Writing Every Day

For the past three weeks I've been trying to write a poem every day in the spirit of the challenge that my friend Sarah put together. I've never felt the need to make writing so ritualistic. Even when I was working on my MFA, I was not committed to the idea of writing as a daily habit. Don't all habits seem like bad habits? I've only made it a priority to write every day during the residencies that I've had. At those times it just seemed like the obvious thing to do, & I've found the experience over the past three weeks totally different than working during a residency. I like the way this daily writing forces me into moves of desperation. No words flowing? Find something & repeat it over & over again. I really have to work to eke out a few lines. I also find that I'm less inclined to "write like what I'm reading" because I'm always reading something different. Or I'm busy with other things (i.e. work, fathering, etc) & not reading. My normal modus operandi is that I tend to write clusters or batches of poems that operate in a similar manner. If I'm lucky a couple of poems per cluster will be decent. But writing every day doesn't afford me the chance to dwell in the same language zone the way I do when I'm working in clusters. After three weeks of writing daily, I find that day to day my writing is more disjointed.