In my writing, I find myself perpetually drawn toward the examination of a collapsed or collapsing past and present. This examination, however, requires the passage of time, a luxury not afforded when one is writing a poem a day for 30 days, as I am currently doing with the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. So, when I signed on to take part in the Project I thought, how can I accelerate a typically months or years long historical and poetic synthesis into something I can explore daily?

In 1963 publisher Phil Graham said to Newsweek correspondents,

So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand…

While news today is made in minutes and not weeks, Graham, it seemed to me, had the answer to my poetry quandary. Each 30/30 Project poem, I decided, would take its title from a New York Times headline for that day, and use only words and phrases contained within the story’s body (though grammatical articles and prepositions may be added or removed and suffixes changed).

I chose the New York Times because, as a New York City resident, it is an institution local to me. I also chose it because of its reputation as a global standard bearer in reporting. That the Times Poetry Editor, Anne Boyer, would resign after I made this decision but before I wrote my first poem, protesting the paper’s coverage of the war against the Palestinian people, leaving “a hole in the news the size of poetry,” is a complexity not lost on me as I embark upon this journey.  

If journalism is the first rough draft of history, perhaps my poems will be the idea of a second rough draft. You can read them at the Tupelo Press December 30/30 Project Page. And you can support underrepresented poet voices here.