We Wordle #26

Hi poets,

Welcome back to our small pond.

Sometimes I wonder when our pond will dry up and it’s tied to a core question. Does the well of creativity dry up? Can you run out of material to write? Not really. If you don’t limit yourself to writing about your own life story. I mean, we don’t really want to listen to the same story over and over, do we? So how do you ensure that you don’t run out of material? You’ll have to come up with stories. If you can fictionalise, the well will draw water from the ground in infinite cycles of precipitation. Poems are, of course, stories.

Since this is a wordle prompt, in our cycle, here are the words, one selected from each of the poems submitted to Barbara’s prompt last Thursday.

Hannah: green
Laura: wine
Jules: bloggers
Christopher: papers
Irene: vanilla
Marilyn: gin
Barbara: moles
Purpleinportland: stain

Poems have a speaker. The speaker is not the poet. However much one imagines it is the poet. Or perhaps it is the poet speaking. But something happens in the process of writing such that both individuality and otherness come into play.

To quote Czeslaw Milosz:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

It is possible to compare the poetic process to dreaming. In dreams, all sorts of absurdities are allowed, and the unconscious finds expression. The world is mutable. Who is this darker, other self that appears? What is the role of fantasy in your writing?

Seems to me that’s how a novelist like Haruki Murakami writes too. Playing on the duality of self and other.

Take these thoughts and write.