My initial plan was to write everyday, which I did for a long time. The practice helped me aim my perception toward something to question, ponder, celebrate, or co-habitate with writing on a regular basis. Eventually, the everyday morphed into every few days although it seems the more I return to typing letters into this box on my screen, the more I want to return, yet when I’m in the throes of writing something else, especially and particularly poetry, I don’t have much to say blog-wise, and I’ve never believed in pushing the writing river.
So if you don’t hear from me for a week or so, it’s not because I don’t love writing to you. It’s simply because the writing has gone underground: into new poems or, far below that, a silent pond, waiting for the wind to work itself up again. I don’t believe in – and please, writers, don’t hate me for this — writer’s block, only writer’s-not-ready spaces. To that end, I tend to work on multiple writing projects at once, going where the energy of the words take me: sometimes into the workaday-life of revisionland, where we live as old marrieds with our prose or poetry, steadily applying letters to the page or screen, copying things over, reading things aloud, ready to catch whatever music comes through the grind.
Other times, it’s that heady and breathless romance of first drafts, fishing for possibilities well beyond our frontal-lobe, pre-selected and old-dog-trick thoughts so that something alive, and surprising can come through. Sometimes it’s just writing shit, knowing it’s shit, but being okay with that because compost is golden, especially when it comes to making something new and nourishing.
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