I’ve just written and posted a poem that I have tentatively titled “Blazes.” People frequently ask how I write, so I’m going to talk about this one while it is fresh enough to remember.
First, there was a Twitter event on Tuesday of this week in which people were posting poetry, talking about poetry and writing and publishing, all using the hashtag #poettues. I didn’t feel well and wasn’t really up to writing something new, so I posted a poem I’d drafted recently. At the same time, I thought what a great idea #poettues was. I thought it would be wonderful if I could manage to post a new poem on my blog every Tuesday.
I’ll regret posting a poem on Friday because of that, but #poettues was what had me thinking about scheduling time out on a weekly basis to draft a new poem.
Then on Wednesday I noticed that Robert Lee Brewer had a new writing prompt up at Poetic Asides: “take no prisoners.” For whatever reason, the image that popped into my mind was a bulldozer. I didn’t think much more about it at the time. I was busy doing other things. But the idea of writing a poem and the image of a bulldozer were planted in my mind.
Later, I noticed on Facebook that Molly Fisk had posted a writing prompt about water and another one about a falling apple, which reminded me of Newton’s gravity explanation.
Meanwhile, on Composing with Images the weekly theme was moon.
Thus, this morning when I pulled out a legal pad and a black gel pen and asked myself if I had a poem in me, the images that had collected around the idea of writing in the past few days were bulldozer, water, moon, and gravity.
A few months ago, my brother flipped a backhoe into his pond–not in the moonlight, but definitely because he was attempting precarious actions on a levee. It was inevitable that this would tie in with the other images, and so with that string of random pictures in my head, I sat down and wrote “Blazes.”
This is a typical process for me. I don’t always use intentional writing prompts. Mostly I pick up bits and pieces from things I’ve read or seen or heard. I take a kind of mental snapshot of anything that interests me. That snapshot gets mixed in with other snapshots. Then when I write the collection of recent mental snapshots arranges and rearranges itself in my head until a poem or something like it emerges.
