The 100 Poems Project

I first started a blog in February of 2013, in my second year of undergrad. I have been writing for much longer than that; since the age of 8: in the back pages of school notebooks, scraps of papers, pretty journals, on my first computer, and every laptop I’ve owned since then, in the notes app of all my phones, in every notes app that I’ve ever tried, and recently, in journals again. There have been time periods in my life when writing has overflowed out of me, and time periods when the well has run completely dry for months on end. Sometimes the writing has been public, and more often than not, a vast amount of it has been private. Through all the ebbs and flows of my writing output, however, I’ve always considered myself a writer. It's a word heavy with implication, and often feels pretentious to use. I'm using it devoid of all burden: I like to write, I write often enough, therefore, I'm a writer.

Several experiences have led to this moment.

My creative writing output slowed down in the last few years, shoved aside by life changes: a move across the globe, a graduate degree, a new job, a new relationship, and the unending responsibilities of adulthood. I told myself that the ebbs were only natural.

Two years ago, after a nasty bout of covid during the Delta wave, I caught myself forgetting words for a few weeks, my mind foggy and exhausted, and the effects exacerbated by the constant barrage of information we subject our brains to nowadays. I hadn't realized just how much I relied on finding solace in words. The intensity of the inward silence took me by surprise.

A few months ago, on a trip home, I set aside several hours to go through my old journals and other pieces of writing, scattered in various notebooks, loose scraps, and cloud backups. I found short stories and essays, some poems, a "book" about my closest friend in primary school, journal entries containing pearls of wisdom that my 13-year-old self somehow knew, and my 31-year-old self needs constant relearning.

Since then, a quiet desperation has taken hold of me; of wanting to find something within myself that I've lost. I've waited at the mouth of the river in a drought, promising to be content with murky trickles.

This is an attempt to channel those trickles, to dig and create canals, so that eventually there is enough to quench something in me that is parched.

There is beauty in language, in words. One can find something to meditate upon in every word, in everything that it can represent. Hence, I'm starting this: the 100 poems project.

Here are the rules I've set for myself:

1. Pick a word from this list.

2. Write a poem that has the word as its primary theme (preferred), or uses it somewhere.

3. Post poem.

4. Move to the next word only when done with the poem for the current word.

5. Maximum time limit for a poem is one week.

Bonus: try out different poetic forms.

Bonus: write behind-the-scenes of how the poem came about.

The aim is not perfection, nor to say anything profound. The aim is to exercise the creative muscle. It’s to forge a way to think deeply, to engage the mental faculties against a sea of distractions. There’s value in creating itself, rather than in the outcome of the creation.

And the goal is also, along the way, to find some joy by way of paying attention.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

— Mary Oliver. Sometimes.