Looking for inspiration
Something I’ve been thinking about, in my writing and the poets I read, is the subject of inspiration. What are the topics that poems are written about? What makes them important to anyone else? The great poets are able to take something mundane, and sometimes ugly, and transform it into a moment of wonder. Who would have thought William Carlos Williams could do anything with a red wheelbarrow, or Mark Doty with a display of frozen mackerel?
I’ve been traveling the country for a few weeks now, Florida to Michigan with plenty of stops along the way, and everywhere I ended up, I found something to write about. Yet, each object/moment ended up being completely different. On a beach in Florida, I went on a two hour walk to find sand-dollars, and I ended up with a burn to show the journey and a poem about sand-dollars. Somewhere on the drive northward, I wrote a poem in my head about vultures and mortality that ended up on paper some time later. And in Michigan I wrote a poem about ants; I’d seen ants plenty of times, but I guess it’s a combination of factors that allow us to see more than is actually there, the biggest of which is our mental state (influenced heavily by anything we’ve been reading/watching at the time).
June 14th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I recently created a “Google Alert” which sends me an email with links to sites that contain the keyword phrase “wpmu” (look in your address bar now), and I’ve been receiving links to some really interesting blog entries. I just discovered this blog, and after reading just a few posts, I have found it to be a really interesting project having different artists blog about whatever they feel.
I live in Michigan currently and oddly enough, I haven’t seen any ants at all yet this summer. I guess I should look closer:)
Thanks for making me think beyond the self…