This is the end.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Two hours to write one short poem....
A Life
Youth was juggling
confused days
trying to forge some
existential meaning.
Adult life broke;
we awoke
to new kinds of pain.
At last joy is found;
we almost get the
knack of living.
And with age
we forget much.
God’s tears spill down
as summer rain.
The rainbow appears.
7/18
Saturday, July 14, 2018
New poem
As
Sure
As
sure as blood flows
through
my veins,
I
hold the reins.
I
am living a lie;
I
must take care of “I.”
I’m
an old ship
on
an ancient sea.
Isn’t
it time
to
think about me?
7/14/18
Saturday, July 7, 2018
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On Writing, Revision, and Sculpture
Concerning the poem, I have now entirely deleted it. The reason, it was written in the first person and highly exaggerated, also it used real names. I have read that in writing about self and family, first you must change the names and also generally not write it in the first person. This is especially true when a poem is too personal. I spent close to an hour revising the original, or I would prefer to say sculpting it.
Michelangelo said that inside the block of marble, the figure is already there. His job was just to chip away until the vision became a reality. Revising writing is much the same, especially in poetry, where you must be as succinct as possible to describe something in the best possible way. It also helps to have a thorough knowledge of the wonderful English language, with so many nuances of meaning and words derived from other languages, that the unabridged dictionary weighs half a ton. Nonetheless, writing is largely instinctive, and can be done and should be done by everybody.
There are definitely times when a blog or a diary helps to unravel thoughts and feelings that would otherwise go unsaid and continue to invade the psyche in treacherous ways, without working out any solutions or understanding what's really going on in our heads.
I want to tell a story about Robert Frost, many times repeated to me by my mother.
This writer's custom was to work all day at his writing in a room upstairs in his house and only come downstairs to join his wife for meals. At lunchtime one day his wife asked him, "What did you do this morning, dear?" To which he replied, "I took out a comma." When he came down for dinner, she asked him again, "And what did you do this afternoon, dear?" To which he replied, "I put the comma back in."
This story illustrates the attention to detail which most of us are plagued with. One must not only write but learn how to revise constantly, until Michelangelo's Pieta finally arrives. Ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating.
Michelangelo said that inside the block of marble, the figure is already there. His job was just to chip away until the vision became a reality. Revising writing is much the same, especially in poetry, where you must be as succinct as possible to describe something in the best possible way. It also helps to have a thorough knowledge of the wonderful English language, with so many nuances of meaning and words derived from other languages, that the unabridged dictionary weighs half a ton. Nonetheless, writing is largely instinctive, and can be done and should be done by everybody.
There are definitely times when a blog or a diary helps to unravel thoughts and feelings that would otherwise go unsaid and continue to invade the psyche in treacherous ways, without working out any solutions or understanding what's really going on in our heads.
I want to tell a story about Robert Frost, many times repeated to me by my mother.
This writer's custom was to work all day at his writing in a room upstairs in his house and only come downstairs to join his wife for meals. At lunchtime one day his wife asked him, "What did you do this morning, dear?" To which he replied, "I took out a comma." When he came down for dinner, she asked him again, "And what did you do this afternoon, dear?" To which he replied, "I put the comma back in."
This story illustrates the attention to detail which most of us are plagued with. One must not only write but learn how to revise constantly, until Michelangelo's Pieta finally arrives. Ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating.
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