We Weeble, We Wobble, We Make Poetry Out of It
WN.13 \\ 02.03-09.25
Greetings, loves!
For all my fire-some productivity in the first month of the year:
That’s how little energy I have entering the second month:
I recently read this Bluesky thread,1 and it unlocked a lot for me. I’ve never had a ton of energy to begin with, and as I progress through my 40’s, I’m finding that I have to take the rhythms of my energy a lot more seriously than I used to.
So rather than beat myself up for not “keeping to the plan,” I’m choosing to recognize the rhythms of the season and my own embodied self. Essays will resume when they do.
In other news, I’ve added a sit/stand desk to my office (it’s so nice!), and a wobble stool instead of the traditional office chair. Jury’s still out on the wobble stool, simply because it’s so different, and it activates muscles that have been used to delegating support to a chair back for 30-some years. TBD, as they say.
My writing life started as a child, and if I identified as a writer over the years, it was always as a poet. I sometimes think that I wrote poems because I wanted so desperately to experience a dramatic “durm und strang” life, and poetry felt like the way to channel that desire and the emotions I couldn’t seem to control. Then life actually happened, and actually living it took up a lot of the energy that went into writing poems, and so, poems fell into a box labeled “Sometime and Someday.”
I’ve recently started re-reading The Discovery of Poetry, by Frances Mayes as a way to re-learn the joy and form of poetry. Perhaps I will add some reflections and poetic attempts to the newsletter, as the “heightened speech” of poems communicates the stuff of life that matters and endures.
For now, I leave you with a villanelle, one of my favorite forms to play with, even though I prefer free verse. But I’ve never hewed to proper form anywhere.
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
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