Equal Opportunity Profession, Poet

January 18, 2015 — #ROW80, art, challenge, poetry

ROW80

My adventure into poetry continues, and the plot thickens. I learn about the lives of poets from my podcasts and reading. I am highly encouraged by the diversity found in the population. Any and every kind of person has written poetry in the past, and the platform only expands now. There were people who worked in mundane industry who took up writing after retirement and found smashing success. There are prisoners, idealists, and students working diligently to create verse and other written art forms. Many of my fellow writers involved in #ROW80 have years of experience and much more instruction under their belts as poets. This feels like a good place to learn from those who have already mastered and shared words carefully placed and edited, intended to express something beyond what the reader can see.  I notice that I might be better instructed by poems that do not suit my fancy than by those I instantly like. I also notice my subject matter is similar every time I work on my poetry.  I am like Claude Monet and the water lilies, just can’t stop.

I see merit in making series or building on a theme, but in a couple of weeks of daily poetic practice I seemed to be pleasantly slipping into a rut.  My drawings are mostly stylized butterflies, and the poems related dream images and psyche flying around the world bringing messages to daytime consciousness.  I did say I was not entering this practice to be self critical, but I did need to nudge myself to move beyond the butterflies and tell some kind of poetic story.  All the poems I hear and read show contrast and variety, while mine are running flat in a straight line, going nowhere.  I aspire to be like Monty Python and Dorothy Parker, yet my current offerings look like rorschach tests with  brief captions in explanation of my personality. I do hope we can improve on that.

I made an attempt to write a witty little ditty about the execution of my famous poet ancestor as a story.  This truly haunted my dreams and daily life for a couple of days after I learned about the incident in history.  We know details of his life and death because he was an aristocrat.  We even have several portraits of him.  Reading his work and imagining his last 6 days in the Tower of London in January freaked me out to the bone.  I skipped a day of poetry writing because I could not come up with any angle from which to create this story.  I know I dreamed about him, and developed sympathy for his plight, but nothing carried over into my writing.  I found that my boundaries restrict my creative muse.  My desire to capture emotions was not as great as my will to make a statement and be done.  I finally wrote a short  poem with him in mind, but it was not the big leap I wanted to take.  I have decided to keep Henry Howard with me as my ancestral muse.  I will confer with him before and after I write.  I think that by reading more of his work and keeping his memory alive in my dreams I have a chance of expanding beyond my comfort zone as it is now.

I am grateful to all the writers in the #ROW80 challenge for showing me that all of us have similar issues, both helpful and obstructive to our process.  The support and sharing within the group is a great incentive to keep the faith.  Thanks to all who check in on Sundays and Wednesdays on this adventure of ours.  I appreciate knowing we are in this as a team.  I have high hopes for all of us.