National Poetry Month, April 1

For National Poetry Month, I decided to challenge myself with an ekphrastic poem every month.

What’s an ekphrastic poem? It’s a poem written about a picture or work of art–or inspired by a picture / work of art–meant to expand upon the meaning of the piece it’s in response to.

I’ve had the honor and privilege to be part of the Blackstone Valley Art Association‘s Art-Poetry Pairing for the past three years, and I’ve loved working with artists. This year, I participated as both artist and poet.  You can see this year’s parings at this link.

So, this year, I decided to celebrate National Poetry Month by doing my own pairings of my hobby photos and poems. Some days the poem will be the inspiration, other days the picture will be.

Today is my first full day home after attending Conbust, one of the regular conventions I attend. It was amazing, as always, and it’s the inspiration for this particular pairing.  I had an idea of taking a picture of my duffel bag spilled first and writing a poem about recovery, about self-care and permission to recover–particularly after several excellent panels discussing invisible disabilities and the challenges of neurodiversity.

Instead, with the photo plan in mind, I wrote the poem first–a very different poem than I planned–and then did the shoot, chose the pictures, and edited them a little. The poem, however, is unedited and will be edited.  Most of my poems are handwritten first. So here are the two pictures I am deciding between for the pairing and a photo of the VERY ROUGH draft of the  poem.

Please do not share these photos; I am not finished and sharing them can hurt my future plans for this piece. Thank you!