‘For this week’s challenge, tell us about a time when you had to deal with an obstacle in your creative process, whether it was a bad case of writer’s block, some rigid rules you had to work around, or some other limitation — financial, technical, mental — that set you back (bonus points if you share or link to the work in question!). Did you manage to transcend the obstacle, or was it too much to deal with at the time? More important: what did you learn about yourself and your creativity in the process?
I look forward to your responses!’
Reading has been a part of my life. Before I could start reading my grandfather used to read out to us. It was stories and the world of imagination. Prose of any type interests me. But poetry has always taken the back seat. I love poems which are simple and touch my heart from the beginning. But I have not been able to understand or appreciate the prose type of poems like the works of T S Eliot. So there has always been a mental block against most types of poetry. And all those rules, rhymes and meters and so on were obstacles in the appreciation of Poetry. Then some time ago I read in The Daily Post about Writing 101: A poem a Day. I hesitated for a moment, those mental blocks !!! Then though Why not? My first question to Ben Huberman was about any rules that I should follow. He replied, “We intentionally kept all formal rules out for this course — the only thing that matters is what your own thoughts and voice dictate.”
Before writing I read something about poetry and came across these words which really helped me, ‘Poetry, more than prose, communicates through the way the words sound and way the poem looks on the page… An important characteristic of poetry is compression, or concentrated language… a good poem has similarly been intensified by removing the non-essential words. This is one reason why poems are often short.’
The course was a wonderful experience. I found that I could express a lot with minimum words. After the course, I would give myself prompts and write something about them. Even now I try to write poems with the Daily Prompts. But still I hesitate to call them as Poems, I prefer calling them Expressions. I still have not studied about the different Rules of Poetry. That obstacle is still there but it is not really an obstacle as I continue to write my ‘poems’. The words just come and I write them in my diary. Of course there are changes before I post them. I am enjoying myself and feel satisfied with my expressions.
Today seeing the clothes drying in the sun these thoughts came to mind,
CLOTHESLINES
Clotheslines out at all times
Under the sun
And with the wind
All weather things.
Clothes hanging from them
Move merrily to the
Tune of the breeze.
Under the sun,
Hanging from the clotheslines
The clothes become
Hot and fresh.
Moving to and fro
With the breeze
They express a feeling
Of freshness and cleanliness
And make the mind
Fresh and happy too.
Mukhamani 