[witing] Pale and wasted, she stood

I am attempting to get my poetry-writing muscles back into a serviceable state again. And I thought jogging was hard. I went out and bought a little notebook of the kind I had in university, when poetry came out of me like soft ice cream out of a Dairy Queen machine and wow as a metaphor that really blew. Everything I write is like that, forced and insipid and who cares about how blocked I am?

Except that I have to remember that anything I write now is just the crap that I write most of the time. Most of the time I write crap. And I have to write it to get to anything good - it's one of the Laws of Karla's Creativity. My old school notebook is filled with crap, most of it disjointed and odd, and here and there I can see the traces of what later became a poem. Other (crappy) metaphors: you must mine a lot of rock to find diamonds. You must run a thousand miles to win the 100 metre sprint.

Bleah. I am so out of practice that I feel like the poetry-writing bits of my brain have atrophied. I've left them asleep for too long, and now waking is going to be a special form of agony. I am considering auditing a writing course in autumn, but for now, it looks like a long summer of the literary equivalent of physiotherapy.

"Pick up that pen! You can give me three more lines! Good! Now three more!"