by Naomi Shihab Nye
Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.
A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.
The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
"Sleep Is Life."
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?
Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early."
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.
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Every summer I feel this way, though perhaps more than most this year. Travels to Canada and rural Oregon have gotten the wheels turning but my pen is still out of ink (mixing metaphors, even). Any suggestions for how to take well-lived poetic moments and get them onto the page?
2 comments:
suggestions:
1. write them down unpoetically, forget about them, and turn back to them later when your desire to tell the truth of the experience is not so strong. (if you find it impossible to write them down unpoetically, then you also win).
2. to keep yourself writing other things, come up with a big project for yourself, preferably an impossible one. if you're like me, you'll make slow progress on the impossible task, but take great pleasure in cheating on your project with side projects or individual poems. or an art exhibit.
3. from personal experience, i can recommend a long convalescence from spinal surgery in a foreign country, especially if all your friends move away.
that's what I'm trying to do today, with a strict diet of trying to stay seated at my desk (interspersed generously with forays into the garden and the kitchen and the porch . . . )
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