I used to write a lot of poetry. Over the past few years my writing has mostly been prose, a mix of creative non-fiction and fiction. Once in a while, however, poetry can be used to say what prose cannot. I found an old notebook that had old material in it. The old material was embarrassing, and in pencil, so I decided to erase it. In the process I realized I was creating a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a document that has been erased so the paper can be reused for a new project. This seemed to cry out for poetry. Erasing my life so that I could reuse it. Recycling myself. I began to write short poems over the older work. My palimpsest. Maybe I had been bottling it up, because the poetry kept flowing. It felt like a day of a thousand poems. The reality was more like a dozen, but that’s a lot of poetry for one time. Instead of intentionally crafting poems like some writers do (notably Poe was meticulous in...
Blog of a struggling writer.