What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The waiting. Waiting for another poem trigger to spring, waiting for the wraith of a poem to take enough shape to be ready to write something down. I didn’t have to deal with waiting when I first came back to poetry; I had a decades-long backlog of material to draw on, and the poems came quickly. They take longer now. The combination of retirement and the pandemic has forced a kind of quiet in which fewer things happen that grab the mind in a way that triggers poems.
When the period of waiting gets long enough to rattle me, I translate. Or I try to read deeply in some subject area, generally history. I distrust canned poetry prompts and ekphrastic verse—don’t ask me why, but to me they feel too artificial. Reviewing the work of other poets and writing critical essays are other ways of making the waiting fruitful.
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