It’s been a long week and tonight I’m huddled up in jammies, robe and blankets. I have a chill and feel yucky. Hopefully I’ll feel better in the morning. I wanted to spend some time writing but my brain is fuzzy and I’ve taken an Alka Selter Cold and plan to curl up with my book and go to sleep as soon as it kicks in.
I wrote a haiku earlier this week and found the comments interesting. I need to work on clarity. My first two lines meant one thing to me and something else to readers. I wrote Smoke and mirrors lie, giving form to hopeful thoughts. To me, the hopeful thoughts already existed. The smoke and mirrors created an illusion that made them seem more solid. We turn away now meant we stop looking because if we look too closely at an illusion, we see through it to the uncomfortable and often unwanted reality.
Writing poetry is different than my usual blog posts because I can usually explain and clarify as I go along. The poem, once written, is just thrown out there. It hangs on the web all by itself and because of the nature of writing from a prompt and hooking it to poems and comments by others that I don’t know and who don’t know me, it’s a bit unsettling. It’s a little thing and I will be writing more. I will write for the practice and just to see what I might have in me.
I still plan to continue blogging about everything else. My life, my work, how to do simple things on the computer and I plan to explore this too. It’s incredibly fun for one thing. I read a quote that spoke of writing as using words to express a feeling and the reader reads the words and feels that same feeling – becomes infected. That is the clarity I want. To paint a word picture that evokes a feeling, even if it isn’t exactly like the feeling that I started with – that’s joy. I know I need to educate myself on the mechanics. I have good people I can go to for that as well as books and the internet. The comment section would be a wonderful place for assistance with that (hint hint).
What a wonderful thing to have the internet. To write and have the opportunity for immediate feedback. I want to give as much time as possible to commenting on the work of others because they will teach me. I’ve read some amazing things this week and am in awe of the voices and the courage that puhes them to write and then just throw it out there, not knowing if it will be loved or come home bruised and broken. I think losing myself in something like this is a perfect cure for a disease I didn’t know I had – if I have the guts….
It’s been a long week and I’ve written more than I intended, so goodnight world.
This is a long-ish quote, but your musings on the meaning of your poetry reminded me of it. I read it just this morning, I love it when connections like this happen.
“A poet writes, not what he wants to write, but what he finds he can write; he writes, or at any rate he prints, only what is left after the spirit of the age and his own incapacities have ravaged and pared down his own more ambitious intentions. And so the image of himself and his own world which emerges from his poems is as disconcerting to him as to anyone else; the poems in print give back to him the image of a stranger, a stranger whom he may even, quite heatedly, dislike. And yet it is no accident that some things and some attitudes turn out to lend themselves to his pen, certain others to resist him; for this means that those intractable themes are things he has not felt with the sincerity that poetry demands. It is this which makes the writing of poetry for the poet a process of self-discovery; this image which emerges from his poems considered together, this stranger, is a person whom he has to recognize as more truly himself than the person he had always supposed himself to be.”
Thanks for this Manuela – this rings true. I think the discovery process becomes not just about ourselves though – we discover as we read the work of others and share the commenting process, that we have a common voice. It’s disconcerting but also very human. That is an unexpected gift.