Howdy everyone, and welcome to the new old thing. If you’ve been following along for a while, you know that I’ve been writing poems for the past year. If you’re new here and you glanced at my previous entries, you probably gleaned my poetic bent pretty fast. If you looked closely, you probably know that I set out to write one poem every day in 2020. I have done it. It is over.
While I enjoyed the challenge of writing a new poem every day, I have to admit that the process was also taxing. I usually let ideas percolate in my headspace for a while before I set them to paper, and even once I do that, they’re not perfect. I haven’t mastered the art of revision, and last year probably pushed me further away from good editing habits. ’cause pumping out one poem every day is hard. It’s a lot of work. I didn’t always have novel ideas. I mostly spat out whatever random thoughts I’d been having at the time, and tried to arrange them in ways that were poetic. I won’t be too hard on myself, but I don’t think a lot of great poetry came from the yearlong experiment.
Why is he rambling about all this, you may be wondering? It’s because I don’t want to jump into another year of daily poetry. Not yet. I’d like to let my ideas percolate again, and jot them down in my journal, then refine them over time. I’d like to be more deliberate with my writing process. My poems will be more private, until I believe they’re good enough to be published out here. The wonderful wild west of the interwebs.
So I’m returning to this blog’s original form. Prose. I used to be much better at stringing words together to form amusing sentences and compelling paragraphs. Then I learned that brevity is the soul of wit. Or so Shakespeare wrote, supposedly. No matter how long I stew on that nugget of wisdom, I resist it. I like to ramble. I like to use too many words. Which is probably why I’m so bad at revising my own poetry. Anyway, I’d like to tackle prose again, in this vague public space, and I’ll only post poems when I really like what I’ve fashioned.
Oh yeah, about the brevity – I had a point to that. Most advice given to folks putting their thoughts online is to keep it short and sweet. Like I said, I resist all that. Maybe I’m not yet clever enough to encapsulate my entire thought process in a sentence; maybe I should’ve jumped on Twitter years ago to hone my knives; anywho, the reality is that I’m not great at cutting away the chaff. So I ramble. Hence the whole damn category called “rambling”. It’s the most honest I’ve been on this blog. Okay, maybe that’s a stretch – I’ve put a lot of myself in my wayward paragraphs. But here, on every post, the word “rambling,” it tells folks exactly what they’re gonna get. And I don’t wanna lie to anyone.
So I’m still here. I’m still ready to type out my thoughts. I’ll still write poetry, but not all of it will be on this blog. I hope that’s okay. I tend to be a people pleaser, and I know a lot of folks hopped on here because I write poetry. I hope to win you over with my rambling prose as well. Is it good? Is it compelling? Ha, probably not. But I’ll do my best to make it readable, at the very least.
A happy new year to everyone. Problems don’t magically go away in a puff of smoke because our constructed calendar moves up one increment. So let’s keep up the work of improving ourselves and our communities, yeah? Hell yeah. Thanks for rambling with me.
The Opportunistic Poet 