I chose six words that thread through my work, put them in order, my posterior to chair, pen to paper and began to write. After three days of concentrated effort I had a first draft ready for eyes and ears other than my own. Since then it has been workshopped, read by three poet friends, and although the third stanza isn't there yet, I actually like the piece, even though there is still work to be done with it. I'm both exhausted and energized by it---work up at 3:30am this morning thinking about it---and will return to it before the day is over.
In one of the "reflections" introducing his Collected Poems Stanley Kunitz writes: "Our poems can never satisfy us since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe once or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall." I read this after finishing the dreaded sestina's first draft and realized that this effort to "recall" something I've heard only once or twice is the source of both energy and exhaustion at the center of my creative process. And I'm beginning to recognize the same effort in the work of others to call up their unique "song heard once or twice in a lifetime".
Just this morning I opened Alicia Ostriker's No Heaven at random and read "The Faure Requiem". That took me a listen of Faure's music and then full circle to my persistent sestina. This kind of connection is so necessary to my creative process as I get closer and closer to being able to answer questions suggested by Jeffrey Levine in a recent post: Can I describe my work in one sentence, one paragraph, one page? Can I clearly articulate what I write about, why I write about it and how I write about it?
In was just an assignment and the one of three options I resisted the most.
