Still searching for my groove

I remain locked in a holding pattern, hovering in this strange lull. The fisherman’s daughter in me sees me circling around and around in a swirling eddy, pulled just out of the current, while the rest of the river flows on. The changing season makes me think of poems trapped underground like dormant bulbs though spring is coming at last and there are tiny white blooms in our postage-stamp of a yard. So little new work. I have revised some poems, but so little new work. April is National Poetry Month and all over the poetry blogosphere poets are writing a poem a day; I abandoned the challenge on day two.

It’s not just the poems; I am at low tide. My energy is low with the boys, our days uncreative. There have been no special projects, no neat new games, just many trips to the Tierpark. Luckily they are still young enough to see it as a treat every time and now that it is spring there are lambs, baby dwarf goats, goslings, a newborn donkey. Boychen squeals with delight (although pigeons and sparrows seem to be his all time favorite animals) and the Small Boy is over the moon that the pony rides are back, even if only on Sundays. They, at any rate, do not seem to notice that my body feels like winter even as the days are turning to spring.

The days are turning to spring, they are longer and lighter. Surely I cannot be far behind.

* * *

I am dithering over a poetry submission. I’ve a set of good poems but I’m not sure if they match the journal I’m looking at. The poems are good, one of them is very good, but I wonder about the theme. I’ve another set of poems that feels like a better match but I don’t think the package as a whole is as strong.

These are the times my inexperience stands out most sharply. Putting these packages together, deciding which poems fit together and fit the journal; wondering if it’s better to send three strong poems that are wildly different thematically or three poems that center on a similar topic but perhaps aren’t as strong. I print out drafts and shuffle them around in different groupings like I’m matching swatches to paint chips. I’m overthinking it, I’m sure, but I’m on unsteady ground here. I know how to write the poems. I’m still learning how to let go of them.

Talk to me, oh Writers of the Internets

So it’s not just my hard-drive. My computer, the actual box and wires, is dead. It was an IBM ThinkPad and it was good to me. We had a good run. But it’s dead now and I need a new computer and the field is wide open.

So talk to me, writers and poets and bloggers of the Internets. What do you use and why. Pluses, minuses, regrets, love-affairs. Has anybody out there switched from a PC to a Mac and how did that work for you?

Looks like I’m going to have to get used to the idea of doing real work on R’s loaner. This could take a while.