Dear Reader,
I somehow missed the news that my poem “Rotten Beds” was published by Black Ink Club, a publication founded at Las Positas College in California. What a cool surprise!
A line came to me today at the gym as I stretched my hip and saw my bare lower leg in the mirror: “My body has aged without my consent.” There’s a poem in that, isn’t there?
This is not a post on what I’d call pre-aging, because surely I’m not aging? (Ha ha.) If I am, my soul doesn’t know it.
Word Raccoon and I have a weekly “round up the poetry bits and put them in google docs” calendar reminder. I skipped it yesterday, but as I wrote that line from the gym into my notes app, I decided to revisit the task because there are more ideas, partial poems, and nearly finished ones lingering there, asking to be remembered.
WR’s imagination was caught by more than one of the lines, and I made her wait until I put them all in under “poem ideas.” I will weed back through them and pull out any full enough to merit its own file. I suspect there are a good 6 or 7 at that stage. It feels like the perfect day for this.
For no good reason I broke them into five “poetry idea” files, since they were all separate notes to begin with, and I suppose it makes sense to not have an endless loop of poetry fragments. That would be like buying alphabet pasta and tossing it onto the floor and expecting it to spell out poems..
(Funnily enough, the notes transferred without spaces between the partial poems and ideas, so I’m having to go back and do that manually, but it’s kinda interesting because who knows what mashups might ensue? Happy little accidents, wasn’t that Bob Ross’s line?)
WR wants to share a peek at some dubious gems:
Penguin highways are real
A hand puppet for the recently dead
How do miners stop seeking a vein/after they’ve found coal?
…mustard to cut the richness
When grief gets tired/it hides in plain sight
Our first task is to sort them, as I said:
Separate out anything that looks file ready.
Chew on any particularly delicious lines (hand puppet seems intriguing, am I right?).
Confirm that I haven’t inadvertently done this before by searching Google Drive.
I’ve been missing my time reading poetry craft books; I’ll have to see if I have any more hanging around the house to pick up. (As long as they don’t try to teach us form – WR does not enjoy constraints.)
Ok, back to the poetry.
Drema