Stafford Challenge Update - Weeks 9 through 12

[fauxklore]

87 Days so far!

I finally had a chance to listen to the March guest poet presentation by Lauren Camp. She talked about and read from two of her nine books of poetry - In Old Sky and Is Is Enough. The former is about her residency in the Grand Canyon and focuses on darkness, while the latter has to do with her father and his descent into dementia. One comment she made that I liked was that poems can narrow in, rather than having to be about the whole. She also talked a little bit about revision. While I enjoyed her poems, I wished she’d had more practical advice about process.

Here are the titles of the poems I’ve written over the past month. As usual, I will not include the actual text of any poems I might ever try to get published, since most publications count blogs as prior publication.

Stafford Challenge Week 9:

14 March 2026 - Pi Day

15 March 2026 - The Ides of March

16 March 2026 - Road Trip

17 March 2026 - Black Hole Nightmare

18 March 2026 - Dancing at the Overcrowded Bar

19 March 2026 - Taking Another Friend for a Medical Procedure

20 March 2026 - Folklore

Stafford Challenge Week 10:

21 March 2026 - Book Club Irony

22 March 2026 - Emcee Challenge

23 March 2026 - Circumnavigation

24 March 2026 - Mary Talks About Names

25 March 2026 - Cynthia

26 March 2026 - Packing

27 March 2026 - Roald Dahl

Stafford Challenge Week 11:

28 March 2026 - Bigfoot

29 March 2026 - About Time

30 March 2026 - Pancakes

31 March 2026 - The Railroad Rhyme

1 April 2026 - Fools

2 April 2026 - Diana

3 April 2026 - Passover Haiku

Stafford Challenge Week 12:

4 April 2026 - More Living Room Archaeology

5 April 2026 - Pollen

6 April 2026 - Inaction Item

7 April 2026 - Zip Ode (22181)

8 April 2026 - Choosing Hotels

9 April 2026 - Taxes

10 April 2026 - Crosswords


Crosswords:

I’ll include the 10 April poem here, since an Acrostic is hard to find a market for. I wrote this on an Amtrak train on my way to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this past weekend.

CROSSWORDS

Constructors
rely
on
strange
synonyms,
wildly
obscure
rare
definitions.
Stimulating.

The Zip Ode

The Zip Ode is a poetic form that is new to me. The idea is to take your zip code and use each digit as the number of words per line. For example, my zip code is 22181. Here was my first attempt at this form:

Virginia days
in spring -
Weather
cannot make up its mind about the temperature.
Unsettling.

Comments

[capri0mni]

Your crosswords acrostic gave me a chuckle.

Here's my Zip Ode:

Waking up,
The radio's voices
Calmly recite terrible
News ... Sigh.
[*]

[fauxklore]

I like your Zip Ode.

Now I wonder how the Zip Ode would work with UK postal codes.

[capri0mni]

Funny enough, both zip codes where I've lived most of my life have had a zero somewhere in them.

As for UK codes, I can see it working one of two ways. Either the alphabetic part of the code (the first two and last two lines) must start with that letter, or you convert a letter to a number (C=3, Y=25, etc.)

[fauxklore]

I think I might try that with just using words with the appliable letter.

[capri0mni]

Or maybe, start each line with a word that starts with the same letter as the number written out (Two starts with "T," One starts with "O," etc.). That would at least give you something to write for those lines with a zero.