Pep Talk Now That It's Summer and I Have More Time

It's summer, but there's no real writing going on. Would it be helpful if I listed my difficulties? I feel scattered generally in that living paycheck to paycheck way but I mean my  thinking. I can only plan until the next short term fulfillment or task. I'm hiccuping instead of breathing. I'm continually getting snagged instead of skimming a surface lightly. Is it my age? Is it my impending birthday giving me a surface roil? Is it the sweating? Is it the influence of my job and how I flick through computer sites to distract myself/calm myself down? I have thought this before--that my job makes me think less well.

What's odd about my unwriting is that when I break through the skin of the poem and start fiddling with organs (OK--too many murder mystery books obviously), things seem to go well. So breaking through the skin continually. A better metaphor-- putting my head underwater where everything looks flaring and dreamy and I have to hold my breath. Dive deep.

Should I have a prompt chosen every week just in case? Should I keep an image notebook? This immediately appeals to me. It would be as if I'd be doing sketches. OK. Find suitable notebook. Look up mosaics online today and see how interested I am in that possible poem.

Learning to breathe underwater again.

(What is Necessary) Image Above All

I think I might have mentioned earlier my feelings about form--not dismissal which seems too brutal and foolish, but perhaps thinking of it as of secondary importance. Even as I write that, I realize what a firestorm of disagreement and repudiation I might unleash. And it's all because I learned how to write when free verse still felt new and subversive. Let me begin again. Point one of my personal manifesto.

When I teach poetry, whether literature class or workshop, the first thing I discuss is image. Image as setting, image as tone, image as the referent of emotion. Image which allows the reader to put his or her finger into the physical world of the poem, understanding what is true because he or she knows this is how sunlight really does feel on skin. Image establishing a world and an authority.

Stark image--standing in for. A chair in the poem that we can sit on. Complex image which feels wonderfully apt at first encounter and then keeps unfolding, accruing meaning, suggesting more the longer we consider. 

I was having a little facebook conversation about this with someone late last week, trying to enumerate the examples I might use--Bishop, Plath. That fork poem by Simic. And then this morning I opened a book of poems by Tomas Transtromer, Windows and Stones. I was struck dumb with admiration in the second poem:
"Now my letter is with the censor . . . . / my words leap like apes onto a grating/ shake it, go stiff, and bare their teeth." (from "To Friends Behind a Border")

How else to inhabit the world if not through the senses?