Poems float to me again. This hasn’t happened in a number of years. I’ve had phrases arrive but then it’s like the valve shuts off and word flow stops. If I force a phrase toward a poem, I butcher it. Poems feel ethereal, fragile. I choose the word float intentionally…it’s as if the words butterfly by, out the corner of my eye, or rather, my ear. I think I hear them instead of see them. Perhaps this varies because sometimes I visualize an image. I’ll have to pay closer attention to this experience to describe the process accurately here. Regardless, if not caught and written to the page the poem keeps moving and leaves me behind.
So, three poems in the last two weeks or so. The relief accompanying them, that they float to me at all, is palpable; I hadn’t realised how much I miss them. These latest poems arrived when I felt most depleted, when I was most physically and emotionally exhausted…not so much in a state that I’d given up, more that I’d given in…surrendered. I worry about this. How to invite the conditions of open receiving without the physical and emotional exhaustion[1]? I don’t know.
The following poem arrived during a lunch break last week…the first lines always feel the strongest, the most tangible, then I wrote the lines spooling from there until I could tell I was twisting my own meaning into them. Instead of forcing my own thoughts into the piece, and because I needed to return to the office, I left it alone. A couple of days later, an image, tangentially related, kept entering my mind when I thought about the piece. I interpreted this as a sign the two aspects/concepts wanted to be woven together in the one poem. I completed the following draft over the weekend[2].
Here’s where it gets interesting. This poem, I discovered, also communicates information about my long form writing project (and process) I hadn’t quite understood prior to writing the poem. I’ll try to explain. Last month I printed out the long form project (a book length work, very much in progress) and promised myself I’d read it. I haven’t. Instead, energized by the idea of working physically with pen and highlighters and paper instead of messing around in digital files on my computer, I used index cards to list different scenes associated with different characters. One side of each card listed scenes from the distant past, the other side listed scenes from a recent past. The long form project is, for the most part, creative nonfiction with several people. Sitting there, looking at all the characters on the desk in front in me, I realised I don’t have a card for myself[3]. One could (I have) dismiss this discovery, subsume the idea I’m the persona, the narrator, in this work, so, naturally, I’ll find my way into each of the scenes…somehow. But I’m fooling myself. Sitting there with all the cards on the desk I realised (duh) two things. One, this project is more about my own experiences and thoughts and reflections, and these aspects aren’t integrated (much) in the current draft[4]. Two, the voice I wish to narrate this project requires what I refer to as my audacious voice …and that voice my friends has taken a fucking vacation. And despair, despondency, desperation—all the dis- words of negation—set in fast. I put the project aside. Again.
Then this poem floated to the page with its battle cry of a title and emphatic last line to confirm, with a flood of relief, my audacious self will revive.
[1] I’ve also received poems in states of extreme emotion.
[2] It’s important to express my gratitude here. In my last blog post I’d lamented missing the spring chorus of frogs I don’t hear living in the city. A few days after publishing that post, a friend messaged to offer me his cottage for the weekend. Serendipity. I spent the glorious gift of a solo weekend in the woods reading (The Forty Rules of Love by Eilf Shafak, a romance toggling back and forth between Rumi, a chorus of characters, multiple POVs, in the 1200s, and a current day woman who falls in love with a writer (who is writing about the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, also Sufism) then leaves her “perfect” marriage of twenty years for true love.) It rained most of the weekend which was also a gift because it provided the excuse to lounge in the screened in porch (which felt like a treehouse) and just read (and sleep) instead of canoeing my way round the lake. Unfortunately, I only heard a single peeper and a bullfrog; mating season suspended at this point of spring becoming summer. Instead, I endured the chainsaw to the eardrum that is the “song” Waterloo by ABBA blasting from a cottage across the lake. The universe does have a sense of humour. I prefer this song. I did enjoy the loons and the whip-poor-will night calls and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s day song. I did not manage to see those birds (I really wanted to see the rose-breasted grosbeak as I haven’t before) but did trace the phoebes and vireos amidst the wet leaves.
[3] When I first wrote this sentence I inadvertently wrote “cared” instead of “card”.
[4] The crazy thing is, I know I’ve discovered this before and even written about it here…and here…and then, I guess, I just…forget? Frustrating …and embarrassing…but also, human. Process is not linear and, apparently, the learning doesn’t build upwards from any previous achieved foundation….the whole thing seems more like dancing across quicksand.
Process Peace 