Picking Up Signals

Picking Up Signals

I began my winter day with some yummy oatmeal (nuts and berries, sliced dried apricot) and reheated coffee. I had a flash of inspiration while washing my cereal bowl, and dashed upstairs to write a poem.

I’m in a groove these days. I have my Poet’s antennae poised and scanning the airwaves, like a giant Double Doppler radar dish picking up every storm front moving through.

It’s not talent of genius, but merely a form of permission to consider EVERYTHING as subject. Here’s how it works:

I went to the thrift store to buy a 7-iron for golf ($5), a desk chair ($5) and a royal blue knit sweater($3) — Poem.

I read about Gen. Erwin Rommel giving away accordions to German troops right before D-Day to boost morale — Poem.

I recalled one summer in Southern Pines, during a residency at Weymouth, helping an elderly man with his jumper cables. He was on a first date at the movies and they were stuck at midnight because AAA assistance was an hour away. — Poem.

Finally, I wondered if there are any finishing schools for poets? — Poem.

And here’s where it gets even better. I plagiarize from myself, and it’s all fair game.

Several years ago, I wrote a poem about my ischemic stroke and had it published in an online, national stroke survivor magazine, with the rights reverting back to me.

I later turned the poem into a 4,000-word essay and put it in “The Low Wire,” my first essay collection. Then I teased the essay into a 75-page mini-memoir called The Guests: A Story of Stroke, Depression and Healing that’s now up on Amazon. I will probably come back in a few years and update it, and probably double the length of it.

If you tell me you are stuck and have nothing to write about, I will not be dismissive.

I will be very supportive and suggest you open your aperture a bit and consider new possibilities that are most likely right in front of you begging for your attention.

I’m betting whatever happened at dinner last night is worth looking at again, maybe turning it upside down, or reversing the flow, or picking out a specific menu item or utensil, and doing a five-mile deep dive on it.

That’s what creatives do. We recycle the regular stuff and transform it.

This essay originally appeared in Laying Low (2021)