.This is the first morning of the Boiler House Poets Collective workshop-in-residence this year.
We all arrived safely yesterday afternoon and enjoyed a welcome dinner together at Nara Sushi. After that, we all went back to our apartments. I stayed up talking with my apartment-mate, cleared up a few things on my computer, and went to sleep.
For a few hours.
I woke up at about four and, after I realized I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, started drafting a poem in my head, which I then wrote out on paper because it gave me a better pallette for the spacing. I showed it to my apartment-mate before she left in the still-early morning darkness for our studios.
I also came to the studios on the early side and we visited a bit. She graciously swapped chairs with me to make it easier for me to have head and neck support. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to write more, but, looking out my studio window, photo above, I was able to write another section to the poem I started earlier.
It is one of those angsty, personal poems reflecting on my current health and worries. It might never make it even as far as workshopping, but I apparently needed to write it. It’s the first poem I’ve written spontaneously since the tinnitus and other symptoms started in March. I have worked on some revisions and wrote a new poem in a workshop with Abby E. Murray, but, otherwise, hadn’t been feeling creative in that way.
So, yay, for having written something new, even if it is not viable as a work for sharing.
Sometimes, catharsis is reason enough.
Joanne Corey 