3:00 pm, Tuesday, 2 November, 2010 – Atlanta
At the moment my writing poetry, and blogging and facebooking, and research all require my computer, so I read, write, drink my coffee, and think, while sitting in my large brown leather office chair, at my computer in the corner of the living room where I have set up my work nook.
A number of things to check today. While at the computer, I have become adept at checking my facebook app, Market Street, and my email, and Googling a question I have regarding a topic for writing, and looking at poems for submissions and discovering new sites. All at the same time. I am waiting for my brain to explode or implode, but it seems to thrive.
Yesterday, I started two different poetry challenges. Robert Lee Brewer, of Poetic Asides, has a create a poem a day challenge for the month of November. You can find the guidelines here. Then, on a new site [new to me as I go careening through blogs trying to swallow/envelop all that I have been missing], belonging to Diane Lockwood of Blogaliscious [how can one resist?!], I found a link to Molly Fisk [it's rather like the maze at Knossos, following the string so as not to get lost, and no minotaur at the end], who is also offering a poem a day challenge during November. The prompts are given by poet Lisa Cihlar and you can write to Molly at mollyfisk@gmail.com if you wish to join in.
She wrote me a lovely letter, in which she says, “If you write 30 poems in 30 days, you’ll feel like an Olympic athlete. If you write 2 poems in 30 days, you’ll be glad you got two new poems. Even if you don’t write a thing because your life takes a left turn and you just occasionally read other peoples’ poems, it will help your own writing down the line to be with us and part of the family of poets. Please don’t be mean to yourself about productiveness, that is not what I’m about and I encourage you to let go of it too. Write if you can and keep breathing. Have fun!” Again, hard to resist.
I receive a poetry newsletter from Diane Lockwood and I liked her prompt to follow the structure of Anthony Hecht’s poem “Despair”. So, that’s in my notebook, along with a prompt from Confident Writing, to write about blogging…along with several submission requests from the group I follow…but that’s for another blog. This is a lot for you to read and digest and check out.
