BIC & Poetry vs. Collage

81º ~ feels like 85º, summer’s having a final blowout sale this weekend with temps and humidity climbing, a promise of cooling down in the new week & the new season, hummingbirds continue to battle it out, one bird trying to claim all four feeders in our yard

First, a celebration of BIC (butt in chair), as it really does work. This morning, I flailed about for at least an hour, starting two miserable drafts in my journal before stumbling onto what I really wanted to say/write.

I have to thank Brent Goodman this morning.  His poem “The Brother Swimming Beneath Me” bleeds into the line “is not dead yet… .” That sparked a first line for me, “Dad isn’t dead yet, but disappearing.” Many of you know that my dad has been dealing with Parkinson’s for years. Recently, he has shown all of the elements of Alzheimer’s setting in as well. As always, it is a struggle for me to be so far away and to know that my mom and my oldest sister bear the brunt of his caregiving. I thought that’s what the poem would be about, but no.

Instead, today poetry did that magical thing. The draft went in another direction, focusing on my dad, not me, and helping me see something about him that I’d never been able to articulate before. The draft, titled “Undersong,” actually reveals a man “letting go” of the world long before symptoms appeared because the world had advanced beyond his recognition. Yes, it is based on autobiography, but there’s a good deal of fictionalizing going on in there as well.

*Note, “undersong” is a real word with a real definition, but all these silly spell checkers keep telling me otherwise. Le sigh.

So, hurray for BIC and for poetry as an act of discovery that helps me make sense of my world. It might not make living in that world any easier, but it helps.

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Now, to poetry versus collage. I don’t really mean this as a “versus” kind of thing, but the form of “this versus that” is easy shorthand. What I mean to say is this: I am torn. I have a limited number of hours to devote to my creative life, and I’m having conflicted thoughts about where my collages fit in with my poetry. Truth is, some mornings, I’d rather be making a collage than stumbling over the page in this broken way of late. Yet, I have been “a poet” for so long that I feel guilty about wanting to be making a different kind of art.

I worry that if I don’t keep my BIC, I’ll lose my poetry muscles (from past experiences, I know I will), but if I’m uninspired by writing and inspired by working with visual images, shouldn’t I honor that?

Anyone out there who makes art in multiple fields care to offer any advice? This is much weirder than genre-switching on the page. Each practice requires a whole different physical space and movement, a different firing in the brain. Help!