Greetings, fellow poets!
I was unable to participate in both NaPoWriMo (though I tried) and in OctPoWriMo in 2015, not because I didn’t want to, but rather because I was completely overwhelmed with my latest creative endeavor. In August of 2015, I started art school! I have always enjoyed all of the creative fields, but never fancied myself capable of drawing/painting/sculpting. With a little encouragement from my husband, I enrolled at my local community college and began taking art classes. While it’s been overwhelming at times, I have found a great deal of joy in the process.
The greatest lesson I’ve learned in the past three semesters as a visual art student is summed up in the above quotation from Leonardo Da Vinci. On every single drawing, painting, or sculpture that I attempted, the due date arrived before I felt they were “done”. When I think about it, the same is true of my poetry. I will toy with the words, tinker with the rhyme scheme and meter, and then abandon the effort. I never feel any of my poetry is finished either. Sometimes the result is something decent. Most of the time, I have doubts about the quality of my attempts.
The point here is that all of the work matters. Each of us can find the flaws in our work (as poets or as artists of any kind), but we keep trying. We keep coming back - to the page, to the keyboard, to the canvas - to either make changes to what we’ve done or to try again from a clean slate. That’s the beauty, I believe, of being creative. We don’t have to be done. Ever. We just have to keep trying.
The prompt: Go through your archives and find a poem that, for whatever reason, you “abandoned”. Rewrite the poem somehow. Add to it. Edit it. Or use it as a springboard for a brand new poem on the same topic or in the same form.
Image Prompt:
Image Prompt:
Word prompts: abandon, rediscover, complete
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