A tiny celebration for a small accomplishment: a little notebook full of handwritten poetry fragments. The first two entries aren’t dated but the third begins at 9:54 p.m. on Monday, August 15, 2016: “Maybe we take for granted the trees, where some of us are able to go when we are young to find peace, away from the chaos of home and hurt”
A work in progress, to be sure, but I keep these notebooks, and the Notes app on my phone, close at hand because these fragments arrive so suddenly and unexpectedly. There are a few other items inside, like a daily calorie plan, notes for a novel, notes about a reading by Karen Brennan I attended in March, and observations about “The Thing” in southern Arizona that helped me ground my poem “Roadside Freak Show” in concrete images and fill it with atmosphere.
The rest are poetry fragments. A fragment might make me cringe and hurry on. It might become a full poem someday. Tomorrow.
Today.
As midnight arrived on Sunday, October 08, 2017, I hurried to my little notebook with two lines in mind, frantic to capture them exactly as they were in those initial moments. Handwriting offers a kind of permanence. A few more minutes passed in free writing and then the notebook was full, this final fragment measuring two and a half pages long. That’s long enough, perhaps, to be considered the first draft of a new poem.
Monday.
My Poetry Revisioning workshop instructor asked us to bring in some of our collected poetry fragments for an exercise.
Someday.
a red note
book
Every day.
The next little notebook waits. It has a green cover.
You must be logged in to post a comment.