As September settled in, I was a little
fried from the click it up a notch photo project. I’m not altogether
sure why the photo project kicked my ass as much as it did. I mean,
What? I have been snapping pictures for as long as I can remember,
and the two former photo projects this year worked out very well. I
blamed it on the camera, sure, but there had to be something else at
play too. I think the real issue with the camera and the process may
have had something to do with having to be at my computer for so much
of the time. I’m always at the computer and that has gotten tiresome.
I was thinking about all the hours, all
the years I’ve been doing creative things and I have to admit, the
computer has become a more recent thing. The other issue with the
computer is that even though I’m sitting at it, I’m not always
working.
I was chatting about this with an old
friend. I was telling her that I’ve been watching tons of shows.
“What?” she said. “You never do that!” And she was right, at
least I never used to do that. It gave me a lot to think about. I’ve
noticed that late at night, after the family has gone to bed, if I’m
up writing in my notebook, or drawing, or reading, I have a very
specific wind down and I get to bed early and I sleep great. When I’m
up late at night looking at Netflix or YouTube, I’m tired, but not
sleepy, I stay up later and I sleep like shit.
Then, as I was thinking about the
September project, a poetry project, I thought I might do something
much more lofi. Something more like what I used to do. I like to
write poetry, even if it’s very bad poetry. I suddenly realized that
I don’t need to have a computer to do that. Hell, I don’t even need
electricity.
There was one concern as I began to
formulate the project in my mind. I generally write a bunch of poetry
after I have read a bunch of poetry. I think there are more people
out there writing poetry than there are people reading poetry. And up
until the onset of this project I was not one of them. I have, when
writing poetry in the past, written one poem for every fifty I read.
But this year, I haven’t read any, or very little anyway. Was I
really going to turn into one of those?
Sure. Why not. All I wanted to achieve
from this project was a little break from my computer. I had been
taking a bit of a break since Camp NaNoWriMo in July. I had gone back
to my trusty composition notebook and a box full of cheap ballpoint
pens left over from my service industry days.
So, that’s that, I’m writing the poems
in my notebook. What the next step was going to be, I hadn’t yet
decided when I started writing. The challenge? To do my annual poetry
project which culminates in a chapbook of poems.