A Poetry Priority

“Ross All Over the Map” has been a powerful tool for reinvigorating my writing and for refining much of my thinking about school change, travel, photography, and music. It has pushed me and it has rewarded me. That said, I have felt its limitations more and more over the last six months or so, in particular as I have been pulled toward writing that requires a longer period of fermentation than standard blog entries. In early December I wrote about my goal to reinvigorate the blog, but alas, I have fallen short.Interestingly, it was the blog that led me to take what felt like the brave step of sharing poetry I had written, and now it is my work with poetry that has kept me away from the blog recently. Over the last couple of months I have been giving the same amount of time I was devoting to the blog to work on a collection of poems.  As I have been working on them, it has become clear to me that the pressure of continually posting work creates the potential that I would rush them and that their quality would suffer as a result.So here is my plan: for the near-term, I will give full priority to my work with poems, and I will be committed to finishing the full collection I have outlined. I will also maintain the blog though I will not maintain the same commitment to posting as often or as regularly. In the blog’s first full year I averaged over two posts a week. For now, I am adjusting my goal for posts to something like one post every two or three weeks.When after the first couple of months of its existence, I started to refine my vision for it (“Finally, A Name for My Blog”), I already knew that I wanted the blog to be malleable.  From the start I have wanted it to meet a personal need far more than it would create an additional obligation—my life like everyone else’s has enough requisite demands already without adding another by choice.I am excited to continue work on the poems and to see how the blog continues to evolve. Here’s to the new plan!The poems I have posted on the blog are collected here.