I participated in this year's global/national poetry writing month and I actually managed to write a poem a day! Now, in the case of a lot of the poems, I did end up spending only around five minutes on them. This was on days when I was particularly busy. Still, it shows that it is possible at least. I had never written any poetry before, so it was quite an experiment for me.
I would say that the experiment was a success. Not in terms of the poetry output, but in terms of the process. There is something so therapeutic and cleansing about the simple act of being "creative". One thing I realised in this process was the need to find more outlets for expressing creativity.
What I had hoped to achieve throughout the process was a deeper understanding of the form of poetry itself. I did manage to expose myself to a lot of different ways of thinking about poetry, mostly through the daily prompts from the website napowrimo.net, but I still don't really understand how to write "better" poetry. This doesn't bother me too much, though. As I said, the real goal of the exercise turned out to be simply unlocking some creative impulses.
I feel that we, or at least I, tend to think about creativity in terms of projects and production. Sometimes, it feels like it is not enough to just sit down and write. I always have to contextualise writing in some kind of broader agenda - producing a novel or short story, a blog post, etc. The problem with these kinds of project-oriented works of creativity is that a lot of the joy and satisfaction that is gained from completing a creative act is deferred (usually indefinitely). Sure, if you want to be successful with your creation you also need to put in a lot of time and work. But, this experiment has shown me that even 'micro' acts of creativity can go a long way. Going forward, I will try teach myself to practice this kind of creativity more often in my daily life.
I posted the poems on my gemlog and weblog every day. If you're on Gemini, you can view them here [1], or you can view them with more context/explanation on my weblog [2].