Starting My Second Book of Poetry

I didn’t anticipate that I would start this book of poetry quite so soon, but while I was on break one day at work, an idea came to me and I started to write. Before I knew it, I had the makings of a poem. Since that day I’ve written three or four other poems of the same theme, and so I can say with confidence that my second book of poetry is officially in the drafting stage.

It will be interesting to see how the process of writing this book goes. My first book was the creative thesis for my M.F.A., so while it went through several different variations, I was given consistent feedback on it by my faculty mentors and fellow students in workshop. I don’t have that now. I can send poems or the whole manuscript to friends for feedback, but I won’t have a faculty mentor to tell me when an image isn’t working, or to give me ideas for letting the imagery really come alive.

However, one thing I have now that I didn’t have then is a lot more confidence in my ability to write and revise my poetry. I’ve already done that with my first book, so I know what that looks like in terms of my own practice. And while I do intend to keep writing these poems, my primary focus right now is on my first novel, so I don’t intend to abandon that project for the sake of this one. I still need to figure out how I’m going to space them both out, keeping them both going even if my attention is primarily focused on fiction at the moment, but that’s a task for another day.

One thing I’ve noticed about this second book already is that I am simply not ready to dive into the subject matter as heavily or as thoroughly as I did with my first. I think part of that is due to the fact that, emotionally and mentally, I had already healed a lot from my miscarriages, which is what my first book of poetry is about, and so the writing about them very much added to the healing process. Whereas with the deconstruction of my faith, that process is still ongoing and, in many ways, still in its beginning stages. I don’t want to trigger any further religious trauma by rushing too quickly into this second book of poetry. Sometimes we’re simply not ready to write about an experience, and that’s okay.

So today as I’m sipping my English Breakfast tea and preparing to start my reading for the week, I’m allowing myself space to feel the contradictions of desire. I want to get into the gritty details of my deconstruction of my faith, but I also want to preserve a sense of peacefulness over my mental and emotional health. I will read The Hobbit, a book where the main character also feels contradictions of desire – he wants the safety and warmth of his home, but he also wants the intrigue and excitement of adventure – and I will read for school and I will get as much written in my novel as I can before the end of NaNoWriMo, and I will let whatever poems come to me in their own time.

Sometimes writing is like faith: we have to trust in the parts of ourselves we cannot see.