Island of Lost Poems

In a recent post on Stick Poet Super Hero, Michael Wells wonders out loud what happens to poems we've started and left unfinished. You know, all those scraps we have lying around somewhere that seemed so lovely to begin with and then just seemed to sort of go ... nowhere.

Well, I've got a lot of those. I had this wonderful idea for a poem to commemorate the Challenger crash a couple of years ago. I wrote the introit, did a lot of study on those who died, and the thing just lay flat. It's not that I lost interest, I just came to realize I could never create the poem that I imagined in my head. The idea of the thing had grown like Topsy, and there was no way the reality could match the idea. I know. I've tried with other things in the past.

Well, at least I've got a pretty nice introit, in terza rima form.

Problem was, this sort of thinking had led me to a major writer's block. I kept having these magnificent ideas that never became words on the page. Then, I met the Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, George Wallace, and he talked about his discipline of writing a poem a day.

This was a discipline he had learned in a writer's workshop with William Stafford. It's clear, from Stafford's book of essays Writing the Australian Crawl, that he did not normally write these poems for posterity. Now and again, a poem might come out fully formed, but more often they would require some crafting. A not-so-good poem might still have a good line or apt image that would find a home in a better poem.

So, I have set myself the goal of writing a poem as often as possible. There are days nothing comes to mind — I can't even think of one image or line. That's all I require: one image or line that appeals to me. I let the words flow from there. I have found that the less I plan a poem the better; seems most of the creative energy goes into the planning, and very little gets directed toward actually writing anything.

So: I see an image, mentally hear a phrase, I write it down. As a rule, more words follow that. Let the thing percolate through the day. Send it off to the Poetry Espresso list for feed-back. Publish it here & pray for more feed-back. Come back to it (on occasion) for tweaking, based on that feed-back.

Most of the poems you have seen in this space are the result of that discipline. Many of them I consider "finished". At the very least, I'm honest enough to recognize I'm not likely to do much else with them. A few seem like good ideas toward something else; or there's more I'd like to say. And maybe, someday, I'll come back to those unfinished bits and cobble more on.

But all these "fragments" will remain here, so long as the database which underpins this blog holds out. I'll continue posting these poems, along with my political and religious musings, so long as the muse allows.

I trust the product justifies your visit to this island of lost poems.