Writing Time

It's cold and gloomy here in the northeast and a perfect climate in which to write. When it's gray outside I feel more confined and sheltered in my little writing room. With a jazz CD playing softly in the background, my heart stills, the chatter in my head stills, and the pen slips over the blank page like skates on a frozen pond.

I blogged yesterday about my varied tastes in genres, but today focus seems to be my theme. Although I have an unfinished novel  waiting for me. Characters who are waiting for me to tell them what to think and feel and do next. I am into poetry. I'm at work on a poetic memoir. I've written fifteen poems so far in the form of prose poems, haibun and tanka, and have worked with a teacher to help me hone the poems into their best personas. I'm searching for more poems in my stack of notebooks and writing new ones so I can have a 30 to 40 page chapbook to submit.

I love writing poems on quiet gloomy days. The atmosphere seems ripe for metaphor, lyrical verses, lines that sing and thrum with emotion. The joy I find in poetry is trying to tell me something and perhaps this time I will sit up and listen. I do have a writing niche, I just keep taking jaunts down foreign roads better left untraveled. When the road not taken is the road that best fits my life work then I know I should take it.

So why do I resist my passion so heartily? Why do I choose novels that will never be completed? Poems rise in me like ripples in a stream, as I travel down river, the poems become rapids that sweep me away, I need to ride this current more consistently and not get swayed by what I'm reading or what others are writing. This, poetry writing, is where I belong. Maybe 2013 will be the year I settle into the genre that causes my blood to roil and my mouth to turn up in a contented smile. It's where I am supposed to be.

I hope the coming year leads you to where you're supposed to be.

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 29, 2012 at 12:16 PM

    I'm also watching the snow come down while musing on some writing projects today just a few miles away from you. And I have the same difficulty deciding on where to focus my creativity, but I've made my New Year's resolution to listen to my heart and stay on the path I feel most called to follow. So my New Year's wish is that you'll do the same. You write about poetry with such passion and obvious joyful enthusiasm, I think you should listen to what your heart is trying to tell you.

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  2. ReneeDecember 29, 2012 at 1:50 PM

    Thanks Cathy. Yes, only a few miles apart we focus on what we love to do. If only I could always follow my passion, but it's not too late to learn. My collective poetry memoir is shaping up. I need to complete the poems then work on some art to go along with it.

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