I have abandoned the poem of my last post for the moment –

It’s still working it’s way through the cogs of my head, trying to find the right images (words will follow later, I hope). I’ve taken E’s advice, writing everything down that I can imagine, trying to figure out which images to string together, where my emotion is.

(By the by — does anyone know how to attach something physical to music? Because that’s the image I’m struggling with right now. Everything else has had actual physical equivalents, but music eludes me. I want to attach something to a song, so that everyone can see it, not just a copy that I own, like a CD.)

Instead of struggling with the most awesome awesomeness to come out of my imagination, I’ve started on a poem that is inspired by a single line: I wanted to write you a love poem.

This work is entirely different that what I usually write. To begin with, couplets. I don’t think I’ve ever actually written couplets, and it’s interesting to try to think about where the line breaks should be, and as I add and change lines throughout the poem, I have to be mindful of the couplet breaks.

The imagery is different than usual, too, since usually I attempt a single running metaphor (the universe, perhaps?), and this one switches up three times, but it makes sense because it’s more stream of thought than I usually attempt.

Think Billy Collins, really. I’ve been gorging on poetry between chapters of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins required for class, and his poetry moves me like nothing else, and there are no “love poems” so much that there are poems filled with love.

My poem is… I know I know, this would be so much easier if I could share the poem with you all, but I’m working on it for submission for the Sigma Tau Delta lit mag, and I don’t want to put it up here and have that count as prior publication and thus get excluded solely for that. But once it gets rejected, I promise to share it with you all.

But I’m really excited. It’s like my muse has decided this is the week she’s going to be awesome. This week, I heart poetry. And to show you, here’s one of my favorite Collin’s poems, animated. I think all poems should get the “music video” treatment.