Cooler air has finally come to Georgia, and I’m starting to feel a desire to return to my creative practices, mainly poetry writing and drawing.

Before sitting down to write, I clean house, walk my dog, work in my garden, or go for a swim. By the time I’ve burned off my nervous energy, I’m too tired to write (or so I tell myself).

In the morning I like to read for an hour, but usually it’s newspapers and magazines. Something’s got to change. As William Carlos Williams says in Asphodel that Greeny Flower,

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

My friend, poet and writer JC Reilly, writes of her struggles with not writing. As she states in her post at Poeta Venum, writing or not writing is an existential matter to her. Writing is her life.

She’s a brilliant poet— I recommend her fascinating book-length fantasy, What Magick May Not Alter for exploring her most recent work.

I pray the universe, the Muses, and all the gods and goddesses shower her with lines of poesy and delicious words and images to inspire her.

For myself, on one hand, I feel Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, but on the other, I’m exhausted. I could use a few weeks in a cottage at the beach. A state park cabin near the ocean is all I need.

Since I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, I’m going to give myself an assignment to come up with ten different first lines of a sonnet.

If one of the ten lines speaks to me, I’ll go ahead and write a complete sonnet with it. If you want to play along, write your own first lines! I’ll share what I come up with in a few days.

Each line will be roughly ten syllables with five beats, but the lines will not necessarily go together. I’m hoping to trick my ego into not “trying” to make sense of it, at least not in the beginning.