Honeyed Words: Not Going Down in a Blaze of Fire

Not Going Down in a Blaze of Fire · 27 January 2007

Despite all appearances, things are going well for the site. I’ve got some fun stuff planned out for the remainder of January and the beginning of February and the only reason none of it is up yet is that I worked 18 hours more than I usually do last week, which left me no time to write about all the plans that I’d made.

Faced with the severe time shortage, I found myself turning to shortcuts to get everything else that I’d scheduled for this week accomplished. When I sat down to work on my fiction, I found that instead of the latest scene in my short story, poetry was coming out of the creative recesses in my brain. And let me tell you, it wasn’t exactly pretty.

I’ve historically viewed bad poetry as the province of teenagers and star-struck lovers. Why then, in this crunch time where every hour is precious, am I putting my own bad poetry down on paper?

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve had difficulty in completing other projects lately (100 pages into writing a novel, 10 odd short stories in various stages of completion) but last week the idea of writing poetry sounded divine. The poetry itself . . . well, that’s another sound all together.

Poems by their very essence are self contained, and usually short. Poems are deadly in their economy and unlike most of my other writing, they don’t tend to go on, and on, and on, and on, and . . . you get the point.

Is my subconscious sending me a signal with this abrupt return to poetry? Perhaps it’s a subtle reminder that sometimes less is more, that quality trumps quantity. As I continue to drive myself to complete a long list of goals, I’ll be keeping that message in mind. A well crafted poem’s brevity contains the essence of its meaning and a well organized life should do the same.