Poetry Calling

I feel like returing to poetry. By this I don't mean I am planning to leave fiction, but that I must concentrate on writing and reading poetry. I doubt though that I ever left poetry. I host poetry events at the Sacramento Poetry Center every second Monday, and I attend poetry events at other venues. I am always in the company of poets, and I read poetry every so often. But still, I feel like returning to poetry. Perhaps I mean this in the sense of turning on my poetic voice, so that I can resume writing poetry. That's what it must be, because in the last year or so, I have been focusing my writing on short fiction (Well, I tend not to mention that I am working on long ficton, an novel here, another there, but like Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, or Dambudzo Marechera, in reverse order, I sometimes have no patience for very long, sustained stories, thus my longest novel manuscript (which I began in 1999) has too many stories struggling to become long stories each in its own right).

After publishing my poetry collection, I subsequently started preparing two other collections, each with eighty poems or so; then something happened: the short story became very popular again, and there were all these cool writers winning Pulitzers, Guardians, Faulkners, Frank/Flannery O'Connors (not that this was new, but talk about short fiction was everywhere; I started to teach short fiction too, and before long, I began to discovered the form, commitmenting to reading short stories exclusively for months. A famous blogger introduced the short story month, and I blogged about that; then I started to publish my own stories, and one of the stories paid a check bigger than my poetry collection, but I truly began to enjoy writing, and especially reading the short story).

I am returning to poetry. I will revisit the collections I was working on at the end of 2008. And I will continue attending poetry events, and hopefully inventing some; I will start sending poetry submissions (oh, that's what I had stopped doing--submitting poetry), and learning more about the market of poetry. But I will rediscover what I now miss about poety: the magic of its language, the beauty of the deletion key as I edit the lines into pure song, then as the process refines, as I reach the point of expression that uses language as if it has ceased to exist, as if what I am now using is something above language, and if above and beyond our physical bodies exists souls, beyond language, poetry must then demand the soul of words....

In short, I will be diversifying my creative efforts.