I like poetry! I want to read some! Do you?
I’m just going to assume yes since you’re still reading. So let me tell you about the Sealey Challenge!
The What Challenge?
In August 2017, Nicole Sealey (check out her poem “The First Person to Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born” and an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure) read a poetry book a day and tweeted about it. (This was back in the day when Twitter existed.) A bunch of other folks took up the gauntlet and named the challenge after her, and a hashtag was born!
If you want to do the original challenge, there are some tips and recommendations at The Sealey Challenge website.
A poetry book a day is a totally amazing achievement, even if you pick a bunch of short ones. I am a very slow reader, especially of poetry. (Reading poetry, for me, ideally involves a bunch of staring at a wall and wondering what just happened to my insides.) So I’m intimidated just thinking about it. I think I’d have an easier time chasing my friend Justin through one of the 100 mile races in the woods they do.
Please don’t let me discourage you from reading a poetry book a day (or running 100 miles in the woods in one go)! I’m just saying: I think my body might not do that.
My Easy Mode!
I do love a timed & structured challenge, though, and I want to read more poetry!
So I’m going to take August to do my own mini-Sealey challenge. Here are my parameters:
An average pace of 25 pages/day.
Because I’m especially interested in finding poets I’m unfamiliar with, journals & collections are allowed.
Because I want to find new things, no journals I’ve read before, and no single-author works where I can remember reading more than one of the author’s poems already.
Queer, trans, and BIPOC poets to the front.
Here’s My Reading List:
Nepantla, a journal dedicated to queer poets of color, 1-3
beestung, a web magazine of non-binary writers, 1-15
Some pamphlets from Fourteen Poems: Antonyms for Burial (Ellora Sutton), Amphibian (Georgie Henley), with your chest (Remi Graves), Keeper (Mícheál McCann), and The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands (Cleo Henry).
Fat Girl Forms (Stephanie Rogers)
Brother Sleep (Aldo Amparán)
Dark Testament (Pauli Murray ← if you don’t already, you need to know about this Black queer would-probably-have-identified-as-trans-if-the-vocabulary-existed civil rights lawyer / activist / scholar / priest… apparently a poet too!?!?)
Other Easy Mode Ideas
If the original version of the Sealey Challenge isn’t your speed either, here are some other poetry challenges you might dare yourself to do in August:
Read at least one poem by 31 poets you don’t know!
Sign up for the daily poetry newsletters from Rattle, Poetry Daily, and/or Poem-A-Day (and read them)!
Check out a poetry video every day on TikTok / YouTube / Instagram! Some places to start: Button Poetry’s YouTube channel, this amazing reading of Paul Tran’s “Copernicus” from All the Flowers Kneeling, the videos at fourteen poems, or the seances of the Dead [Women] Poets Society.
Grab a couple books at random out of the poetry section of your local library to read!
I’d love to hear about your version of the challenge. Drop me a line or talk about it in the chat.
Also, Let’s Talk About Hair!
I’m working on a piece that involves interviewing a bunch of people about their hair, their history with their hair, their feelings about their hair… you know, hair stuff. (Right now, I think it will be a series of ~50-word micro-micro-interviews in people’s own words, but I’m not positive about the final form.) If you have 15-20 minutes and are open to talking about your hair, please let me know!
Check Out This Poem
torrin a. greathouse just dropped this phenomenal essay about the burning haibun, a form they invented, that includes the original burning haibun she wrote and pointers to a bunch of other amazing examples. I love when poets speak with form, and I think erasure forms like this one can say really meaningful things about power and attention and institutional violence.
Until next time!
~Callie