IT TAKES ONE A LONG TIME TO BECOME YOUNG

DOUBTING MYSELF

There's not much to write, except lately I've been doubting myself. Am I a decent writer? Can I be a better reviewer? Yesterday, I fell into a period of despondency - believing that all I have written all of my life ( my poems) have been garbage. The more I read the works of famous poets, analyzing style, and method, and experiencing their remarkable use of language; the more I feel very inadequate. Poetry must have SOUND, it must SING, it must melt into the reader so they will come away with feeling, a remembrance. A poem must affect a reader, so at the end, they say "wow" - it must move them somehow. I think of Yeats 'lyrical verse, I think of Dickenson's solitary words to the outside world (never revealing herself). I think of Marianne Moore's "The Fish" with it's vibrant images, and clever placement of words.

I doubt myself these days. I write, and then I scratch out and re-write a draft over and over again.....and it never feels finished. Is a poem ever finished? Complete? I write, and tos the paper on the floor....I get too personal, I weave lines, and then cut, cut, cut.

Mary Oliver (a poet) stated that she writes a poem for someone who will not be born for centuries. Her poem must tell all of an experience, explain itself fully, so that those generations following, can read and understand exactly what we mean when we write a piece, whether poem or novel.

Doubting - that's o.k. I guess, but I am so bothered by the junk I write - yet I've discovered poems I wrote thirty years ago, and those pieces read beautifully. Because I just HAD to write, I had to be a writer. It's not something you choose, it's what you have to do everyday...just as a painter must paint, even through his doubt, a musician must create sound, melody, lyrics. It's in the blood.

I hope this self-doubting will ease, and I can just write for myself, and not compare my feeble work with the masters. Poems are paintings, they require color, sound, melody. I must study harder, I must improve, I must push myself harder, and look deeper into the gut, the heart, into the authentic self I know I am.