Wordsworth believed that poetry "takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquility"
Thursday, February 28, 2013 was a very interesting day for
me. I’ve several websites I check each morning, and The
Writer’s Almanac entry set the tone for my day.
The poem for that day, one in free verse, which to me means
it doesn’t rhyme and has no meter, was Breakfast,
by Joyce Sutphen. An o.k. poem, quite a bit toward the prose side of writing,
but evoking a pleasant scene. I thought
a bit about it and decided it made for a nice memory.
The single birthday entry for the day was that of novelist
Colum McCann. I’d never come across any of his writings. What struck me was this bit: He has had a happy life, he says, the kind that
doesn't make for an interesting story. He said, "For me, the logical
conclusion is that I have to write outside my life." All day long that Thursday I thought about how
my own happy life was the same – the kind that doesn’t make for interesting
writing. Yet in that poem about breakfast with her father, Sutphen took the
memory of a brief moment in an ordinary morning from a happy but probably
otherwise, for many, uninteresting life, and made a web-worthy poem.
Uninteresting lives don’t make for interesting novels, but they’ve got lots of
poem potential.
I wish I was a poet. I’ve many interesting bits that might come out well as
poetry if I just write them out as a sentence and then rearrange it into a few
stanzas. It’s something to think about. Could I do that?
Then – two days later on March 2, came this poem, The Key, by Jane Hirshfield.
It too is about a morning, but very different, still free verse, but not just a
slice of life. I’m torn as to which of
the two I like best. --- I’m still torn, and I’m writing this on March 10th. I’ll post it when I’ve got an opening.
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