The Accidental Poet

     One of my sisters, a retired English teacher, told me she read in an interview about the working habits of a very famous living poet. She said this poet uses index cards to jot down and file any phrases, ideas, etc. that come to her in the course of the day. Every morning, at the poet's regularly scheduled time for writing, she holes herself away in her office and looks through her index card file to see if she can expand any of those phrases or ideas into the working draft of a poem. This is a full-time poet who has been widely published and anthologized; she makes her living solely on writing poetry, something only a handful of people can do.

     I am not one of the handful.

     In theory, anyone who aspires to write can jot down random thoughts on cards and keep a file. Many people (not everyone) can set aside a daily slice of time in their otherwise ordinary, non-poet lives to look through their cards, stare into space, and scribble out a line or two, maybe even a whole stanza. And there are people in this world to whom imagery, metaphor, and simile come so easily as to be almost their native tongue.

     I do keep a notebook into which I enter random phrases -- when they come to me. The problem is, they don't come with any kind of frequency or regularity. I am not one of those people to whom imagery, metaphor, and simile come easily; hence, I can't simply look at an apple and see in it the seeds (forgive the pun) of a poem. I envy those people (forgive me, Father) their fertile imaginations. 

     Anyway, I can't write about apples or trees or daffodils, unless or until they really mean something to me personally. I am a personal poet, not an abstract one. Which is probably why I don't get on better than I do.

     As to the daily slice of writing time, which every writing manual, every writing teacher, and, for that matter, every writer, will tell you is essential and necessary to becoming a good writer of anything -- I have tried, and continue to try. Because of the nature of my day-to-day life, I can't designate a specific hour or length of time as my regular writing time, inviolate and sacred. I catch as catch can. Morning pages? No. My mornings are devoted to prayer, and that is inviolate and sacred. (For those of you not familiar with the term, "morning pages" are writings done at the very moment of waking, before having coffee, before any morning ablutions. You put pen to paper and write whatever comes into your groggy brain, and you do not stop to think or edit along the way. You just write.) 

     A friend of mine, Elizabeth at Swing in a Tree, started her blog primarily for the discipline of writing regularly and "putting it out there." She inspired me to do the same. If poems, or even the seeds of a poem, don't come as frequently as I'd like, at least I can churn out blogposts on a semi-regular basis. And I do take a writer's care with them. When I post a poem, I hope my readers know how rare it really is -- not "rare" in the sense of superlative (I wish!), but rare in the sense that poems don't come at all easily to me, either in concept or finished product. They are, in truth, accidents of inspiration and the hard-to-harvest fruits of a not-so-fertile imagination.