Still no literature for this site! (How fraudulent all those Suffolk Punch links from other writers' sites are beginning to look.)
Well, what can I say. I am a writer because I write. But I'm just not feeling the literary vibe right now. I'm not reading much and my poetry output has been reduced to zero.
At the moment I'm too busy trying to remember how to be myself .
5 comments:
If we all had to skill to write 'at the drop of a hat', we'd all end up like Barbara Cartland, Andrew Lloyd Webber, or God forbid Jeffrey Archer.
Frustrating as it can be I think it's all part of the 'normal' ebb and flow of creativity.
Yes, I'm sure the urge to write poetry will come back. It always has before. But I actually don't miss it at all. I don't want the parallel life of the poet right now. I want to ride out my insecurity and learn to live in the company of other people, enjoying them, learning from them. The little living I have done among others of late has been really inspiring.
Exactly, Janey! I think my whole career as a poet has been a thinly veiled attempt to hide what I couldn't face. All those uncomfortable facts about myself and my relationship to the world. And my sense of myself as a poet encouraged me to separate further from the things that were important because it gave meaning--and false intellectual justification--for loneliness and depression.
When I look at some of my writings from that time they look like the work of another person too, because for now at least I have pretty much stopped caring about those things. The whole scene seems dominated by competitiveness and egotism. I can write a fair poem sometimes, and one or two of them have been praised by The People Who Know, but what good is that? Increasingly I found success in poetry meant no more to me than failure.
a thought -- it occurs to me that it takes a stronger poet to write well about the good times than the bad. my own "good-time" writing usually appears quite lame. still, you've spent years developing, as an artist, the ability to paint those dark pictures; aren't you a little curious about the brighter hues?
I do not suggest, for one moment, that a life as a non-poet is somehow a lesser thing, but for selfish reasons, I hope you'll find and share the poetry in this new aspect of your life.
Thanks Ralph. I am fairly certain I will pick up the pen again sometime--this blog proves the urge to write is still with me.There may even be a period, soon, when I disown my current thinking and posturing and wish I hadn't been so public with it.
My flirtation with happiness has a touch of the darkness about it, after all...
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