POETRY DIARY 2024 - In 2024, I challenged myself to write a poem a day, from January 1st to December 31st, up to 11:59 PM. My usual way of writing a poem was, writing down a few lines and leaving it for a few days or months, maybe years, until I was ready to add something to it. And even then, I usually discard the poem if it doesn’t lead to my liking when finished or if I couldn’t add anything to end it at all. I’m usually able to write about 10-15 complete poems a year, and if I’m able to collect 33 finished poems, I self-publish an independent poetry book like my Bunshin series.

As for my Poetry Diary Challenge of 2024, I was able to finish a total of 503 poems. I was able to write to the end of the poems as soon as I started, which was something I never thought I could do, forcing my way to write a finished poem on the spot in less than 5 minutes most of the time. And it didn’t at all feel forced; if anything, it felt more spontaneous, and the ones I wrote like these are the ones I really liked. I still wrote fragments of lines as a start of a poem and left them to be finished another day, but these too were finished quite easily once I got to them. I plan to release these poems this year, in 2025, and I have divided them into 14 separate books with an average of 35 poems per book. This book you hold in your hands is one of them.

-Marius Black