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

I have been very mired in gloom for a long while, and I know I need to get myself free from it, at least in terms of what I am writing.  There is a place for poems expressing these feelings, but I don't want it to be all I am writing, and so I am trying to be a bit more playful in my poems.  Play can, of course, be a part of expressing these same feelings, but I think it might help me to loosen up and shift the work.  Tonight, for example, I worked on a poem that was about a time I travelled overseas and arrived to find my luggage was missing.  I framed the poem around the fear of not having underwear, which was a thing that I remember thinking about at the time, and used that odd perspective to make it a bit silly, though I think it is still connecting to something more, to a sense of being uncertain in a strange place, and hinting towards the want for some kind of familiar comfort for stability.  Play is easy to ignore or forget, at least for me, despite it being not only a powerful, and, often, motivating, tool, but one that is usually pretty fun to put into practice.  It may just be that right now I have a lot of feelings that want to work their way out, but I am not writing to just journal out my feelings.  The personal has to be incorporated, of course, and one cannot write without some connected experience to draw upon, but, by necessity,  there is also a deeper purpose to an artistic communication beyond venting one's frustration and upset.

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