Originally Posted by
Heathpack
@
3alarmer, "Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road."- Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
I was referring of course to @
Ramona_W's bus driver. But you made me think of
On the Road. Very many ideas appropriate to road bikers in that one.
H
"O Bus Driver" was written after I reached my poetry goal. I had heard about Billy Collins's "Poetry 180 Project" and decided to create my own. His thinking was that if the coordinating group collected 180 poems and put them on a website then a teacher could choose one at random to read to the class during every day of the school year. They weren't supposed to make the students analyze the poems; they were only supposed to be read aloud and allowed to float in the air, as it were, over and around the students' heads during the day.
I decided that anyone could gather up 180 poems and put them on a website and that using other people's poems was sort of cheating and that the real challenge would better lie in writing 180 original poems one's self. So, I did. Every day for 180 days, I posted a poem I had written, usually that same day. I composed triolets and haikus and cinquains and a Shakespearean sonnet and all kinds of different forms. Feel free to browse around and read more than just the two I posted links to. There are also some short stories and a longer piece of fiction from the year I participated in National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo. It's a murder mystery called "Fate Pays the Rent" and I believe it's about 50,500 words.
Needless to say, I don't have time for those kinds of projects these days but it's fun to look back and sometimes be surprised by how very well many of the pieces turned out. (You probably noted the Walt Whitman influence in the poem about the bus driver and there's a poem on the site about old Walt as well.)