I’ve posted several poems recently – an intense few posts in the tradition of how I’ve been posting, very fresh and new and a bit raw. I’ve talked about that before and sharing process. There remains a sense for me that that may mean I’m posting half formed things, honest to process, but not always my best poems.

I think there is a step with them I’m sometimes not taking — open to getting them but an internal processing missing that is there in my best poems, maybe some internal dialogue of challenge of them and myself, something that makes something click rather than just splurge. (and a sense of searching for just that, groping for something.) Maybe. Or of not seeing that. Sometimes it is also that they lack some real grit around which to form. That may come from challenge too — but it seems it is a part of my process I can struggle with, sometimes. Some of it is clarity, or awareness of working towards it and maybe just sharing workings on the way.

Part of it feels very challenging, to find my best when it may be further away amidst care of the day, hard to bring in at that time, hard to be clear about — and yet the process can be what brings the clarity. Part of it may bring anxiety when that best is not about and the day is fast with work and lots.

Anyway – after just over a year of posting this way, I’m going to challenge myself to pause and turn poems over in my mind before posting them, a bit more anyway. Maybe the recent slight revisions I posted of some older posts was part of that. No doubt I’ll want to be spontaneous sometimes, but i want to think about this as I was starting to get a sense of poems being ok, kind of fine, but too easily shared — and maybe this is just me developing my own process more, naturally, finding it when it is not as clear as it sometimes has been.

It is a (some) poet’s dream that poems emerge full and good in moments, and sometimes a few have . . . but I’m not sure fishing in this way (or as I have sometimes) is how to find that, that is found in being in other ways and emerges, like a flash, if at all, and maybe not from me at all (i.e. may not happen to me again but also may not be something i have much say in, given).

I may even reject these thoughts and commit to a stream of consciousness (aware that can slip into being just at a certain level) – such an approach undoubtedly valid, and allied to where i come from therapeutically, in itself it has things for it (that writing for wellbeing idea of not judging what i write). But at the moment I just want to sit with it a bit more, let go of any anxiety or desire with it, let it be, catch up with myself. We’ll see if it affects how much I post and also what you all (or some) think, as we go . . .

toni