10:10 poetry thing

I let a friend talk me into doing a 10:10. That means ten poems in ten days and it is excruciating, agonizing, sublime. For me, writing a poem that I love feels like walking naked in a crowd of people. I want to write poems that move a reader emotionally, but of course that means I must dredge up strong emotions and write about them. The emotion and detail don't have to be reality, but they have to be true, except that means all the feelings that I stuff down into my internal box in order to function in real life must come out. I have to play around with them and somehow form them into a structure of words. Even when I'm writing about love and peace it's painful, because how much of life is really that uncomplicated? Answer: none. Love is incredibly difficult and multifaceted. So that is what the poems must be, too. Five down, five more to go.

something beautiful

Metamorphosis from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

new National Poetry Month poster!

This is the new National Poetry Month poster, isn't it awesome? I think it's particularly appropriate considering that this year is the International Year of Astronomy.

sunrises

Two sunrises over my front yard. The first was January 29, 2009 and the second is from January 28, 2009. The snow is gone now; today the temp went up to 60F. We'll see if I can get up early tomorrow and catch the sunrise again.

Don't talk much

I don't talk about this much, simply because I don't like to imagine that this particular issue defines my life, but sometimes it is the simplest explanation for my erratic presence online. I have fibromyalgia. I tend to ignore it most of the time, buy every so often the physical manifestation of this syndrome makes it unpleasant for me to sit in front of a computer. Nuff said.