Category: NaPoWriMo 2020

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NaPoWriMo Time Again

My heart yearns for
the Dream Place,
the Crystal Space…

Linda Rushby 5 April 2021

I was in poetic mood earlier, in my yoga/tai chi/meditation time, with one of those moments of understanding who I am, and what I should be doing, which has faded somewhat now, as they always do, before I was able to get to the computer and capture what needed to be caught, but I will try.

This is the third year I’ve attempted NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I started in 2018, with haikus, because that seemed like the easy way (although I know that writing a good haiku is not something to be flippant about). I was so happy with the results that I had an idea about creating a hand-made book – I’d been on a bookbinding course and bought a bookbinding kit, and was going to lino print an image for the cover – but the only image I came up with was a forlorn daffodil, and I got frustrated and disheartened and never even opened the parcel with the bookbinding kit and gave up before I got started. Maybe one day.

The next year I didn’t even attempt the poetry challenge, but then last year I did, with no plan or ideas, I managed to turn out something for every day of the month, a motley collection of uneven quality. I have always said that poems come to me or they don’t, and I can’t make them happen, but one of my favourites, ‘Beachcomber’, came out of a challenge I was set to write a poem a day for five days on Facebook in summer 2015, the first summer after I moved to Southsea.

This year I wasn’t going to bother, but on the first day I wrote a very short poem, and posted it, not here but on another blog to which I sometimes contribute. That poem, entitled ‘Web’, is about the idea of a web of connections, not the electronic ‘world wide web’ so much as an older and more general sense of interactions between events, actions and people, which relates to my interest in systems thinking, the basis of my PhD, and the idea of ‘Crystal Space’ which I have played with for some years. Writing it out gave me the idea of pulling one of the threads in a web and seeing where it led – would it just attract the attention of some monstrous spider, or might it take me somewhere interesting? So the next poem was about Ariadne’s thread, and each day since some image or reference from the day before has triggered the next poem.

So far it seems to have led me back into my lifelong interest in Greek mythology, which is of course a very fertile seam for poetry. Each day’s poem is very short, but by the second day I had the idea that they might build into something interesting. On the other hand, I might just give up one day, but how will I know unless I try?

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Spontaneity vs Inspiration

I was talking yesterday about why I write in the morning, following the advice from Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’, but how that’s also usually my unhappiest time, as I try to sort out in my head what I need to do for the day.

When I first tried to follow the advice, in the late 1970s early 80s, I was trying to write a fantasy novel, of the then conventional swords-and-sorcery genre, which was hopeless, because it inevitably had to involve a certain amount of fighting and war craft, which I couldn’t get my head round at all. In fact, I didn’t even like reading about that stuff, even though I loved the Tolkien books, I would skip all the fighting parts and just read the adventuring. This was in the days before the genre had opened up with more female characters and writers, such as Ursula le Guin, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey and Marian Zimmer Bradley. I didn’t see how it was possible to have fantasy books outside that patriarchal paradigm, or how I could write within it, so I really was on a hiding to nothing.

Be that as it may, I tried, and I tried in the mornings, and then I discovered that if I sat down to write for a specific purpose – such as to continue my novel – I was paralysed. All I could write was what was in my head – such as what I’m writing now, and write most mornings, about my life, my thoughts and feelings. I was going to say ‘write spontaneously’ but that seems odd, in that the daily writing is quite regimented – but there again, it is spontaneous in the sense that I don’t always know what I’m going to say until I start saying it.

Now I’m confusing myself. Because the other kind of writing – the way I write most of my poems – is the stuff that comes into my head at any time of day, and I need to capture it – so that by the time I sit down at the computer, it’s already there, and I’m just ‘taking dictation’ – so is that spontaneous or is it the other? Because that is what I think of as being ‘inspired’ writing, and I have no idea where that comes from or how to make it happen – it’s outside my control except… for the times when it isn’t. What about all those poems I wrote in April, for NaPoWriMo? They were ‘inspired’ somehow, so how did I make that happen?

There was also a period in 2005-6, immediately before and around the time when I started both a creative writing course and blogging, when I WAS extending my novel (not the original one from twenty years earlier, but a more feminist one) by writing 500 words daily, developing the plot in classic ‘seat of the pants’ fashion. Why did that come to an end? Because my writing energy was diverted into assignments for the course and blogging, perhaps?

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Day 30 – Columbine

I had three haikus up my sleeve for today, but this one popped out randomly when I was eating breakfast in the garden.

And it shows I can rhyme – sometimes – but only with my tongue firmly in my cheek! 😉

Columbine, where is your Pierrot?
Waiting at the theatre door?
You will find him, never fear; oh
love will triumph evermore.

You deserve a ream of sonnets,
so delicate and pinkly pretty,
but you’re really granny’s bonnets,
so please accept this little ditty!

Linda Rushby 30 April 2020
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Day 29 – Paper Flowers

Wrote this yesterday evening. Spent most of the morning clearing a space on the table from my previous papercrafting projects.

May or may not be finished today – don’t hold your breath!

Tomorrow I will make a paper sunflower.
I have the stamps, the dies,
the coloured paper.
A small act of creation
with glue and pencils, paper, ink
a little effort.

It may not be
a thing of beauty.
Just a pleasant way
to spend the time.
But there are worse things
I could do.

Linda Rushby 29 April 2020
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Day 28 – Work in Progress

I started this two days ago, couldn’t see where to take it or how to finish it, lost it because it was saved on my laptop instead of PC, realised I’d got nothing to post for today, found it again, read what I’d done, added a bit, still couldn’t see where it was going, but what the hell, maybe it’ll make sense another day, and this all I have for now.

