December 04, 2008

Perked up

Have not been very efficient about writing the last few days. Was working on a series of poems that grew stubborn but refused to grow otherwise. Does that happen to you? I tried to sneak up at the poem(s) from different directions, but it didn't budge, and I'd lately been making lame, half-hearted, pretend jabs. Which made me anxious about this whole darn writing thing and which, as you can imagine, did not help at all.

Today, one of the first poems in the series was workshopped and everybody agreed that it seemed to want to grow longer (ah, workshop phraseology). THAT was incredibly helpful. I am always ready to end a poem, get done with it, wrap it up, hurrying. I don't mind revising; taking out that first draft itself scares me a bit. Which is why it is nice to have people who urge me on, or people who are dissatisfied with the first draft. (Though what I read during the workshop today was the second draft: Lesley had kindly been dissatisfied with the first.)

What I think I want to do now is to scrap the series idea and house all my various themes into this one long poem. Because I like its form so far and in the other poems, I'd been struggling with form. Okay, enough! because it is not interesting for you, this abstract talk. But: oh potential long poem, I have to have enough patience with you and trust in you and hopefully enough urgers-on: you intimidate me so. And I must remember that being inefficient is not so bad sometimes.

She said it.

"So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." -Brenda Ueland

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