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​I Forgot To Stop Writing Bad Poems (For Several Years)​

About three years ago, I decided to start writing bad poetry on a fitness app I use regularly. When I checked last week, I had written more than 500 poems. Mildly curious about whether any of them were halfway decent, I gave them a quick read. And then …

… did someone offer me a significant sum of money to publish some of my running poetry in a chapbook? No.

OK, but was I pleasantly surprised to discover that I had, through persistence and hard work over three years, become a great poet? Also no.

What did happen is I waded through a 500-plus page document and found that I had written a lot of bad poetry. But, some of it—well, hold on just a second:

How I originally started doing this was: Back in 2022, I read this book of poetry and essays by Chris La Tray called One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large, and loved it. Then I listened to a 2020 episode of my friend Ed Roberson’s podcast, Mountain and Prairie, in which he interviewed the author, and Chris shared the process of how all that poetry became a book. That process, to put it in bullet points, was:

• While working as a manufacturing consultant, Chris wanted to keep practicing the craft of writing, so he committed to writing one sentence every day (yes, a One-Sentence Journal, if you will)
• he happened to read the book Braided Creek, a collection of short poems that Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser wrote as correspondence to each other
• Chris realized that if he made some edits to the spacing and punctuation to the sentences in his one-sentence journal, they could be poems too
• He made the edits to the spacing and punctuation to the sentences in his one-sentence journal, and they became poems
• The poems became a book called One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large in 2018
• The book won a bunch of awards and Chris became Montana’s Poet Laureate

I did not have any illusions of writing an award-winning book of poetry (or even a non-award-winning book of poetry) or becoming a poet laureate, but I did think to myself:

“Shit, one sentence? I could probably do that.”

So in November 2022, I ran 3.1 miles, one of those just-going-through-the-motions, something-is-better-than-nothing runs, I stopped my watch, pulled up my Strava activity details, and tapped out a poem on my phone keyboard with my thumb. It was, like the run itself, a real going-through-the-motions, something-is-better-than-nothing effort:

And then I just kept doing it. After every run, I’d stand in my kitchen, dripping sweat (late spring, summer, fall) or slowly freezing in my sweat (every other season), trying to type out a few lines that might, in the most generous of definitions, pass as poetry. In the worst case, I was still showing up—like a server at a brunch restaurant showing up for work on New Year’s Day after a very late night out partying. It may not have looked or felt that great, but I got the food to the tables and didn’t get fired. Like this one:

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In the best cases, I’d be present during the run, taking things in, trying to connect some sights or sounds into a scene that would work as a poem. Or something would happen during my run, and all I had to do was convert it into some sentences in my head by the time I finished running. Like this one:

As I said, nothing magical happened—as in, nothing unexpected or miraculous happened. What usually happens happened: Some of the poetry wasn’t total shit. Lots of it was shit. Which is kind of what happens when you run, or go to the gym, or do any form of exercise—some days you have a really great time out there, and some days you just gotta get out there and get it done.

Some days I’d have a great run, barely even thinking about my poem until I stopped my watch and remembered, Oh yeah, I always write a poem when I finish. Some days I’d have an average or below-average run, but a poem I thought was pretty decent would basically write itself. Rarely would I have both a fantastic run and an easy time writing the poem afterward.

But I never expect every run to feel amazing. I don’t really run with a goal of performance; I mostly run because of what it does for me: anti-anxiety, time in nature, fitness, lengthening telomeres, time to get away from devices and think, et cetera, et cetera. If I had a motto for my running on a sticky note above the closet where I keep my shoes, it might be:

So then maybe the poetry motto would be:

I was just messing around, really. Right? Publicly sharing poetry is not something most of us would probably do at an open mic night, or even on Substack. But Strava, an app where nobody reads much of your description of your activity (unless you’re a famous athlete), that’s kind of a safe space. If I was serious about it, I’d probably try to get published. But telling myself I was just messing around gave me permission. From myself, which is funny to say.

Chris La Tray said another thing in that Mountain and Prairie interview that stuck with me. He was talking about when he started going through his years of daily sentences to see if any of them would make good poems, and said, “for every good one, there's five terrible ones.” That’s probably him being at least a little bit self-deprecating, but hey, if one out of six is good enough for our award-winning Poet Laureate’s first drafts, that seems like permission for the rest of us to try.

I share Chris La Tray’s story—guy, busy working regular job, determined to keep creating every day, gradually builds something great—with all my writing workshop classes, because I think it’s inspiring and admirable for the rest of us (in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s “Forget the Noun, Do the Verb” or Oliver Burkeman’s “Kayaks and Superyachts”). But I also blame One-Sentence Journal for being a gateway drug to me inexplicably buying and reading poetry books, which is becoming a significant expense, but not quite a problem. Yet.

When the three-year mark passed a couple weeks back, I had thought I’d written a poem for every single run I’d done in that time period. But the spreadsheet said otherwise. I must have given myself a break from writing bad running poems in January 2024 (a month in which I usually try to run a 5K every day, just to make myself get out of the house during our cold, dark days here), and was pretty spotty through that spring, when I was getting sick a lot thanks to viruses Jay was bringing home from day care. But overall, I wrote 524 poems in three years, 20,000-some words, kind of by accident.

And if one out of six of those poems is good, that’s more than enough for a fairly standard poetry collection book, so maybe I’ll put one together sometime. Or maybe I’ll keep writing more bad poems, in order to eventually produce a few more good ones.

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Here's a look at a new coffee mug design about the creative process (mug available here):

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