"Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you're left to your own devices..."
-Richard Siken, "Driving, Not Washing"

This week at Coffeehouse, I had a discussion about why teenagers don't default to short stories or to weepy memoirs when they are at their most vulnerable, but choose to write poetry over everything. I told him that I thought it was about escaping the confines of form, not having to follow a formula or stick to a structure. 

I think that answer may have given the impression that I think poetry is easy. Far from it--if there's anything I've learned over the past few weeks, it's that I don't understand how they do it, not at all. I want to see a journal of Neruda's discarded scraps, or where ee cummings threw up his hands and abandoned a few whimsical words, thinking them too cluttered. I know it's not realistic for me to produce quality work all the time, but I'm disappointed most in my lack of inspiration.

The assignment I gave myself this week was definitely difficult. Maybe I should think through writing poetry when I'm still bleary and my eyes ache too much to look at the screen. What is left written when I leave for school in the mornings is consistently incoherent, and I'm left a lot to try and clean up in the afternoons. Still, I suppose it's something that I managed to meet my goal of actually completing the poems. I think maybe my Tuesday one will make it into the collection, but not the others.

Coming up with inspiration on my own has clearly been difficult, so I'm going to return to mining from other sources. I love weird words and words from other languages that we don't have equivalents for in English. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to compile a long list of interesting words I've come across, then use a random generator and write a poem based on whichever word it lands on. I'll try not to keep it to any particular tone--it could be emotional, or it could be totally silly. After all, my first poetic inspiration was Shel Silverstein, and he could do both effectively.

As for my good friend Catullus (he'd probably write a revenge poem abut me for my overt familiarity, oh dear), I'm planning to translate some of his poetry about his more platonic relationships. I'm particularly inspired by one translation I've seen of a poem to his friend Licinius Calvus--it actually did the poem justice, surprise, surprise. So that will serve as my model this week.