Aug 27, 2009
work, work, work...
yesterday afternoon i started going through the poems again - the rejected ones - and did quite a bit of long, hard work on several of them. slowly, slowly, slowly, these pieces are finding the right voice and time and cadence and all those things that make a poem a poem, i suppose. it's so much harder than painting. a landslide harder. it's real easy to write a bad poem... a good poem is a rare and miraculous occurrence. there is definitely no formula for it and no map to guide you. none whatsoever. it must be the sheer love of words that keeps a person coming back to struggle and fight and lose and struggle some more.
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2 comments:
Go you, keep at it!
You have probably read this poem before, but anytime I think about how much I love words, I think about Robert Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas"--
http://www.diabeacon.org/prg/poetry/87_88/hass1.html
-"the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies."
i had NOT read that poem before! thank you!!!! thank you dearly and so so so very much! i've read it three times now and i'll read it at least once more before i go to bed. beautiful!
i will keep at it. they force my had at times. the poems. even if they're bad, they show themselves. they refuse to be ignored. :)
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