Drain

I’ve just finished phase one of my first commissioned piece of writing. That is to say, I’ve finalised the body text of a long poem which will go on to feature as part of collaborative work in the Seachange artworks that will be mounted along the South Shields foreshore from this Spring into early Summer. All quite wishy-washy, I know, but I don’t want to say too much about the work until it’s actually out there, so hang fire.

The reason I bring it up now, however, is that I’m starting to feel like some of the writing I’ve been working on the past 2-3 years is reaching sell-by. I talked in a previous post about the potential for poems to reach an expiry date; for the passions that ignited them to become staid and the writing to become forced and disingenuous.

I’m not sure whether I need to widen my scope in terms of subject matter, or even to take back up the old prose writer in me for a change of scenery. Whatever the case poems seem to have stopped coming to me as easily at the minute. I probably just need to boot myself up the arse and say, right, I’ll have 5 totally new draft poems by date x; I’ll resend x, y and z old poems to a journal I’ve not submitted to before, etc.

This was all a bit pointless really wasn’t it?