I suppose that’s one reason I’m publishing quite a few poems recently. It won’t last long. I haven’t written new verse in some time. I do keep my little notebooks in a pocket most of the time and a pen on the off chance that a really good idea is going to run across the street in front of me or smack me in the back of the head, and they are full of observations.

What I have not done is go through the editing process, which is tough work and also the place where the real poetry is born, at least for me.

Editing requires first that I squash that little ego that’s been building itself a shrine in the back of my head over the last few hours, days, months, and years and decades and understand that just because I wrote something down in a particular sequence, it doesn’t have to stay that way and doesn’t necessarily represent the best thinking on the topic or even my own belief or lack of belief on the subject. They’re just words, and, while there is a finite number of words (at least in my brain), there are nearly infinite ways to arrange them.

Contradictorily, having squashed that little ego thing, I must also be overwhelmed by desire to have the poem at hand, to feel the deepest of needs to get this thing said and said right. I think this is related to the definition of literature I used to teach: literature is the tradition of witness, of truth-telling, at least truth telling to the best of the witness’s ability. I’d repeat some story or story fragment, a Biblical story or one of the ancient Greek stories, and notice that the folks who told that story were trying, to the best of their ability, to tell the truth about something.

Now that I think of it, that need for truth telling, combined with my headlong dash to keep myself significantly busy lately — which has to do with a theory for keeping myself out of trouble– may account for the lack of overt productivity lately.

If I line those things up, a desire to tell the truth and a useful squashing of ego while retaining enough playfulness to try whatever comes to mind with the words, bark up any tree, and also retaining the chuckling editor’s most basic tool — the delete button, the blue pencil — who knows? A new poem might pop out.