Welcome.

I am launching this journal eleven hundred and sixty seven days from my fortieth birthday.

I know, at face value forty is just a number, not inherently any more or less significant than 39 or 41. But it is a number charged with meaning all the same. In the story of the Great Flood, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert. Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness. In the Judeo-Christian culture, anyway, forty seems to mark the end of soujourn, a time of deliverance and re-emergence. It is the number of retrospection, and of looking ahead to the next epoch. A time to collect oneself.

It seems to be a liminal number. Like the bordertime between day and night, the turn of a season, or the edge of the woods. One of the thin places. Look at all the nervous energy it provokes in people. "Lordy, lordy, look who's forty!" We sense the magic in the number, the sheerness of it. We bring to the occasion the same air of mockery and bravado with which we approach Halloween, another of the bordertimes.

And there it is, flickering, on my not so distant horizon.

If I have acquired any wisdom at all in the thirty-seven years it has taken me to get this far across the wilderness, it is that there is no telling what life will throw at me in the next 1,167 days. But for a long time, I have been saying that I want to have a book of poems completed by the time I am forty, and it has lately been dawning on me that I might have to actively particpate in that process.

There are so many reasons not to. I have three children. A part time job. Numerous other interest and commitments. Poetry can be hard and lonely work. And it scares me. To me it feels like mining, or deep-sea fishing. Sometimes I go in, and I don't know if I will come back up to the light of day.

This blog is a way of tying a line on. Of digging in, without getting lost. It is intended as a way to set a specific goal: a manuscript-length collection in 1,167 days; 36 poems in a little more than three years. I also hope it will be a means of accountability for myself, like telling the world I am quitting smoking, or losing ten pounds. You are witness to the intent.

It's a measure against the loneliness and the long silence that comes with writing sometimes. A place to test-drive poems, and a sketchpad for fleshing out ideas. A place to talk about the creative process. And being as narcissistic and needy as the next poet, I also hope it might be a source of feedback and encouragement.

Who knows what it or I will wind up being or doing?

But the journey of 1,167 days begins with a single step, and this is that step.

K.