Where did you wander?

Odysseas Elytis...Here I begin again, to try and restore my ability to write. The muse had fled, dejected, ignored. I have an awfully inferior brain, you see. It lapses. I fear I have sustained psychic damage, chemical damage perhaps, to the extent that I had forgotten I loved poetry. You could say I'm just out of practice and you would be right, up to a point. For writing poetry has never been entirely effortless for me. There was a point where I had steadily built writing into my life, formed a habit of it so to speak. To transmit what I was experiencing in the form of verse became second nature. Sadly, all that good work has been laid to waste and now I must try to remember how I lured the Muse to my side in the first place.

It took time then and it will take time now, to gather the strength and concentration.
I realise I need to feel emotionally strong to begin the discipline again. I know this may not be true of others who effortlessly pen away the hours, heads flooded with pictures and sounds, no matter what disasters abound around them. But I have to concentrate in order to write, and mostly I find I am tired from mundane activities. My senses are dulled and stifled at the end of the day, the only time I have to write. Now I must try hard to sharpen those blunted sense..

My latest attempts have resulted in song ballads, not my usual free verse. I found it a useful exercise to focus in on form and dramatic monologue, just to get back into the act of putting pen to paper. Useful exercises but hardly resulting in texts of mind-blowing quality.

And so, I study my masters, from the beginnings of my poetic stirrings, from Aeschylus and Elytis and Kavvadias I translate.