Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Day 11: You can over milk the cow until nothing flows

It's really freeing to just do something without over-working it in hopes of "perfecting" it. In the past I rewrote poems until they truly dried up, lost all their juice. This time, the practice required me to stick to a deadline, a time when I had to "come in" from being "outside in the day." Like calling a kid in from playing kick the can. A definite end to playing with the poem, a definite "ok just post it." I came to love that aspect of "the practice." I bet other art forms have this same thing: that when you "keep at it" too long, you actually lose the "wisdom" or "impact".

2 comments:

  1. This is great! Makes me
    think of putting a sermon together in thirty minutes or
    less ... sometimes you just have to, and there's tons of juice in it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. First instincts are almost always the right ones.

    ReplyDelete