mining the vacuum

the following article was recently submitted to gotPoetry magazine:

I like to think of myself as a poet who moonlights in IT to pay the bills. Imagine my angst when I find myself sleeping on the train instead of trying to capture the day’s observations in words, or killing time even less productively:

missing my stop
I lose another
game of solitaire

I’ve written in the past about using one’s creative dry spell as a source of inspiration. Other helpful resources include on-line communities that encourage spontaneous exchanges of haiku “links”, an informal variation of the Japanese renku. This enables a poet to leverage external sources of inspiration, focusing instead on the act of writing.

Another thing I tend to do is to look back through my own archives, not trying to reinvent past experience as much as shaking the cobwebs off my pen and engaging myself in the mechanics of poetry. Consistently good poetry is a product of exercise as much as it is the product of inspiration. So why not practice by dusting off an old chestnut and applying a few variations?

Here's one from January 2000:

between sleeping passengers
commuter sunrise

Seven years later, I immediately ask “isn’t the word commuter redundant? And isn’t there something more interesting I can do with the word sunrise?” Let’s try this variation:

between sleeping passengers          sunrise

Obviously the possibilities don’t end there, but isn’t that the point?