Poet United Midweek Motif ~ Moon

A Lunar Eclipse Glows Red

“Just like moons and suns,

With certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.”

                                                       ― Maya Angelou

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore?" 

― Ming-Dao Deng, Everyday Tao

"Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other." 

―Sojourner Truth

🌕

Midweek Motif ~ Moon

Today is a special day for the moon:  

Source

Today you may witness a "Super" blue moon, coinciding with a lunar eclipse for the 1st time in 150 years.  Moonlight and lunacy, light and shadow, ever leaving and ever returning ~ 

Your Challenge: Does today's convergence magnify or change the moon's character?  Make a new poem  for the moon, using a perspective new to you.

                 

Full Moon and Little Frieda

by Ted Hughes

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -

And you listening.

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm

wreaths of breath -

A dark river of blood, many boulders,

Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.
🌕

Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage 
Of The Moon: Christmas, 1960  
by James Wright

After dark
Near the South Dakota border,
The moon is out hunting, everywhere,
Delivering fire,
And walking down hallways
Of a diamond.

Behind a tree,
It ights on the ruins
Of a white city
Frost, frost.

Where are they gone
Who lived there?

Bundled away under wings
And dark faces.

I am sick
Of it, and I go on
Living, alone, alone,
Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves
Of Chippewas and Norwegians.

This cold winter
Moon spills the inhuman fire
Of jewels
Into my hands.

Dead riches, dead hands, the moon
Darkens,
And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins
Of America.
🌕

Full Moon by Du Fu

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.

On the cold river passing night-filled homes,

It scatters restless gold across the waves.

On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,

Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon

Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,

All ten thousand miles at once in its light! 

🌕

Song Of The Moon

by Claude McKay

The moonlight breaks upon the city's domes,

And falls along cemented steel and stone,

Upon the grayness of a million homes,

Lugubrious in unchanging monotone.

Upon the clothes behind the tenement,

That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,

Linking each flat to each indifferent,

Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

There is no magic from your presence here,

Ho, moon, sad moon, tuck up your trailing robe,

Whose silver seems antique and so severe

Against the glow of one electric globe.

o spill your beauty on the laughing faces

Of happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues,

Waiting on tiptoe in the wilding spaces,

To drink your wine mixed with sweet drafts of dews. 

🌕

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Shoes)

Moonlight Musings

The Dreaded Writer's Block

Some writers say it doesn't exist, it's imaginary. They remind me of those fortunate, infuriating people who boast that they never get sick, and think those who do must be putting it on or being self-indulgent. It's just laziness, such writers say, or lack of discipline. Sit at your desk at the same time every morning, they say, and write for three hours anyway.  Or get down the story you need to tell, even if the words are awful, and fix them later. 

Yes, well, that might be all right for novelists. We're poets.

Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate of Britain, spoke of a time when he 'had written nothing for a year or so.' After which one of his most famous and beautiful poems, The Thought Fox, came to him one night, out of the blue. Imagine how thankful he must have felt! If such a dedicated and prolific poet could be blocked for so long, it was hardly a sign of laziness, and clearly was not imaginary. 

Even worse – an old friend, who recently had a new book of poetry published, told me he had an 11-year gap in his writing before producing the poems in the book! He thought he would never write poetry again. How devastating would that be? People don't decide to be lazy and call it writer's block as a kind of excuse. At best, they rationalise to console themselves: 'Oh well, I still have a life. I do other things now.' But if and when the poetry returns, they are not only relieved but overjoyed. They would have been doing it all along if they could.

The first time I experienced writer's block lasted only a few weeks – but I didn't know that at the time. Sitting at my desk and trying to write didn't work. It's a long time ago now, but I don't suppose I stayed there hours at a time. I did return there frequently and hopefully, however, with no result. I was distraught. I didn't know what to do. I had husband, children, work, friends; still it felt as if my life was over – or at least that a part of me had died. A vital part. It was in my early days of getting published, doing readings, and going to Poets Union meetings. Where else would I turn but to my fellow poets?

'I've got writer's block,' I muttered, ashamed and desperate. They pretty much just shrugged. I was astounded and hurt that no-one even expressed sympathy, much less offered helpful advice. It was only later that I realised it was no big deal to them. They'd all been through it and come out the other side – at least once. 

I hadn't thought to mention that it had never happened to me before. And if I had, I don't suppose they would have found much to say, except, 'It will pass.'  And it did. Thank God! One day, poetry started happening again, for no obvious reason. 

Why did it stop, and what made it restart? Come, come, I don't have answers to the great mysteries! I'm just thankful I've not had to wait for 11 years, nor even 'a year or so' like Mr Hughes. It seems to have been just as mysterious to him; at any rate he offered no explanation, as far as I know. He said that, on that particular night, 'I got the idea I might write something' and the poem was finished in a few minutes. Here is the poem; isn't it wonderful? – The Thought Fox. Click the link, do! As well as seeing the words onscreen, you can hear Hughes read them.

