Creative impasse

[camus]

Ah, writer's block, it’s a certain kind of illness;
One that doesn’t warrant sympathy or won’t
Immediately kill us, but an illness all the same.

It’s cancerous, it grows and I should know – I dropped
To nine stone, lost half my facial hair, because I
couldn’t form a quatrain or forge a dimeter.

But still and still we try, with one eye on the
prize, that elusive voice that one must find
between the line-breaks and the irony the

litotes and the litany. We try too hard, too
soft we tread on undiscovered ground,
searching for something, so rarely found:

Like a murmuration of starlings considering the etiquette of moral turpitude:

Like an erasure poem that petitions the reader about pop culture featuring the voice of God and an eyehole:

Ohhh sometimes, the truth is harder than the pain inside…

Like a poem in an invented form that is framed by temperance featuring a speaker who is definitely the poet and an eaglet unaware of depravity, crashed on a rock, one limp floccose wing flapping in the breeze.

[ton321]

Kris

What a poem! Comparing writers block to cancer is a leap but you managed it with this. My father in law recently died of C and I watched the thing play itself out over the last year. Simon and Garfunkels' "Silence like a cancer grows", as silence is the enemy of the poetic or any voice, comes to mind.
For me the last four stanzas are prose poems in themselves that could be expanded upon and made separate but they add to the piece too.
Gud 'un

Tony

[camus]

Thanks Tony,

Having recently gone through the big C process, I felt almost compelled to write about it. Alas David recently wrote a series of poems that did the subject far better justice than i could, so thought I'd try a different approach. The idea was a 'meta poem' really. The fact that the N was suffering from writers block but writing a poem about it, hence the rather random tacking on of those final flourishes! Glad it worked on the whole though. Appreciated.

Caleb,

Let me start out by saying that our writing styles are sometimes so similar

Really? I'd be interested to know how you think our styles are similar? Please elaborate, seriously I'm not being facetious. It may help me understand your approach a little better.

To be perfectly honest I find the majority of your poems to be the very same poem, just in different scenarios, often with very little 'poetry' involved. I've mentioned before that I find your poems basically prose rants in the structure of poetry. So I was surprised to see you using poetic devices such as metaphor etc. in your last poem, which worked well.

As to your suggestions, yes I think some of those make sense. I'm very untidy and find the revision process extremely difficult. As far as i'm concerned once it's out there it's out there, job done. The perfect poem would be created once there are no revisions required. Off the bat perfection!

Thanks for taking the time, appreciated.

Cheers
Kris