So recently a friend of my asked for a couple poems to accompany her novel, being written episodically on Royal Road. There may be an idea of doing a live reading, with her reciting and me interjecting a couple new poems and maybe some older ones that fit the book.
It took a long time to come up with these two poems, becuase the source wasn’t mine. I was rather surprised at the challenge of the blank page. How did I overcome it? By reading extensively in her book, and then reading a bit of Finnegans Wake (as posted before, the re-read is a slow but steady project). With the subconscious language in that tome pushing those secret poetry buttons, two poems were eked out. But boy, it hurt.
I’ve been writing prose for years now, haven’t touched poetry at all. But this commission is a good reminder that I should get back into it, at the minimum just to knock the creative rust loose so the poetry makes the prose better.