#546: Étude for Not Writing a Poem

I don’t know what to say. I have never before, in the eleven previous years of participation in National Poetry Writing Month, experienced such intense internal resistance to writing a poem–ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE MONTH! I can’t explain it. Usually I am fired up and I jump out of the starting gate with great vigor and enthusiasm. Today, not so much. It appears, since looking at the NaPoWriMo optional prompt of the day almost first thing in the morning, that my day has been spent actively avoiding writing a poem. It’s 9 pm as I type this and I still don’t have a poem. What you are seeing here is not an introduction to what I have done, but the doing of the thing in the moment. As I type these words I have not a single idea in my head about poetry. Let me try some brainstorm-on-the-fly.

In yesterday’s introductory entry, I talked about how the NaPoWriMo curator has promised a collection of prompts based loosely around the ekphrastic, that music and art will be a continuing thread as inspiration. Today’s prompt contained two glossaries, one of musical terms and another of art terminology. The idea was to take a word or two from either or both of these lists, words that were unfamiliar, and use one or two of these words in a poem. Fair enough. There is a ton of material there, for sure. But I’m not sure I’m game. I am, however, interested in, and have thought regularly about, writing a series of poems about music, about being a musician, about being an avid listener, a collector, being someone for whom music is a kind of life-blood. I’ll peruse that music terminology, see if there’s something that floats my boat. If I don’t find some word there that immediately grabs me, unfamiliar or not, I will face the blank page and put one word after another word and see where that takes me–with music as a guiding star. There’s a hackneyed metaphor to begin with. Familiar, it turns out, as I choose the word étude.

Étude for Not Writing a Poem

The time I spent today
not writing a poem,
when I wasn’t scrolling,
stopping in from time
to time on Cory Booker’s
filibuster, when I wasn’t
attempting to walk the
dogs in the rain, attempting
to catch the old one
pissing so I could capture
a urine sample for the vet,
when I wasn’t feeding
myself, making coffee,
taking out the trash,
when I wasn’t meditating,
when I wasn’t talking
with a friend on the phone
or wishing my wife
a good day, when I wasn’t
cooking asparagus,
when I was
alone in the house
for hours, in that time,
when I thought I should be
writing a poem,
I was playing
with my drums.
Not practicing, really,
but playing, playing around,
goofing, entertaining
myself by building
a kind of frankenstein
drum set from acoustics
and electronics, building
something unlike anything
I have ever played.
I spent hours today
not writing a poem
so I could build something else
to hit with sticks,
making another kind of noise.

It’s ten minutes after ten in the PM.
This is the practice.