Neglect, by Any Other Name, Is Still Neglect.

                 “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
                                                                                                                              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.