Method
Last night I had "poetry night" with Beth and Mary. We cut poems from Beth's most recent collection of poems ("Little Magic") to get the book tight for contest entries.
Mary showed us some of the results from the "Vox Memoria" project. (Each of us -- and a couple of other folks -- wrote poems in response to a painting by her husband and then she passed the poems along -- without the original painting -- on to other visual artists to make pieces from our poems.) She was very flattering, saying that her husband was really sparked by my own poem, that most of the artists had really connected with what I had written, and that one in particular had chosen to do an abstract piece completely in response to the poem I had written.
Working on Beth's poems and hearing the response to the poem I had written for that project, made me realize something:
"Mere Jonathans" (my book of poems) was written when I was trying to really SEE how I could make internal spiritual/philosophical changes in my life. In fact, it was the process of writing that book (including a week of work at Short Mountain in the dead of winter) that enabled me to make the leap to see myself as a Radical Faerie. The work of writing the poems does something more than writing essays; it doesn't just make the clear, logical assertion but also allows me to give a BODY to the ideas, to imagine the changes in a real life context.
I realized last night that -- with all these changes I am trying to make, all the beliefs I am trying to make tangible, with all the frustrated efforts to make my ideas over into action -- I really need to be writing a book of poems through this process. Poetry, after all, can be a grappling with everyday issues and concepts, and I would like for my next book to be more settled to the ground, rooted to daily experience.
And what's more: I think the changes I want will make more sense, will make me happier, and will stick better.
Now ... the choice of form and subject, the surge to begin.
Think I'll work on that today.
Feeling far better today, folks.
Mary showed us some of the results from the "Vox Memoria" project. (Each of us -- and a couple of other folks -- wrote poems in response to a painting by her husband and then she passed the poems along -- without the original painting -- on to other visual artists to make pieces from our poems.) She was very flattering, saying that her husband was really sparked by my own poem, that most of the artists had really connected with what I had written, and that one in particular had chosen to do an abstract piece completely in response to the poem I had written.
Working on Beth's poems and hearing the response to the poem I had written for that project, made me realize something:
"Mere Jonathans" (my book of poems) was written when I was trying to really SEE how I could make internal spiritual/philosophical changes in my life. In fact, it was the process of writing that book (including a week of work at Short Mountain in the dead of winter) that enabled me to make the leap to see myself as a Radical Faerie. The work of writing the poems does something more than writing essays; it doesn't just make the clear, logical assertion but also allows me to give a BODY to the ideas, to imagine the changes in a real life context.
I realized last night that -- with all these changes I am trying to make, all the beliefs I am trying to make tangible, with all the frustrated efforts to make my ideas over into action -- I really need to be writing a book of poems through this process. Poetry, after all, can be a grappling with everyday issues and concepts, and I would like for my next book to be more settled to the ground, rooted to daily experience.
And what's more: I think the changes I want will make more sense, will make me happier, and will stick better.
Now ... the choice of form and subject, the surge to begin.
Think I'll work on that today.
Feeling far better today, folks.