If Yeats (this weeks card) is to carry any message with it, it surely relates to change.Why? Because Yeats poetry straddled the Victorian era with romantic poetry and the twentieth century with modern poetry that had a flavor of political and social discourse.
I think it must be true of every poet after a while that they have an early voice or style and as they progress through the years that may change. Presumably the quality of the poetry will improve but this is obviously not guaranteed.
But for many, change is scary. Doing something a little different than you did before can be downright frightening and can paralyze you, so to speak. But a Yeats has demonstrated we can move on in our work to new styles, new voice, new themes. Anything that brings freshness to art has to be positive because art is about the new. It's about bolder, different, risk. If we all do the same thing the same way, that becomes old and stale. That becomes boring.
We may be carrying old baggage in our writing life that provides no positive value. Shake it off as the song goes...
This week consider these possibilities:
- Try a different poetry form or invent your own
- Do I have old work scattered that could be brought together in a new manuscript?
- What new directions can you move with your work?
Yeats gives up a template for shaking up our writing life.
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