The Sealey Challenge
and the impossibility of being good at things
Happy Sealey Challenge Month, for those who celebrate!
The Sealey Challenge, created by certified badass Nicole Sealey, is the good-for-you goal to read a book of poetry a day in the month of August. Each August, many of the poets in my feeds start posting pictures that look like this:
As it is August 2nd, I am already failing the Sealey Challenge. To be fair to me tho, that stack of books is just 31 random books from my bookshelf and I have never intended on reading them1. Which is to say, this challenge is both great for the people it works for and utterly impossible for me and I have to give myself a pep talk about why that shouldn’t make me feel bad about myself.
One of the poets in my stack there, Jennifer Knox, has suggested that reading a single poem a day for August is more her speed. That seems doable but still unlikely I’d finish because of the way any self-imposed challenge flares up my demand avoidance. The person I was when I started the challenge slowly becomes a different guy asking me to complete a task that I grow resentful of. “You can’t tell me what to do, me!”
In April, poets also try to write a poem a day, loosely linked to National Poetry Month. I have attempted that challenge several times and usually tap out around days 7 through 13. Eventually it starts to feel like I’m trying to extend my DuoLingo streak at 11:59 p.m. by completing the easiest German lesson in the app just to keep my little streak flame burning. The poems become incrementally… not good. The streak becomes the goal and not the spirit the streak was created for in the first place: ie learning a language, writing more, reading more, etc…
Reading a book a day, even if I could maintain and protect the focus necessary to do it, would also feel like eating frosting for dinner. Eventually, my body stops enjoying frosting before I’m even full, but I can’t eat anymore, even though I desperately need fiber and protein2. All that feeling and empathy and mystery and music and puzzlement and awe and anguish and ways of looking a black birds - it’s too much! I need to lie down and groan a while.
I don’t think any of this should be a reason for you NOT to take on this or other challenges. Probably Sealey herself would say that completing it isn’t as important as the attempt to carve out space for poetry in your days, to curate a practice of reading, to support poets, to expand your soul, to challenge your aesthetic comfort zone, to connect with other poetry lovers and share recommendations. I am down for all that, and so I will manage my own feelings of utter inadequacy in the privacy of my mind as well as force it upon the 500 people who receive this newsletter.
What is a practice that works for me, and maybe you, then? Putting a Zoom poetry workshop I’m facilitating on my calendar every two weeks has been more my cup of tea. It forces me to be accountable to the folks who signed up and present model poems that I feel like I can speak a little about and find a good writing prompt within. And now I have a buttload of poetry writing prompts to share and return to. Yes, this is an advertisement but these workshops have made me fall back in love with poetry and anyway I don’t make very much money off of it (especially when you subtract Zoom fees). The point is that I am always always learning who I am and how I can do these things that I love and discard the baggage that gets in my way.
Please do try the Sealey Challenge tho! And, if you can’t complete it, let me know how you coped with that and whether it was still worth trying. I bet it was.
There’re also several non-poetry books, one video game, and the single best cover to a mushroom field guide that I have ever seen.
Absolutely writing from personal experience.