71º ~ glorious, after days & days & days of soggy rain, the sun arrives but not the humidity, wahoo
Yes, I’ve been writing for the past three days, but I’ve found that I’m not driven to include my draft notes as I’ve done in the past. In some ways, the process is always the same: sit in chair, read for inspiration, wool-gather words, become struck by a line, begin.
What I do have to say is that the drafts for Monday and Tuesday were inspired by my recent dental drama (needing a crown replaced, discovering serious decay, having a root canal performed by a jackass, etc.). However, today, the draft remained medical in nature, and with a human subject, but was inspired by Gracie, our diva-cat who just underwent her second major surgery for breast cancer.
Some of you may remember that the sickly speaker was largely inspired by our cat Lou-Lou’s lost battle with myelofibrosis. Now, I seem to be writing about surgeries to remove masses from a human speaker, but based on Gracie.
All of this reminded me that once, when I had been talking about the great emotional toll taken by working with community college students, who have higher rates of poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, etc, someone asked, “have you written poems about their stories?” My answer then, and now, was and is “no.” Those are their stories to tell. While I empathize and sympathize and give all I can to support those students and help them find a way out, I don’t feel inspired to write persona poems around those issues.
Instead, I seem to be most comfortable transfiguring the experiences of our cats onto human figures in my poems.
So be it.
