A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Eighty-Six

I am feeling rather positive about my work tonight.  First, after my workshop, one of the participants (who I already knew) asked me to be a featured poet at a reading in a few months.  It has been some time since I had such an invitation, and I am quite excited about the opportunity.  I'll share details when I know more, but for now, I just wanted to say that I feel very honored to be asked, especially considering that I don't even have a book out at this point.  I don't know a great deal about the reading series that the even is part of, but it is certainly a good chance to share my work with an audience, and I am hopeful that maybe someone from a literary journal will be there, as quite a few come from Florida.  Of course, that's unlikely, but I didn't really expect the workshop to lead to anything, so I am keeping myself in an open and optimistic frame of mind.

In terms of my writing today, I got three poems and I feel good about them all, actually.  The one this morning was rather political and I think it is actually pretty good.  My first poem from tonight was a return to the series of animal poems I've been working on lately, and I rather like it.  It is about a bear leaving the circus to start a family, and falls into that camp of poems that I was discussing last night, where I take a rather silly premise and attempt to explore it in a way that deepens the idea.  I think it actually works quite well at the moment.  The last of the poems was also a bit political, though in a more subtle way, as well as being a sort of poem about poetry, but not in the way of those I've described previously as "plate spinning."  In this one, I think I did get some real work on the page.  I think it might actually be one of those rare moments where the piece came out almost fully formed.

What strikes me as funny is that often the best way to make sure I am doing good work when I sit down to write is to be willing to sit doing nothing.  I mean, I will open a new document on the PC and just sit at my desk.  Often ideas will pop up for lines, some of which are good, but many times I just don't know what to write.  After a bit of this I am often close to just giving up or writing something about the lack of an idea, but if I keep waiting through that phase, something starts to come through.  Often it is something as simple as the idea of a poem about a circus bear, as it was today.  In fact, the way that came about was that I thought about how I wanted to write a poem with a bear at the center of it, and I started to think about it.  The idea of a big Russian bear came to mind, briefly, but I didn't want to do something involving Russia, because it would just have become charged in a way I didn't want.  However, the image in my head was of a performing bear, and that stuck.  At some point, I began playing with names for the bear, and the idea of it not wanting to be a performer struck me.  The rest happened in the writing itself.  I'm not sure that the poem won't need a bunch more work, but I am quite happy with this first draft.  

Their does seem to be a shift of late in terms of the amount of work I am able to do that is really on target.  Of course, that can change on any day, but this weekend and today felt quite productive to me, and I think that I have done a lot of really good work in that time.  It is not, of course, that the poems are even close to finished, but it does feel that I'm hitting the mark in a general sense.  Revision is not a sign, I don't think, that the original work wasn't good, but instead a process of taking what already is good and polishing it.  If the poems weren't worthwhile in first draft, I likely wouldn't spend so much time revising.  I generally trust that, if I didn't get it right enough in the draft, the idea will come back when I am ready to do it justice.

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