John Steinbeck
It is embarrassing to note my last blog post here was over 6 months ago. I was on sabbatical I shall claim. Not from writing but from writing about writing, and from submitting. I was writing in private I suppose.
It was not intentional, but rather, practical. My non-writing life includes a small homestead where my husband and I live and work. If interested you can read all about it HERE. Last summer we started building a barn and a couple months after that, two wonderful new grandbabies arrived. Then winter stormed in.
I kept up my writing routine and I was reading copious amounts of work by other writers, but all submissions stopped which consequently meant all acceptances stopped as well. Funny how that works. But last week a barrier of some sort broke and I got busy. In a matter of eight days, I wrote three new poems and submitted a total of twenty three poems to seven separate publications.
Seems I'm on a roll and it feels fantastic.
To further wind me up I discovered the article Reconnecting After a Silence written by Jane Hirshfield in the latest edition of Poets and Writers. (Jan/Feb 2018) In it she discusses ways to rejuvenate your writing and suggests not only concrete activities like translating a poem from a foreign language you love, "To keep your relationship to word-shaping awake", but cerebral exercises such as reminding yourself why you wanted to write in the first place. She further suggests that a writer can write about not writing, as I did at the beginning of this post, as a way to check in on where you are right now. In all she lists seven ways a writer can rejuvenate and reconnect.
Although I was not blocked in regards to putting words on paper, I had definitely blocked myself from the next steps needed: revising, fine-tooth combing, and submitting. When I took time last week to review my work over the last few months I was both pleased and appalled at the number of poems I had started but never completed. I had neglected to take my words, thoughts and feelings, the entire distance. I had plopped them down on a piece of paper and abandoned them, leaving them to flip flop around without direction like the fan tail fish who leaps out of his bowl and lands on a cold kitchen floor. A skittering mess of confusion.
So thanks Jane for the kick in the arse I needed to finish up, to follow up, to write a poem about nothing, from beginning to end.
