Every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates.
After "Poets Feed the People"
Some afternoons, some nights, you are lucky enough to be there when the poets giving readings are on fire. You give thanks, you appreciate the poets and the host, even the venue manager if he or she is there. And you go home and work at saying what you saw, what you heard, how their words wormed in through your earholes and burrowed right for your heart, your mind, your imagination, and lo, what was already a garden became a dazzle, a fireworks, a symphony, and your pen or keyboard hardly knows what to do with it. Don't quit! Capture that! Even if you have to go back and polish it, edit it, trim it to the bone, even if you have to go back and re-language it. But get down that caught-fire feeling, that doubly-cleared mind thinking, the new images and sounds you now have. Re-read it. Send a mental prayer to the poets who gave you this. Then wake in the morning and rekindle that fire, reclear your mind, find newer images and metaphors, and work with those a while. Let the performances simmer in you, so you can pass them on in your own work and newly honor those on-fire poets!
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