The urge to write more poetry hit me a few weeks ago. I've been struggling with a lot of things lately (health and otherwise), and when I struggle, I write poetry.
I meditate and I write poetry.
Do I write poetry because I meditate? Or do I meditate and the poetry just gets wrung out of my soul like juicing an orange?
Absolutely both are true. I'm sure of it. Because going inside and doing shadow and healing work on myself leads to a blast of creativity. At least it is that way for me. All inner looking leads to an art of some sort in everyone, I believe. We create as we heal and so raise our emotions to a more positive state.
This past month-and-a-half I've been healing my lungs from pleurisy and from the anxiety of putting my first book out and some other stressful stuff. When that was done, I hit the meditation and binaural beats. For healing, for creativity, for mental endurance and clarity.
Then I started writing.
And I haven't really stopped. I'm not forcing it, or pressuring myself to outwrite myself in poetry like 2021 when I wrote 127 haiku in a little over three months.
I don't know where this poetry spurt is taking me, but I'm just going to let the muses be the guides. In a previous blog post, I had said that I wanted to write more of the form I started writing last year, the "3 Ways of Looking" linked haiku/senryu and some other riffing off of other poets and this is what this kind of thinking led to:
- 24 new "3 Ways of Looking" poems (including one with an anime hint)
- 11 new haiku/senryu, including two riffing on (is this channeling?) on the self-imposed question "What if Alan Ginsberg wrote senryu?"
- 7 new freeform poems
The yearly poetry challenge, Post-It Note Poetry, will begin on February 1st and I have a good problem. I have more poems than the days in February (Leap Year, even) so I have to pick which to post for the daily poetry challenge. And I hope the flow continues, but I'm feeling an urge to get back to fiction. Writing is all about the urges, isn't it?
I plan on blogging a weekly post of the poems for each week.
It's going to be a lot of fun and I can't wait!
