Author’s Note:
The idea for writing one poem a day for 100 days emerged
slowly. In March, as we sheltered in place, I discovered that
putting poems on Facebook allowed me to communicate
with an immediacy that I usually only enjoyed at public
readings. It tasted like bacon, like strong coffee. Naively, I
thought 30 days would cover the worst of the pandemic.
As I considered shutting down my daily posts, returning
to sending poems out to small presses, I experienced a
sense of loss, of isolation, that troubled me. I kept writing
and posting, finding that I needed the electronic human
contact more than a vetted publication with little feedback.
Consequently, these poems have been self-published only
on my Facebook platform, and on occasion, on the Kansas
City Writer’s Place website.
In Swimming Shelter the poems are arranged chronologically
as they appeared. Little has been done to revise, except for
an occasional word choice selection or punctuation edit.
I wrote each morning. Usually, stopping only when the
poem was finished. A few appeared with an immediacy
that surprised me. Other times, I worked off and on
throughout the day, giving them up to the internet late at
night, but seldom before I was satisfied. This went against
the grain of my personal writing process, as I prefer to edit
only after days or weeks have passed, letting the poems cool
for the critical cold eye. Self-publication scared me, sort of
like the time in junior high school, when I accidentally
kicked off my penny loafer into the middle of the basketball
court during a game. Ninth graders dribbled around my
sad shoe like they might a mouse from the biology lab.
The true embarrassment was that I’d forgotten to change
my socks after gym class, and so there I was, swinging my
dumb foot from the balcony in a sweat-stained sock.
Essentially, my social life was ruined, and I became a poet.
I’d like to thank Facebook readers who followed my posts,
especially those who commented on what they read. Their
words and emojis, likes and loves, let me feel like a village
poet, sitting around a smoky fire, probably Irish, weaving
words, inventing stories.
I kept the organic character of original diction in place. The
use of quarantine instead of stay-at-home or sheltering-in-
place is an example of learning terminology, new words for
a new time. The inaccuracies are honest. These poems are
not all about Covid-19, per se, but all of them, for better or
worse, were discovered while swimming in shelter, crawling
for calm water.
