Even as I am just beginning to write this blog, I’m noticing that how I view my poetry has changed.
A piece that I really love, a visual one with no real title at the moment, for the longest time has seemed to have no place to be. As if no one would want to pick it up for their magazine or contest or what have you.
But then, as I’m writing what I think about my craft and writing/creativity I can see a major difference between what I blog and what else I write. Even prose that I work on outside of this blog are clearly meant for things other than this blog.
This, after I was worried that blogging would take away all of my creative vitality and put me in a head space where there would be nothing else left.
Before, I was feeling like it would never fit anywhere.
I started writing to share thoughts, to find meaning in my experiences and to connect with deep thinking people. So far, that has mostly been through books and really amazing school friends. Blogging, oh poet, is a way to connect and be an active writer.
I think there is more than one way to connect with people through reading and writing. And why avoid something modern and weird and uncertain and without academic criticism having focused on it for a thousand years? Why not set the standard? Why not mess a few things up just so you and no one else will tread that corrupted way again?
I’m learning that there is a definite difference between the voice I use here and the voice I use in poems, in essays or in hybrid thinger majigs. With time, I hope that my blogging evolves into something more than a couple posts a week and starts to contain more of my daily thinking about creativity and writing. Hell, if manuscripts fall flat, I might just be impatient enough to share them here. Who knows?
The one thing I do know is that blogging shouldn’t be a scary thing for serious writers—it’s like a nutritionist afraid to take a multi vitamin on top of a pill regime. How much could it hurt?
Gulp.
Dan Dorman 