Voice

Recently, I was thinking about the whole “book thing.” You know the one where the writer finally gets their first book. Not a CD, not a performance of their script, not a film or few pieces in a literary journal. The capital letter BOOK.

The past few weeks have found me distracted., I got lost in the whole “just put the damn poems together” exercise. I went back to the beginning of my blog. I noticed how impersonal this blog has gotten. How much of it has become clippings from the news.

And I thought. Where is my voice? (Thanks Jose.)

What I originally liked about blogging was the sense of building a life quilt. I liked the fact that my raw, barely edited first drafts of poems had a public place to hide in plain sight. I love it even more when the raw, baby poems grew up, left the house and found a place to be in the world. (This usually happened because some kind person commented on them, which made me invest in them.) I liked the documenting "now."

It also made me realize again how true that old saying from the feminist movement is. The personal is political.

So, as I approach my 300th blog entry, I’m hoping to return to my voice again.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this infant poem below.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes, your voice is all you have. You can't sound like anyone else. And news aggregators are more than plentiful out there. Bring your own p.o.v. to it and you'll do fine. Same goes with the book. I'm trying to find mine, too, believe it or not, especially as it concerns the book. Anyways, keep on keepin' on.