Imagine something like that turning up after such a long block! It indicates what I have come to believe – that a block may be a time when all sorts of things germinate underground unseen, like seeds. I have experienced this a few times myself by now, and I notice that when the writing finally resumes, usually some kind of quantum leap has taken place. You start again at a higher level than where you left off. I don't think we can do much to hurry this process. It's organic, and takes place of its own accord.

But sometimes you experience only a few days or weeks when inspiration doesn't flow. In our online poetry communities we are lucky to have prompts to stimulate our memories and imaginations, but sometimes even that doesn't work. You feel that you're in a doldrums. If words do flow – or dribble – you find them completely lack-lustre. 

If you're in that kind of block, you can comfort yourself that it's input time. The well needs replenishing. As I'm fond of telling students, we need some life to put into our art. My advice is to go out and have a good time, or catch up on your reading. Or both. Forget about your writing for a while. Have a holiday from it. Fill the well with experiences, and other people's art. 

If you still feel flat, cranky and pointless; if filling the well isn't enough distraction – perhaps it's revision time, when you fish out all those awful drafts that just didn't work, and look at them with fresh eyes to find a fix. Worth a try! But perhaps the lack of inspiration will apply there too. Then what works for me is to play with form. There's something about tinkering with rhymes and syllables that does it for me, regardless of content. Somehow the content presents itself; I don't pretend to understand how. Or else I do exercises from either one of my two favourite books of poetic tips and techniques: Wingbeats, edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen and The Crafty Poet by Diane Lockward.

If you don't work in form and you don't like exercises, the last resort is to try one or both of these: 

1. start with 'I remember', free write for 10 minutes, and turn the result into a poem (or the beginning of a poem – and feel free to write longer than 10 minutes if you find you're on a roll)
2. write about eating. 

Believe me, both are emotionally charged, and the mind will supply something.

Quantum leaps notwithstanding, I no longer believe in waiting around for inspiration. I think it's fine to chase it. Going to poetry readings can be very inspiring. Or failing that, reading (on page or screen) a variety of good poetry. Again how lucky we are to belong to a poetry community, where that's easy to find. Sometimes we need to encounter new voices; these too can be found on the web without too much trouble. Often we can get to hear as well as read them, via Soundcloud or YouTube. 

Sometimes the trick is to look outside oneself. As I think many of you know, I love the idea of 'small stones', created by husband-and-wife writers / therapists / Buddhist priests Satya Robyn and Kaspalita Thompson. A small stone is a short piece of mindful writing – not necessarily in verse, though most of mine are. Satya and Kaspa explain that it is as if you go for a walk, find a pebble that is beautiful or interesting, pick it up and bring it home, and then polish it. The trick is that you are focused out on the world rather than in upon your own psyche. If you're paying proper attention, it's hard to be blocked for those moments. (They like to have other writers join them. After a bit of a break to focus on other activities, they are doing a month of small stones again, this August – three days away. Here's the link to the facebook group if you're interested. I'm in!)

How about you? Have you ever suffered from writer's block? (You're fortunate if you haven't – yet.) And what do you do about it? What works and what doesn't? What strategies would you recommend?

(Fox image: Dave Bezaire, "Red Fox Coming," Creative Commons license 2.0)

I Wish I'd Written This

The Thought-Fox

By Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes was a prolific poet, considered a major English poet of his era, and was the British poet laureate from 1984 until his death. He also wrote prose (both fiction and non-fiction) plays, books for children, and translations. I like his nature poems best — but this, which I like best of all, has a touch of mystery and even mysticism taking it beyond a straightforward nature poem. On one level it describes a psychological state, but is something more than that too. In his book Poetry in the Making, the transcript of a series of poetry programs on radio which he did for schools, Hughes recounts having had several years of writer's block when suddenly this poem appeared from nowhere ... as the poem itself describes.

He became a controversial figure after the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath, from whom he was separated at the time. Many of Path's admirers blamed him for her death. I am an admirer of Plath, and one of the numbers who think her incandescent poetry outshone her husband's — however I think that assigning him the entire blame for her suicide is an over-simplification which does little justice to either of them. In fact we have him to thank, as her literary executor, for ensuring the posthumous publication of her work, most of which would otherwise have remained unknown. He himself kept a dignified silence on the subject until the publication of The Birthday Letters, his poems about their relationship, shortly before his death from cancer, at a time when he must have known he was dying and evidently wanted to make public his side of the story at last. Many of the poems describe through his eyes incidents which Plath's poetry also described from a  different point of view. Being as immersed as anyone in the whole Plath mythology, it's impossible for me to know if The Birthday Letters could speak to any reader who didn't know the tragic story behind them. 

But 'The Thought-Fox', which may be his most famous poem, can stand alone — beautifully.

You can find more of Hughes's poetry at PoemHunter.com  and there are six pages of his books at Amazon. He was also a keen environmentalist, as detailed in this article.

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).