Writing Poetry is Like Gardening -
If you didn't like it, you wouldn't do it. And once it's done, it's never done. There are always dead blooms to pick off, branches to trim, new plantings to try. When your garden has been temporarily rectified to your satisfaction, then comes the nagging suspicion that you should take out the grass, put in a pond, uproot the whole thing and create a new space, one a bit closer to the serendipitous design of forest, rock and stream that you tried to capture in your small yard.
Despairing, you leave the poem, your garden, at home and take your holiday, camping somewhere deep in the wilderness to get reacquainted with what in perfect hands the garden, your poem, might have been.
Irving Layton would put on his hunting outfit and go for long walks in the countryside around his abode, hunting poems. Then, when the poems found him, he would rush back to write them down
I particularly enjoyed this work David as I love gardening. I think that you are so correct about the similarities of gardening and writing a poem. There is always something that can be changed for made better.
ReplyDeleteThis represents not only poetry but writing other things in the writing field as well.