Resolute
The new year is here! Fresh start, clean slate. New plans and goals. The gift of beginning again.
Ok, just two new goals! I want to write more poetry this year–12 poems for the 12 moons. From this vantage point, that seems doable. But it is more than I wrote last year. I think the measurable part will be helpful. It’s easy to see where I am and where I need to be. But really it’s a growth goal–that’s the direction I want to be moving in.
I brainstormed a whole list of related tasks that will be supporting this larger work:
- Poetry Friday–such a wonderful group of writers!
- Writer’s Almanac–it’s good for me to hear language and Garrison has impeccable taste
- reading in the Norton Anthology–it’s what Billy Collins teaches from
- researching Dorothy Wordsworth and Osip Mandelshtam
- poetry teatime
- personal copywork from the psalms
- working through Write Poetry Today
I also will be working through Adventures in Seeing: How the Camera Teaches you to Pause, Focus, and Connect with Life by Kim Manley Ort. Last summer I took the course, and I got the book for Christmas. It’s finely made and a joy to hold in my hands. Almost every week there is a photo prompt. I am notoriously bad at working with prompts, but Kim’s tend to be wide open and engaging. So. 45 photographs and 12 poems. A body of work in the new year.
you GO girl! Have a great creative and productive year. Love to you top to bottom and all in between. love mama
Oh! Oh! Have you read Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal of her trip through Scotland with her brother and Coleridge? That was a primary resource for me during the writing of the Martha books. 🙂
Love you poetry plans!
Well, no. I don’t really know anything about Dorothy. So now I have a good place to start. Had to try my hand at a polarbear first! http://www.kortneygarrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/0102171915.jpg
Oh, how I love that Poetry Friday community!
Oh I do love the Norton Anthology so much. Mine is sitting on the shelf next to my rocking chair in the living room, just waiting to be browsed through. My other current favorite anthology is The Rattle Bag, edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, a collection of their favorite poems organized in alphabetic order by title, which is just such a fun way of grouping poems, it lends itself to browsing and synchronicity.
I like the copywork from the psalms as inspiration. I’ve been giving my girls bits of psalms and antiphons for copywork for years and the rhythms and words do sink in and seem to have a life of their own.
Do you know that Billy Collins interview I linked to above, Melanie? It is so, so good!
You know I started reading it and wasn’t sure if I’d read it before, but I kind of remembered reading a long interview with him some time ago, and I got to the line where he says that the poem is an instrument of discovery like a flashlight or geiger counter and I thought, Oh I love that image. And the more I read the more certain I was that I’d probably read it before. Sure enough, I did a search on my blog and I’d even blogged that line about the geiger counter! And I do love what he says about the Norton Anthology. And about reading to children, how avid readers are trying to recapture the experience of being read to.
It’s really nice to re-read it, so thank you for the nudge.
http://www.thewinedarksea.com/2013/05/30/the_pen_is_an_instrument_of_discovery/
I read the Auden that you posted aloud over dinner….
Hmm. I just realized that I hadn’t read it aloud yet. And so I did so, just to myself. It’s not so easy to read. There are some lines where I’m really not sure where the emphasis should be and I stumble. I’m really curious about how this was supposed to work as a sung oratorio.
I love your goals! I had a nebulous goal of “reading more poetry.” That’s what I think of from time to time among all of the other things I want to do, but you have challenged me to get more specific. Blessings and best wishes for a fruitful year. 🙂