The Urge to Write Poetry

I have been feeling the urge to write poetry again.  Writing poetry is not practical.  I spent the better part of my twenties trying to write a good poem.  I filled notebooks with bad poems.  Daily, I read Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Richard Hugo.

From that, I have piles of notebooks that are going nowhere.

The urge to write a poem can be a terrible and all-consuming thing.

Really, I am fighting the urge to write a poem.  I think Don Marquis said it best: “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”

—Mitchell Hegman