by golly! i think i've got it?

the past few weeks i've written lots of drafts of poems, not any that i'm very happy with. they don't feel quite right. i've also wanted to write about a difficult subject-- my grandparents divorce--which i've written about a few times before, never extremely successfully. i wrote a blogpost about it a few months ago and deleted it because i didn't even feel comfortable blogging about it really.

"heredity" a poem i wrote during my mfa program, was probably the best i've written on the subject, and it's too associative and vague...i feel like i lose my reader in that poem.

the past week i've written several drafts trying to get it right. i like parts of different ones. then yesterday i tried out persona--i read [this post] and thought maybe i need to put some distance between myself and the subject by writing in persona.

i don't write in persona typically, but i think this might be the way to write about family things without, as the poet says in that blogpost, feeling too vulnerable.

the poem that i think has the most possibility of the three i wrote this week is an untitled one written from the perspective of Leah (from the bible--Jacob, Rachel, Leah). i'm not entirely sure what to think about it right now. i wrote it in form first (very weird for me, i never write in form) then took it back to free verse.

i'm thinking though about trying out a few different personas for this topic...maybe something from mythology, since that is a more classic approach (though i have read an awful lot of poems about Persephone...) or something from Grimm's since i very much love Grimm's.

i'm glad to have made some progress with writing about this. my writing hasn't been as fast the past month or so, but it has been more...deliberate? and during my "child-bearing years" with little ones running around underfoot, that might be a more practical approach to the writing life. less flurry and more dedication.