A Writer's Notebook, Day Four-Hundred-And-Nine

As mentioned yesterday, I had the opportunity to spend most of my day with Freesia McKee.  In many of our past work days, we have done a great deal of hands on and practical work, but today was rather different, in ways that were, I think, necessarily and helpful for me at this juncture.  In many ways, we spent most of the time discussing the work we are doing, preparing plans for getting more of my work ready to send out, and making other plans around projects we are thinking of.  For example, we visited a potential venue in the area for a poetry reading which I had previously investigated.  We also discussed ideas for a collaborative project we are working on, and looked through some of my poems. 

The most important thing, however, and the thing we did for the majority of the day, was discuss poetry.  I am sure that I am a bit of a bore, or at least was somewhat so today, and I really appreciated Freesia indulging me, because it was important that I get back to considering creativity in this way.  Much of what we discussed was fairly abstract, not the concrete lines of a particular poem but the ideas around and behind poetics and our approaches to writing.  It was a chance for me to indulge some of the aspects of my writing mind that have been a bit quiet of late.  As I have said, though I have done a great deal of writing, keeping up with my usual schedule, I also know that my mind has been distracted a lot from the work and that I have not been progressing or considering the questions of improving what I am doing, of challenging myself to do more, and thinking about how the work I am doing may be able to evolve.

One thing that came up, for example, which is not a new idea, really, but one I had all but forgotten about, and which I am not sure would have come back to mind in another context, was to do with how my current work might  progress.  I have spoken before about poems I am writing which work largely by creating a context but not filling in the details of that context.  These poems must lack certain details to do that work, however, it is fully possible to create a lushness that is extraneous to the details that are already missing.  In essence, it is possible to add a lot more texture to these poems, in ways that will also make them more vivid, but involving only extraneous, metaphorical, etc, elements that won't fill in what needs to be missing.  The point is, it is possible to do more with the work, and talking to Freesia pointed this out again.  I had not been considering that before, but after today, I am feeling reconnected to something I had been feeling a lack of in my creative life.

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