It’s hard to trace the ancestry of a poem. The bloodlines thin so quickly. It takes a village to raise a child - or to write a poem.
I’m reading Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson, and this poem came from that, maybe.
This book will probably be the last non-fiction book I read for a while. I’ve noticed that I stall in non-fiction books, reading them in fits and starts, rarely sucked in. This is different - maybe because it’s essays/memoir. It’s different in the way Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias was, or Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self. And yet I’ve been reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence for five years now, bogged down in names and relationships.
Do you read fiction or non-fiction or both?
I’m going through yet another (!) period of self-questioning around this newsletter and That Monthly Zine Project, and whether to continue with either of them. Their invisible weight in my mind. I don’t think they’re so much work in and of themselves, but it’s more about the pressure I put on myself and that invisible looming that hulks them in my head. Being consistent is very difficult for me. I think it all comes down to why I’m doing either.
I’m a big fan of this person on YouTube - and watching this video recently has brought up all this junk for me:
Either way I’m 99% sure I’ll be turning off the paid subscription part of this newsletter pretty soon. It’s more about the standards I hold myself to (the unrealistic kind).
What do you think?
Maybe you don’t have to be all things to all people. Maybe you don’t have to strive to “add value” and help your readers. Maybe sharing poetry and art and plants is enough. It’s hard for me to know when I’m enough.
Over and out,
until next time,
Jessica
(Re)wild Imagination is a newsletter about hope-making, art ideas + illustrated poetry tales from my own garden.
I pretty much exclusively only read memoir type things for some reason...