Stafford Challenge Update

[fauxklore]

It’s now been over a month since the Stafford Challenge started (on January 17th) and I’ve continued to write a poem every day. It’s an interesting exercise. I started out thinking in terms of writing poems related to the wreck of the Congressional Limited train in 1943. I did write 7 poems on that subject, but I quickly realized I have a lot more research to do before I can really get deeper into it. Leveraging off that, I wrote six other poems relating to trains (including the Washington metro, the Long Island Railroad, and Amtrak).

I’ve already posted titles of the poems I wrote for weeks 1 and 2. Here are the remaining titles of poems I’ve written so far.

Week 3:

31 January 2026 - Both Sides Now

1 February 2026 - A Eulogy for X. J. Kennedy

2 February 2026 - A Eulogy for X. J. Kennedy (revised)

3 February 2026 - With Reservations

4 February 2026 - Blackberry Jam

5 February 2026 - The Lily Jean

6 February 2026 - Amtrak Acela

Week 4:

7 February 2026 - Amtrak #2

8 February 2026 - Weather Woes

9 February 2026 - The Bicycle

10 February 2026 - Life Is

11 February 2026 - Sleeping in Hotels

12 February 2026 - Household Archaeology

13 February 2026 - Lucky or Not?

Week 5:

14 February 2026 - The Afghan Song (to the tune of The Garden Song)

15 February 2026 - Post Valentine’s Day

16 February 2026 - Presidents Day

17 February 2026 - Spectral Haiku

18 February 2026 - Cuddly

19 February 2026 - Seeking My Muse

20 February 2026 - The Idea Shop

A Brief Sample

I won’t post anything I might want to submit to a magazine/ journal / anthology someday, since most publications count things published on-line as prior publication and won’t accept it. But I’m pretty sure I won’t do anything with this one and it’s a good example of my fondness for turning lists into poems. I got the idea for this poem while walking back to my hotel after going to the cabaret show I saw recently in New York and thinking “life is a cabaret.” I crowd sourced phrases starting with “life is” via the hive mind (i.e. my Facebook friends) and this is what I came up with.

Life Is

Life is too short
Life is too long
Life is hard
Life is easy
Life is like a box of chocolates
Life is just a bowl of cherries
Life is what you make of it
Life is a song worth singing
Life is a highway
Life is a river
Life is strange
Life is funny
Life is a journey, not a destination
Life is a cabaret
Life is life

Community:

One of the main reasons for doing the Stafford Challenge is the community fostered by the cohort. There are roughly 1300 people doing it this year. There’s a private Facebook group. And there are monthly talks by guest poets. There is apparently going to be a conference in the summer, which I think will actually work with my schedule.

The other benefit of being part of the cohort is access to monthly guest poet talks. The January kick-off talk was by Kim Stafford, the son of the late William Stafford whose practice of writing a poem a day is behind the whole thing. I wasn’t able to make it to that one live, but I did listen to the recording and here are three takeaways from it:

1. ”Poetry is our native language.” We speak in units of breath.
   
   
2. Betty Sue Flowers wrote that the progress of the artistic process is Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge. I really like this concept. Your ideas can be completely wild, but then you have to make plans and do the work to construct the product from them. Then you can look at what you’ve done and assess whether or not it meets your goal and go through this whole process again to revise it.
   
   
3. The muse is the inner voice , waiting for an audience.
   
   

The second talk was Thursday night and was by Emmett Wheatfall. Here are my takeaways:

1. He presented a 7 point challenge, which didn’t particularly resonate with me because most of them seemed fairly obvious, e.g. “listen to the feedback of your readers.”
   
   
2. I did like his statement that Hemingway wrote down seven rules a day, but I’m not sure if those were the same rules or he came up with new ones every day. At any rate, seven is a number with a lot of mystical significance.
   
   
3. He said that a quote of poetry is called a “stretch.” I’ve never heard that before.
   
   

Three is also a mystical number. I don’t think I can find more than three takeaways in most hour-long presentations. I did also write down one snarky note. Namely, he quoted somebody talking about the artist, Edgar Degas. But he pronounced the surname as “DEE-gus” instead of “Day-GAH.” Aargh!

And Now

I need to find a topic for today’s poem.