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I go through a ritual every year where I tear apart my portfolio and pull everything that felt like filler or less than my best effort. I don’t know why I do it. It doesn’t give me closure, exactly. It guess it just leaves my collections feeling more like me and less like what was expected of me.
2025 didn’t leave me with a whole lot left for you to peruse, but the pieces it did leave? I really like those. Newsletters, however, are not something I can cull. I don’t own them. (If I did, I would absolutely prune a few.) I’m not complaining. I’m grateful to write them. But sometimes…
Well, sometimes it’s hard. There’s this enormous world of topics out there, yet they often feel simultaneously overdone and under-discussed. You doubt yourself constantly. Is this too long? Too short? Did I add anything new to the conversation? Is anybody even reading this?
I feel like 2025 wandered off, leaving me (and you) with repetitive content, half-baked instructions, and the scent of this morning’s cold, scummy coffee stuck to the page. You’ve read along as I tinkered, dismantled, and threw new things out there. Some of it was intentional, some accidental, and some a chaotic mix of both.
Truthfully? It’s the intentionality that keeps me up at night.
Anyone who knows me knows I have a near-clinical inability to do the expected thing. And yet—for as chaotic as I may come across—I exist firmly in the realm of chaotic controlled. I’m very good at containing chaos inside intention. There is almost always a method to my madness.
Except when there isn’t, and then everything goes cattywampus and I don’t like that.
Along with that chaos inevitably comes the unexpected, the subversion, the “you can put the glass anywhere, you know” approach to life. I also love bringing big or abstract concepts down to earth and explaining them plainly. It’s kind of my whole deal.
But I didn’t get to do that very often this year.
So now we look ahead.
Next year, I’m trying a new experiment. You may or may not like it, but I’m taking the risk anyway. I’m calling it:
Escaping the Clone Factory.
It’s not that I’m tired of the traditional poetry topics; other brilliantly capable editors explore the ins-and-outs better than I ever could, and I’ll happily link to their newsletters when needed. But for me, it’s time to deliberately wander off the path.
And I want to be honest about something:
Despite preaching “don’t let the fear of failure stop you,” I’ve always been afraid of failure, and it's sometimes made me hesitant do try new things. It’s not that I’ve developed a failure shield or anything like that. I’ve simply decided to stop letting hypocrisy win the day. I don’t know how this poetic experiment will turn out. Truly. But that uncertainty is the point: it’s time to learn something new about ourselves.
Here’s what 2026 will look like: a year-long poetic arc of craft technique, structure experiments, and thematic detours. It’s a sequence I’ve been working on for a while, and it builds on itself, intentionally and a little chaotically. My exact 2026 goals may differ from yours, but you might see poems differently by March. You might write differently by June. You might ruin a draft on purpose by September and call it progress. Maybe you won't.
I have no way of knowing what you’ll do.
I can only control what I do.
The Basic Overview of 2026
The goal is to widen our sense of what a poem can be, and what we can do with one. To be clear, I’m not telling you to be weird if you don’t want to be. (I’m weird enough for all of us.) This is simply a way to add more tools to your toolbox and help you refine (or even find!) your poetic voice.
Escaping the Clone Factory
Topics will fall under:
 Leaning out of “sameness”
Poetic forensics
Purposeful aesthetics
New structures, voices & forms
Constraints, impossibilities & distortions
Imagery–meaning paradoxes
Evolution (yours)
Follow along closely or casually. Lurk, skim, jump in late, start in the middle, or skip entirely. Whatever sparks you is enough.
So here I go: wandering into the forest with a candle and no map, trying very hard not to burn the place down.
If you come along, bring matches. And curiosity. And a playlist of your own, in case you don’t like mine  .
Here’s to expanding our repertoire in 2026.
As always, happy writing.
*“You can put your glass anywhere” is my reminder that many rules don’t actually exist, or can be broken without tragic consequence. You can have a perfectly good table beside you and still put your drink on the floor. It sounds simple (even ridiculous). but if you’re wired like me, it feels weird the first time. Glasses go on tables, right? Says who?
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Poetry: December 10, 2025 Issue [#13493]
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