::My Writing Mojo,Somewhat Lost::

There are lots of real-life concerns I am worried about right now --- the work that I will have to do before my program ends, finding a job for myself which would ensure a ensure a stable (if moderate) source of livelihood, a lot of other personal issues. Writing has been hard for a while now. In March, I yanked out a few poems, around 10 or so. In February, I wrote 12 or something like that. I would wake up around 5, 5.30 pm, make myself a cup of tea, wrap myself in my navy blue flannel dressing gown and would read some poems before writing a few lines. And I would do this everyday, before I began to prep for the class I taught. I don't think I ever finished a poem in one sitting. But I would steadily work through them, writing a few lines everyday. 

After that, it has been a really slow drain. I am working on revising some of the ones I have, and a lot of those I wrote in February had been accepted in places. But ever since April, I haven't really been able to generate a whole lot of new work. I am trying to keep a regular pace of working, writing a few lines every day, reading reading and reading. Hoping somehow that will give me the energy and whatever it needs to dance on page again. But so far, the things I have written don't have that quality which has no name-- you know, how some poems "sing", go straight into the material's core and produce something that will cause you later to think I wrote that, I really did write that. 


In a week I will begin this month-long workshop : Writing A Poetic Sequence. I am desperately hoping it would give me some extra space to feel that creative energy again. Possibly we will read something that will rattle my bones so much that I will be forced to write and write well. Until then, I will try to push myself through, I will bring my pen closer to the paper everyday, let the two brush up against each other, and be satisfied with whatever comes out of those moments of persistent and somewhat forced creativity. 

Robert Frost's "Directive"

• I have enrolled in a form class. I think, as a general rule of thumb, my poems are too rowdy. Not very disciplined. Kind of like my mind. The things I write about, tend to find their own forms, rather than stay within the norms of the forms. But isn't that the thing about forms? But, I still think, it's good to try to write in forms. Like, this week, we are doing "blank verse." A form, which, admittedly leads itself to "imitation and reflection of thought." In other words, wordy! Now, this shouldn't scare me, the verbose person that I am. Except for the fact that all this wordiness needs to be expressed in iambic pentameter, in a fixed order of stressed and unstressed syllables. From what we read this week, I really liked Robert Frost's "Directive."
• Frost's poem, I think, is very much a pastoral and anti-pastoral at the same time. I was trying to read it in conjunction with Charlotte Smith's poem, where the nature has been personified, the narrator seems to be in perfect harmony with it. But in Frost's poem, “nature” and “human history” confront each other in a somewhat antagonistic relationship. The nature is beautiful in Frost's poem too, but it changes through human intervention. It is almost as if Frost feels compelled to use the same form in which pastoral poems were written to show that his concerns are very different. I think, that sentiment has been best expressed in the opening lines: “ Back out of all this now too much for us,/Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail burned, dissolved, and broken off/Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.

• It seemed to me that in lots of places Frost is lapsing into hexameter. For me, what is meant was that, he was looking for a form, which needed to be a little bit hefty. As if his thoughts are struggling to fit themselves in lines, and even a pentameter is not always adequate for him.