Another NaPo is almost over, and again I’ve missed out on much of the goodness. April is such a hectic month for me, but I can’t blame my business. I’m just out of synch with poetry. I have been for a while. I’m the rhythmless girl dancing at the rave.
I’ve heard it said that some people don’t really understand that they can’t stay in love with their spouses forever, not with that same intensity and single-mindedness as they had at the beginning. And so, they can’t handle the change in their relationship and they break it off to start anew with someone else.
I can’t seem to recapture my passion for poetry, so I keep thinking about divorce. It’s childish, and I know it, but there has to be a way to feel that good about poetry again.
I’ve felt like that and then I’ve discovered a poet I’ve never read before who blows my mind and shows me again that poetry is capable of more than I had previosuly thought. But these kind of books don’t grow on trees.
Have you read Tim Parks’s Adultery and Other Diversions? Not poetry, but non-fiction, essays. They are very entertaining, acerbic at times, and well written, and he looks at the issue of staying in relationships in several of them.
Julie,
I find when I have those feelings of frustration (and they’re almost always about my own poetry rather than poetry in general) then it’s time to switch genres and focus on my fiction for a while. Moving between poetry and fiction helps keep me fresh.
The other thing I do is writing exercises and prompts without worrying if what I’m crafting rises to the level of ‘poetry’ rather than the poetic equivalent of musical scales. If I’m not ‘trying’ to write “P”oetry, then I am less critical of myself.
best,
lisa
My dissatisfaction has been going on for years, so I think it’s way past time for me to acknowledge that it’s my “normal” state and that the infatuated state ain’t coming back.