Friday, November 11, 2011

Winter






















The snow sifts down
covering up the ugly death of
fall frost kill,
making the view new and soft
and clean,
tucking the world in
to nap until spring.

(Written for Thursday Think Tank #74, "Winter", 11/11/11)

The lonely writer

Image credit


















It is a solitary activity
the pursuit of
poesy and
prose.
Others may read
our humble offerings
but no one can help with
the creative process except
perhaps by providing
thoughtful or ludicrous
words, ideas and behavior.
How many times at
a coffee shop or the check out
line have I frantically dug for
paper and pencil
to record a hilarious
or ridiculous
event unfolding
fortuitously
in front of me?

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Prose picture

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Head down,
slogging for word count alone,
quantity over quality,
rough framework awaiting
smoothed walls,
the raw emotion grinds out
and astonishes me with its
power and reality.
Rough draft novel writing
mines the depths of creativity
and memory and feeling.
Writing a novel is
a motion picture
contrasted with the
single photograph of
a poem.

(Posted for Thursday Poet's Rally Week 55, 11/8/11)


Thank you, Poetry Palace, for this week's award. I am always humbly grateful for your recognition!







Friday, November 4, 2011

Write...why?













We gather at the library,
autumn leaves blasting past
the windows in high wind,
skulking with our laptops,
defiantly hogging wall outlets
and tables and chairs,
fingers at the ready.
Are we 'real' writers, not
using the traditional paper
and pen? Then the discussion
of typewriters breaks out, with
a fierce contingent avowing:
what about pencils?
And fountain pens, quills and stylus,
wax tablets, parchment, onion skin,
papyrus and animal skins or even
brushes and burnt sticks and
stone and chisels (of stone or metal?)
Arguments about what is
the purest form of the writer
blossom into fierce, mock serious
discussions of writing procrastination.
While various folks
charge off into the book stacks
to look up hieroglyphics to
support their theories about
what makes a true scribe,
I tap away at my key board,
easily making my daily NaNo
word count, emotional guns
all firing at the bad guy in
my nascent novel.
The writing makes the writer,
you see?
(Posted for Thursday Think Tank #73, 11/4/11 and for Magpie Tales, Mag 89, 11/4/11
and Gooseberry Garden's Poetry Picnic Week 12, 11/6/11)