Dear Reader,
I am listening to Collective Soul’s Collective Soul this morning, from 1995.
Wait, does that sound like I’m time traveling? Didn’t mean that, LOL.
It was my favorite album for a season. I’m listening to it today for multiple reasons, one that the café is playing…not my favorite genre of music. Seems to be their thing. Sigh.
And also, I’m in a funk; let’s see if “Gel” can chase it away. It’s just a residual cluster of things nagging at me. If I don’t want to see the list, I’m sure you don’t want to, either.
No big whoop.
Last comments on National Poetry Month, I promise: I know I’ve seemed all over the map with it, but in hindsight, here’s the thing: I already have a daily practice, so it was like signing up to wake up every day, and who wouldn’t be pissy over that? That’s on me. I should’ve just taken advantage of the community aspect and left it at that. And the poems to study that were sent along every day were really cool, and I also appreciated the effort, for sure.
I don’t mean to seem ungrateful to those who put the cohort together.
One nice thing that came out of the month is reconnecting with someone from the program I met in Paris. He’s a poet, and now we’ve been encouraging one another’s process, which has been genuinely helpful. (As much as those in the program try not to break into groups by genre during classes, it happens.)
Yesterday evening I submitted four packets of poetry and put my newest poems into Google docs. Along the way I found nuggets, lines that made me happy. I found tidbits in my “ready to submit” folder, poems I’d kinda forgotten about, some with real voltage, if I may say so.
It promises to be an unusually active weekend. Breathing deeply. Word Raccoon is growling, asking if she’s going to be allowed any pockets of writing time? She just knows I’m going to make her clean house. Of course I am! But I will do my best to sneak her a bag of time, too, and her laptop.
Maybe if I toss some lines on the page here from one of my recent poems very much still in progress, we can move the pieces together.
WR is now snapping her teeth at me. She says if I touch any of these right now, I will be doing them a disservice. New work only today; I am not of a revision mind.
She’s not wrong.
We do remember a handful of intriguing lines in our fragments folder. Let’s look there instead. Here, this is a line that would not only make a good poem IMO, but maybe even a great collection title:
The Gospel According to Shrug
There, raccoon, chew on that.
Meditatively,
Drema
P.S. Half of One is publishing my poem “Squirreling” and they have an artist illustrating it…I can’t wait to see what they come up with! WR is wounded; she wants to know why she’s only made it into one published poem.
ALSO, thanks be, the manager at the café asked if I was warm enough and flipped on the fireplace for me. Yay!! I didn’t want to ask in case they couldn’t afford to turn it up. It was 64.5 in here the other morning!
dremadrudge.com 