In the draft I’d given it the title ‘Changes‘, but ‘Work in Progress‘ seems as good a title as any.

Sometimes I reflect
on the changes I’ve made in
my external life.
The things and the people
that I’ve left behind,
including: two husbands
three cats (two came back)
five flats and five houses,
three countries,
four counties,
two professions
one novel unpublished,
one novel unfinished.

The things that remain
are those in myself,
the voices that taunt me
for sixty years
the person inside,
the grief and the sadness
that come back to haunt me.

What changes, what stays?
Is there no final answer?
All the layers, the strata,
the sedimentation
that makes up the whole
of the soul that continues
the core of the woman
who can’t see the future
who can’t see the ending,
who has to keep going
who hopes to make progress
and someday, perhaps,
will rest on her laurels
and look at the whole
and see it completed?

Linda Rushby 28 April 2020
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Day 27 – Meeeow!!!

No poetry at all today, so here’s one I prepared earlier (last week in fact, same day as the Power Tools).

My cat listens.
She sits upright,
her paws just-so
her tail wrapped around
and looks me right in the eye.

‘It’s okay’ I tell her,
‘Don’t worry,
I’m not talking to you!’

Her eyes narrow.
Perhaps she’s thinking:
‘Silly old bag.
Don’t you realise
I’m just a cat?’

Linda Rushby 27 April 2020
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Day 26 – A Close Shave

I was going to write something serious today, but this happened:

There are jobs I don’t mind doing,
and some I can’t be bothered.
I’m an independent woman
but I’ll take help when it’s offered.

Now in these troubled days, we all
must help our blighted nation,
and I wouldn’t put my friends at risk
in times of isolation.

So I thought I’d cut my hedge alone
to prove that I am able
and this is how much I got done
before I cut the cable.

Linda Rushby 26 April 2020
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Day 24 – Dark of the Moon

I woke.
It was dark.

I thought I would get up
and walk to the sunrise.
I stayed in my bed
and listened to the radio.

We all skate on the surface.
We walk on the knife edge.

Don’t look down,
don’t look back.
Shit happens,
keep smiling.
See the bright side.
half-full.
Stop thinking.
Stop doing.

You’ll never do enough.
You’ll never be
good enough.
You’re half full,
half empty.

Sun rises,
sun sets.
Moon wanes,
moon returns.
Spring rolls
into summer.

This is all there is.
Don’t fall off the edge,
Don’t shatter the glass.

Linda Rushby 24 April 2020

Now the words are coming and I can’t stop them – however banal, however dark. Why don’t I just ignore them? Why do I need to write them out? What happens if I don’t? I’m sure I’ve written about this before, somewhere back in the past, in the morass of words I’ve written and then never read again. Do all those unwritten words fester somewhere in the back of my mind? Things that go rotten do one of two things: they infect what’s around them and spread the rot, or they make compost for other things to grow in. What about my thoughts, my words? Which way do they go? Maybe both – but which predominates? They don’t seem to have borne much fruit so far.

Part of me thinks that writing them out helps in a way, it’s therapeutic, it helps to defuse those thoughts – maybe (but they still come back). There might be some value in writing them. But then, what about the next step, is there any point in trying to share them? What is that compulsion that makes me think it’s a good idea? Who reads them, and who of those really hears them, who responds, who finds them interesting, who is repelled by them, who ignores them and moves on? Anybody?

I want to be clear that none of this is directly related to the current situation. They’re just thoughts that come to me even in the best of times (and anyway, as I’ve said, these last few weeks of inactivity have suited me quite well.) Maybe the self-imposed pressure to write poetry has influenced the form that my thoughts are taking in terms of presenting themselves in lines and stanzas, I’m not sure – and the chain of connections from thinking that way, to writing them out, to blogging about them, and so on. Maybe.

Things have happened in the wrong order today. If I’d got up when I woke, at 4.30, how much would I have done already? At least, I would have had breakfast and gone for a walk to the sea. At 5.30 I checked the time for sunrise, and found it was 5.50, so only twenty minutes to get up, dress, make a flask of coffee and get there. I stayed in bed and listened to a play on podcast. Then got up and wrote. No coffee, shower, cat-feeding, yoga/tai chi, breakfast – just this drivel.

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Day 23 – Where Poems Really Come From

Naked in my bathroom,
water dripping from the ends of my hair.
The boiler gurgles as the tank refills
and the words in my head tumble over each other.

‘Write us!’ they screech.
‘You know you want to!’
I bat them away.

Why can I write nothing solid and finished?
Why do I care for these meddlesome words
which cluster around me like hungry gnats?

‘Write!’ say my friends.
‘You know you want to!
We know you can do it!
We all want to read it!’

So I write and I write,
but how can I judge it?
The things that I write are just worms in my mind
eating their way through my head to the surface
until they emerge at the awkwardest moments.

So what do I do?
Grab a towel and a coffee,
sit down at the keyboard,
and write the bastards out into daylight.

Linda Rushby 23 April 2020
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Day 22 – Power Tools

After pontificating about poetry in general before I’d had my breakfast, I just came up with two tongue-in-cheek poems one after another while sitting in the garden.

I decided to share this one as today’s contribution and keep the other one in hand for another day!

Power Tools

My neighbour has a chipper –
I think that’s what it is.
It whirs and whines and screeches,
and disturbs my garden bliss.

So many kinds of power tools
that in their sheds must lurk.
When will this hell be over
and they all go back to work?

Linda Rushby 22 April 2020