One of the pleasures of being a student again is online access to academic journals. I'm having a blissful time researching my old favourite subjects - nature, animism and transcendence in poetry - and having access to endless papers on it which allows me to follow rabbit trails on Roethke, Lawrence, Bly and others. I think writers and poets should have access in their own right to academic journals!

Yesterday I came across a poetic form invented by Robert Bly called 'Ramage'. It's an eight-line poem where each line is built around the repetition of a specific 'union of consonant and vowel' such as 'ur', 'in' or 'ar' for example. It allows the sounds of the poem to lead the meaning, imagery and metaphors of the poem. Since I naturally allow sonics to direct, to an extent, my writing this seemed like a fun exercise to try. So I've written one so far and it was incredibly fun, throwing up unexpected and fresh imagery and reaching into the recesses in a different way. I think I'll be writing more!

I consciously decided to devote a week entirely (as much as possible) to poetry because my writing has been neglected with so much else going on. It's been so enjoyable spending hours following up my old favourite subjects and coming across poems I otherwise would have missed. I've been working hard at a poem I've sat on the bones of for over six months now - I've managed to add a few lines to it but still nowhere close to getting to the heart of the poem. However, I wrote a surprise poem yesterday about my daughter's hair which I would never have written if I hadn't been in the place mentally to 'receive it' (from the ether?) that all my reading had prepared me for.

I write best when I have a theme to work on, a project bigger than individual poems. For me, poems happen in that tension when two or more separate strands are brought together and in their coming together create a movement, an energy towards something new.

Part of my process is gathering notes, images, observations over many months until the theme, idea, the other strand reveals itself and then the 'gatherings' can be brought together and the poems can be finally written. 

Yet, there are also occasional poems that spring out of nowhere, appear with their own internal dialectic, and therefore can be written / drafted immediately. 

In reading the introduction by Robin Fulton to his translation of Tomas Transtromer's Collected Poems I noted some quotes about Transtromer's poems that particularly interest me:

"And this fascination with the borders between sleep and waking, with the strange areas of access between an everyday world we seem to know and another world we can't know in the same way but whose presence is undeniable - such a fascination has over the decades been one of Transtromer's predominant themes."

"imagery from and about dreams, speculations about how both past and future can impinge upon the present, investigations into memory, and a fascination with the many ways in which borders, open and closed, may be experienced." 

And this quote from Transtromer himself:

"but you could at least say that I respond to reality in such a way that I look on existence as a great mystery and that at times, at certain moments, this mystery carries a strong charge, so that it does have a religious character, and it is often in such a context, that I write." 

I feel like I am forever looking for the next project, next theme which will unlock the writing process and make use of all my 'gatherings'. I feel a constant pull back to folklore and folktales hence my ballad poems. I also like to write in the voice of historical / mythical women and find a real freedom in adopting personas. However, I  think my real fascination in reading and writing poetry is, and always has been, in the meeting place of the natural and the psychological worlds; the internal and the external and how each colours each.