Too many times to count, I have sat staring at the blank page, words rushing around in my head like angry bees, but refusing to come together on the page. And sometimes, I have sat with absolutely nothing in my head, a night sky devoid of stars – just endless, empty space! It is frustrating beyond words. When the need to write is heavy upon you, but the words just will not cooperate. What to do to get those creative juices flowing?
I think, after trying several different options, the one that seems to work best for me, is put down the pen, walk away from the computer and head over to the bookshelf. Find a book of poetry that inspires you and start reading because, nothing inspires poetry, like poetry.
I tend to reach for books I’ve read many times before. I tend to head to those poems; I almost know by heart. I do that, because those are the poems, the words, the images that have touched me, inspired me in the past, and I trust them to inspire me again. Some of the lines from poems that inspire me are:
“Oh, life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! – Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
“This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.” – The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.” – Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars. – After the Storm by Derek Walcott
If there are poems in you, they may just need the inspiration provided by poetry itself, to take flight in your head and settle, at last, onto that blank page.
Write on…