Law of Inverse Importance:
“The more personally important, deep or creatively significant the poem, the more likely it is to be stuck in the poet’s metaphorical throat like a peanut butter-covered hairball.”
I think I’m losing my sanity to the Law.
I have a poem in progress called Aquamarine. The seeds of it were planted more than ten years ago, but I’ve only been actively trying to work on it for a couple of months. I’m getting nowhere…or getting somewhere only to discover it’s wrong, wrong, wrong and I need to backtrack, or change the voice, or do other useful revision tricks.
I’ve even tried writing the poem as a story first. It’s helped, but not enough.
In the meantime, I’m also being tortured by the corollary to the above Law:
“When a poem is stalled as a result of the Law, the poet’s preoccupation with this poem can become constant and extreme enough to interfere with the birth of any other work.”
It’s even interfered with writing on the site or on Not This Song.
Many other things have been going on in my life, of course. It’s not as if I have a huge amount of time or energy to spend on writing…but when I do have a chunk of time to enter that space, Aquamarine waits for me at the gate. It wants the password, and I haven’t found it.
Lori Lynne Armstrong 