Despite often being plagued with writer’s block, frustrated with editing, and eternally impoverished, writing brings me tremendous pleasure, or else I wouldn’t do it. One aspect of writing with which I have never had a very good control of is Poetry. Yeah, I’ve written a couple homeruns, but it is exhausting wahmish work if it isn’t your gig. NPR has this app on it’s page called the Joy Generator (see https://apps.npr.org/joy-generator/#story=intro&page=0 ) and one of the possible generators of joy was Poetry Writing. They suggest creating a blackout poem, using existing text and blacking out all of the words except those that call to you. They even give you a few sample texts to mark over. We won’t get into what was going on the day I felt I needed joy bad enough to write a poem…but here is the one I came up with. (I also decided to call them “Reductionary” poems instead of “blackout” poems. “Blackout” has the connotation to me of the party’s they have at the bathhouse…but we won’t get into that either).
Summon the Clouds; A Reductionary Poem By Daniel Blankenship Summon the clouds, Ever so high. Mount them And ride them heavenwards. Carry the stones. Reach the corner of the sky. Apply and mend it. Do this, and turn attention to the broken pill, And mend it. Mount the clouds. Descend to the earth. Find all now right… But dark.