What a Difference a Year Makes

Sometimes poetry, or the need for poetry, flows out of me like prayer. Sometimes everything I see is a metaphor for something else, every sound that actually reaches my brain from the damaged rail of my deafness is some species of music that I can translate. Sometimes the simple fact of waking up and surviving a day dilates in my mind until it becomes a  universal figure, a bird's nest constructed of light and time. 

These are not those times, I'm afraid. Last January, I was taking a class on poetry-writing, and it unfroze my heart (though that metaphor would surely be excised on revision). All of a sudden, I was a tuning fork, or a lens--I couldn't stop writing poetry. Good (more than a few), bad (more than a lot), and mediocre (most of the time), 2 or 3 poems were coming out of me daily. Only a few of these reached class. But I felt young again. The morning erection of language woke me up every day.

Then, like the experience of patients in the film Awakenings, the drug began to lose its effectiveness. Finally, a year later, I look at the blank page and feel no connection to it. It is alien to me. I have difficulty remembering the excitement of the empty page, which, if I may wax grandiose, must have felt something along the lines of a sculptor looking at the possibilities hidden inside a block of granite.

This is why I don't really consider myself a poet. A professional. They work every day, like tradesmen. Amateurs, even gifted ones, need inspiration. The outside element of the classroom became my LDopa, and I seem to lack the energy of doing it for myself. This may be why I phased from writing to theatre all those years ago. I need the audience, shameful as it is to admit. In the class, I had a group of people (and prof) who gushed over my poetry--or criticized it. Either way, what I pointed to, what I aimed for, was the public unveiling, the reading. That being lost, making poems seems somehow empty.