Well, that’s three hundred and sixty-five. This was a project which started with Dan Waber, who decided on his 40th birthday in 2006 to write 40 words about a different person each day; his rules were that it had to be someone he personally knew and whose name he still remembered. Go to http://www.logolalia.com/40x365/ to learn more.

My blog was originally “a draft a day,” an exercise inspired by something Cornelius Eady said in a workshop: that “drafts are just drafts.” It was an obvious but freeing realization. (For the record, of these 365 pieces, only 10 of them are now completed poems and a remaining 20 are acceptable drafts with years of patience ahead.) So since I was writing poem-like drafts anyway, when my sister told me about x365 I decided to do a px365: a poem for or about a different person every day. My rules were more loose, because I believe locations and fictional characters count as people too, and because I often found myself repeating certain names. And because I took many breaks.

It took three years to finish. It’s easy to quit, and it’s easy to keep going—the hard part is starting again, retaking those vulnerable first steps. But that’s what art is, it seems: the process which disconnects us from present life, the hiatuses which bring us back, and the space somewhere in between where the whole seems to make sense.

In any case, it’s been a blessing to do this project and learn my craft by remembering people. Jackie Woodson’s Locomotion starts with this little bit that goes: “Name all the people / You’re always thinking about / People are poems.”

What have I learned, after three years? I dunno. I’m pretty tired: that’s a good lesson, I suppose. I’m also very not tired. That’s another lesson.

For a lot of these poems I’m sorry, as I’m sorry for many letters I’ve written and mailed by sin of presumptuousness, naivete, or mushiness. I am sorry. But I don’t regret them, and I don’t rescind them. I am still learning.

To the handful of readers here, past and present: you were never just spectators, not of my poetry, and not of language. Words leak everywhere; you drink from that cup too. For that, thank you and, as they say in Argentina: suerte.

Henry W. Leung





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Some housekeeping:

This entire journal is now friends-only for purposes of privacy. But it's not about hiding from readers; comment here with a registered LiveJournal username and I will add you to allow full access, indefinitely. Follow the "px365" tag to read exclusively from this project.

I also have a single Word document archiving all of this, if anybody wants it via email. It's 459 pages.

Following this post will be a backdated friends-only entry with an index of names from 1 to 365. Spaces indicate large breaks taken in the project.

Here ends this blog. I won't be keeping one in Europe. I will write letters. After that, who knows.