When I sold my twentieth poem recently, I found myself wondering: how many poems have I written?

Several other questions instantly followed in its wake. How far back am I counting? (All the way to that poetry book we did in second or third grade, that I only remember because my parents found it when they moved?) Do I count failed-but-complete drafts of poems I later wrote very differently? (Or are those the same poem . . .) What about incidental things I’ve tossed off that don’t really feel like they should count, like that senryu about jet lag written while, yes, horrifically jet-lagged? (There are probably things in this category I don’t even remember: I keep good records, but not perfect ones.)

I finally decided on three rules:

1) Only poems written since I Began Writing Poetry (with “The Great Undoing”) count.
2) Early failed drafts of later poems do not count.
3) To count, I must consider the poem “successful” — meaning worth either posting online or submitting to markets.

By those metrics, I had ninety. And then I asked myself the last, fatal question:

When did I write “The Great Undoing,” anyway?

The answer, my friends, is April 2021.

A mad plan instantly proposed itself. I had eleven days left in April, and I was a mere (“mere”) ten poems away from one hundred in five years. (Ish. I’ve attempted to find out when in April I wrote “The Great Undoing,” with no success. I decided the anniversary month was good enough.) Could I get myself to that line before the month was out — understanding that I needed not only to write ten more poems, but ten I considered successful?

As you can guess from this post, the answer is “yes.” In part because I got a sizable boost when I remembered four haiku/senryu I’d written for an exchange last summer, which I’d never done anything with; upon examination, I found they were in fact not bad and I should send them somewhere. But I’ve written six poems I think are successful in the last week: a rate that would have seemed inconceivable to me just a few years ago, when one a month was about all I could manage. And I didn’t go only for low-hanging fruit, either; this includes a garland cinquain, elegiac couplets (a Latin meter English does not play nice with), a fifty-six-line nonce form that rhymes throughout . . .

. . . and a sestina. Specifically, the sestina that has been my white whale since 2007, long before I Began Writing Poetry, when my crit group gently told me that a flash piece I’d written was not very good but yes, my vague thought that maybe it should be a poem? was probably right. I’ve taken several runs at it over the years, though none in the last five. So of course I decided it needed to be Number One Hundred. (Quoth my sister: “Call Me Ishmarie.”)

I finally did it. And so, in celebration, I leave you with Poem #101, with apologies for hopping on a bandwagon only slightly less overloaded than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”:

This Is Just to Say

Actually
it turns out
it wasn’t
that hard