The mini-marathon of writing a poem a day to raise funds for Brick Street Poetry will continue for as long as you keep sponsoring poems, or until month’s end, whichever comes first. Donate $15 to Brick Street and give me a title — as short or as long or as weird as you want. Or donate $16 and force me to use three words of your choice. Or combine the two challenges for a donation of $25. Details are here. Feel free to ask questions via comment. 

I invite you to join me in this project and help out by reading, commenting, heckling, encouraging, insulting, cajoling, praising and yes, if circumstances allow, sponsoring me and donating funds (to Brick Street, not me). This might not be of much interest if the poems were simply going to languish in a file somewhere, but such is not the case. They will be posted online daily, warts and all, for the world to peruse. That’s right – you’ll see my daily work, unpolished and raw, finished or not, and if you listen closely you may hear whimpers issuing from a certain garret in northwest Indianapolis.

I’ll post each day’s offering sometime in the morning, and will leave the poems up for a few weeks. I consider these poems drafts, and will eventually revise and send some of them to journals/anthologies for publication consideration. Many journals consider poems posted on personal blogs to be published, thus I’ll take them down, so as not to violate their sensibilities (odd though they may be).

Like many nonprofits, Brick Street Poetry, Inc. depends upon donations to augment their projects, which vary from a monthly poetry reading series and podcast, to placing Borrow a Book boxes in state parks, publishing a literary journal and various anthologies, and establishing a neighborhood literary art park (to offer free workshops), just to mention a few.

This month they’re raising funds by asking people to vote, via PayPal donations, for favorite haiku in a just-published online anthology.

I’ve decided to help out by — what else — writing poems. 

Why am I doing this? I love poetry. If I, poet, reader and book buyer, don’t support Brick Street’s mission, who will?