A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-One-Hundred-And-Eighty-Eight

I feel as if I am beginning to break down certain barriers in my writing.  Part of this is just the fact that I have shifted through the work I am doing with conceptual poems.  That is a very different kind of work, and it takes me in a new and energetic direction that requires me to reconsider a lot of the assumptions I have worked within before.  As a result, of course, I am starting to find myself thinking about other things in new and different ways.  I don't feel that I am ready to discuss the specifics of these things, at this point, because they still feel rather nebulous and difficult to assess, and there is something to fear, as well, in that I could imagine convincing myself it is just silly and now what I am imagining it is.  At the moment, the best thing I can do is recognize where I am and embrace it as a space of possibility.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Fifty

Each of the three pieces I wrote today was a bit of a struggle to get going, if I am honest.  That happens, as I have mentioned, and my answer is generally to just wait it out, and the results vary.  A lot of the time, if I am really stuck, I might try to force something out, often it winds up being a bit meta, with me writing about being stuck without much in terms of inspiration, and it feels a bit like I am working scales in a way.  All the aesthetic decisions are there, they just don't always have a lot of purpose behind them, and that is fine in that context.  Essentially, I am just forcing myself to do the work, and getting it done, and I am showing myself that I can and will do it even if inspiration never strikes.  This can often take pressure off, and that lack of pressure opens up creative thinking and inspiration. Now, that is a fine thing for me to do, and I am likely to use that approach again many times in the future, but today I felt that I wanted to make myself do
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Fifty-Nine

I have been thinking about how I can discuss certain aspects of my poetry and the choices I make as a writer.  In particular, I tend to write without as much reliance on sensory details and descriptions, instead choosing more abstract depictions.  This is something that I know many writers would call an odd choice, as specificity seems inherently to demand the application of detail, but I tend to be a bit hesitant about relying on depictions that utilize the senses, as I find that approach somewhat problematic.  For one thing, sensory description is always going to be less than universal, and not only because of the reality that there are individuals who lack one or more sense.  In many ways, for me, the deeper problem is one related to language itself.  Our use of language creates our experiences in a very real way, though I can't necessarily offer a full explanation of what I mean by that right here, but using a word for an object bestows qualities on it.  If I call something a s
Read more

Poem: Already Over

Already Over Moments pass away faster than we can even notice them: it takes time for the light that hits the eye to be understood as an image, let alone for the body to respond. It may only be fractions of a second, but what we think is now has already ended. Yet, somehow we can act upon this world as if we are present in the present, and not trapped just a few moments in the past.
Read more