Today is car-in-the-shop and shingles-vaccine day. O joy! But otherwise things will be pretty quiet . . . more editing, a trip to the bank, some vacuuming. I ended up ditching the poem draft I was working on last week. It was going nowhere interesting and was beginning to feel like a waste of attention. Sometimes a chore is just a chore, even when it's poetry.
So I'll concentrate on reading. That's how my creative life goes: Read read read. Write. Read read read. Write. Sometimes I forget how long these dry spells can last-- Sometimes I also forget that they're not actually dry spells but well-fillers.
My friend Teresa and I are beginning a reading project together: all of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. I'm excited as I've never read them all the way through, just as anthologized scatter. Dante is still open on my desk; my novel-du-jour is Erdrich's Love Medicine. Surely poems will come back to me.
I rather like that image of well--filling. Sometimes it seems that poetry is like a cat. If you don't give direct attention to a cat, it come nudging you for petting or feeding or play. Sometimes a poem just stays out of reach until it twines itself around your feet until you either write it down or trip over it.
ReplyDeleteI like that metaphor, Ruth!
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