Drafting Notes: Putting Poetry First

53º and sunny ~ trees are halfway through the leafing process, all the world is yellow-green and fluttering

Postcard, Mailed & Gone

Using this blog to hold myself accountable is good. I was about to follow my normal pattern and throw myself headfirst into schoolwork and conference work this Monday morning. Instead, I remembered two dear poetry friends, Molly Spencer and Sally Rosen Kindred, and my resolution to put creativity first in my daily life.

Molly recently posted a reminder to “do your own work first” on her lovely blog, and at AWP she, Sally, and I had a chance to talk about it. I was beating myself up for putting UCA and the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference before my “own work” of writing, revising, and submitting. While I came to see, through their eyes, that the conference had been my work during the building of it, I also came to renew my desire to make the craft of poetry my own first work. In other words, while I believe mightily in the conference and its mission, I don’t want to be an administrator first, and I know I don’t want to be an academic first, although I love my students and am fulfilled by our work together. These are important, but if I value creativity in my life, I need to put my poetry work first.

And so, instead of launching into administrative emails and commenting on Game Concept Documents (writing for video games), I picked up my notebook and worked on the fragments of a poem I started last Tuesday. I’m proud of myself for keeping my BIC (butt in chair) and slogging through the work of drafting. Sure, the initial stanzas were easy because I had my notebook with many of the lines nearly “there.” However, today, I was faced with the challenge of taking it further, with fleshing out the heart of the poem. Many times in the last hour I questioned myself and the worth of this draft; many times I wanted to get up and get a cookie, a cup of tea, a cat to snuggle. Nevertheless, I persisted (and we must honor every time we do) and I now have a fledgling draft. It might not be quite ready for independent flight, but its a helluva lot closer than it was, nascent in my notebook.