I think I’ll make my next, next book this kind of thing, and call it From Poetry To Essay. I’ve got so much damned stuff collected over the years. I may as well use collate it and use it. It/they about all kinds of ‘stuff’, i.e. bits and pieces of themes and ideas. It’s a good way to get rid of it.
A Little Essay called Start–A-Poem
When I start a poem there is no thought of acceptance, spreading or sharing. The writing, motive pure, there is a kind of reverence for what is going on in the mind at the moment. Only the creation process matters.
The process set in motion, impossible to resist, I take up any paper scrap on hand: backs of envelopes, the blank margins on receipts and ads. I’ve even written on tissue paper. Thankfully there is usually a pad and writing implement somewhere near, even an open computer. And so it starts. The writing, the thinking, long pauses, hesitations, corrections, thesauruses, dictionaries – each leading to contemplation, deeper layers, broader possibilities. Every sensory impulse outside myself fodder.
There grows enormous discipline sometimes called compulsion. I can’t get up. I can be in the most uncomfortable position and there I stay. It’s irrational. At the moment of finishing I’m thinking this poem is the ‘cat’s pajamas’ and the next urge sneaks in: to have it read by someone, preferably some ones. Thank God for the Internet.
In the beginning, thanks to my computer literate daughter, it was establishing a poetry site. Long after, the discovery of other poetry sites, online magazines… Feedback, comments – wonderful. A world out there that reads, thinks, likes, criticizes,
I’m there still; time consuming admittedly, but stimulating, producing an abstract, invisible condition of gratitude. Part of the world now, giving, taking, I’m hooked.
March 20, 2018
Arlene Corwin Poetry 