Gunpowder Press

Poetry

  • Bookshop
  • Your Cart
  • Home
  • Books
  • Poets
  • Poetry Prizes
    • Barry Spacks Poetry Prize
    • Alta California Chapbook Prize
    • Carol Decanio Abeles Young Poets Prize
    • Carol Decanio Abeles Emerging Poets Prize
  • Anacapa Review
  • About Gunpowder
You are here: Home / Single Author / Downtime: Poems by Gary Soto

Downtime: Poems by Gary Soto

$18.00

Categories: California Poets Series, Single Author
  • Description

Description

Part of the California Poets Series, Downtime features new poems by Gary Soto, who describes his process:

The Monday when Daylight Savings, 2021, kicked in, I was left in the dark. The morning light appeared in our eastern window, then was gone by the time I finished washing the lunchtime dishes. The daytime was downright stingy in offering sunlight’s optimism.

A few days later, while I was on my couch with an Afghan around my legs, I sat up from my ten-minute nap, struck by a bright idea. I would write a hundred poems in a hundred days—why not? I pictured myself licking the end of a pencil to get them written in sort of a captain’s log—do it longhand, I told myself. I woke before sunrise, wrote, revised, and got a poem done by lunchtime. Ambitious me.

In truth this Hundred Poems Project was absurd. I knew—other poet friends knew—that more than half would end up the fireplace if not the angry teeth of our paper shredder. For me, that was a given. The act of writing mattered—keep it going, I told myself, be like a beaver and chew on a pencil, put down some lines, don’t forsake this craft! This private project of mine was a reminder to myself that after five decades I remain a poet, a calling few can claim.

I provide forty-seven of the one hundred poems written that fall. I like to think of this period as my downtime on the couch. The writing was anything but restful.

FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail

Related products

  • Drinking with O’Hara: Poems by Glenn Freeman

    $15.00
    Add to cart
  • Original Face: Poems by Jim Peterson

    $15.00
    Add to cart
  • Shaping Water: Poems by Barry Spacks

    Shaping Water: Poems by Barry Spacks

    $15.00
    Add to cart
  • Burning Down Disneyland

    Burning Down Disneyland: Poems by Kurt Olsson

    $15.00
    Add to cart

Contact Us

gunpowderpoetry@gmail.com
Gunpowder Press
P.O. Box 60035
Santa Barbara, CA 93160-0035

Gunpowder Quarterly Newsletter

Follow Gunpowder Press

FacebookrssinstagramFacebookrssinstagram

Copyright © 2023 ·