Creative Procrastination vs. How You're Failing at Control
I dropped some random truths over the past week which random people were grateful to hear. 1. Poet & poetry editor Jeffrey Levine taught us that your poem is an entity, and it has a name - not a title. What's it's name? It wants something - what does it want? A title is something you assign to a thing for your own convenience - this is me talking, not Jeffrey. We assign titles, we name things, to assert control over them. To conquer fear of them. But what name does your poem call itself? What does it want? You start writing because you have a thing about yourself you want to convey to the world. But if you listen to your poem - like listening to a toddler who doesn't have full command of spoken language - it has its own thing to say. And the fact that it's telling YOU shows you something about yourself. What's it showing you? Anything a toddler shows you is the most precious thing in the world. The child waits for you to respond, and assigns value to his own