The worst thing I can do to my creative drive is overcrowd my plate with commitments. Sometimes it can’t be helped.  The creative energy that feeds my poetry also feeds my classroom.  Sometimes there’s a duality and reciprocity in that exchange, where the hustle in one place gives me energy in another. That’s totally not what happened in February.

I hit all my major commitments. I didn’t drop the ball anywhere. But there was nothing left for anything else. If my husband didn’t wash my clothes, I would be walking around with dirty clothes on. And peanut butter on my face because that’s all I would’ve eaten.

What HAS been amazing, though, is that in that frenzy I gained the seeds of not 1 project but 2. And then subsequently felt NOTHING but frustration when I couldn’t work on the actual pieces.

I can’t ignore the impact of sound and music on my practice, and it’s not something I can logically explain to anyone else. I am rarely writing when there isn’t some meditative or ambient sound playing in the background.  Several years ago I even invested in expensive, noise-canceling headphones that allow me to create a sound-cave of isolation to tune out distractions. Oddly I can’t listen to music that includes song-lyrics or narrative story-telling. And the beat has to be lo & slo.

But I would never consider myself a musician or a lyricist. My poems deliberately ignore any attempt at rhyme (and I in fact soundly reject most forms that require rhyme as cheesy and annoying–cringe, as my kid would say). But how things sound in the mouth and in the mind–that can’t be ignored. I’m about to fall down the rabbit-hole in recording. 

I would like to create a body of work that is well-recorded and is just my poems–no video, no concern over how things ‘look’ (including myself). I’ve been looking at apps for my phone, and I have a vague notion that I can record things from my closet, lol.  

I’ll keep you posted on this process.