In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

By William Ernest Henley

 In light of this, I want to speak better to and better about my family. I want to stand on the shoulders of the giants that are my parents and my grandparents. I want to crystallize life as I’ve known it so I can give it to my daughters in hope of steering them clear of obstacles that I’ve faced and explaining grief that I hope they never feel.  In preparing for this great goal I have one challenge that I can’t escape.

I can rewrite my past

One of my professors in college convinced me that the best writing is sparked from one of two places:

1) The most imaginative perspectives.

-or-

2) The most transparent souls.

With this in mind, I ask myself a simple question, “What happens when we take the best of both of these qualities?”   

In my writing I can make my last love my first love. I can make my sporting career eternal. I can pretend that I’m the most innocent, forgiving, inspiring, selfless person that ever lived. I can become the best brother and best son. I can exceed the passion of the Greeks. I can overshadow philosophical giants by removing their names and repeating their words. In short, I can frame my past in such a way that it comes off perfect.

I don’t think this would help my kids. I don’t think this will help me either. As I put down the pen from a heavily revised and polished version of my life I might smile. I might even feel better about myself for a moment. I might be excited to share this version of my story with my kids. However, is this the kind of dream I was meant to write to shape my reality? I don’t think so!

I choose to write what’s REAL

Writing what’s real and what’s true is pretty amazing. While I’m doing this, every now and then something magical happens. The words of my college professor take a new direction. I start to write beyond what is and drift into what I hope to come. Though I refuse to try to rewrite the past I have the honor of writing my hopes for tomorrow. Thankfully all of us have this gift. When I write these dreams I know I’m starting to write the future. In this future I can see my daughters all grown up. I can see the economy recover. I can envision infinite possibilities that lead to better people and a better world.  

As you’re reading this I don’t know what your dreams are. I do, however, know the power of a dream. A dream can become a North Star that points us towards our best self. Writing gives each of us a chance to shape our thoughts, and thus, shape our future. It’s not real until it’s written down.

I’d love for everyone to share a few of their simplest tips on how to write your dreams below.

Needless to say, on many occasions when I return I face the same problem. Delete. Backspace. Delete. The cycle continues until days have passed and I’ve made no progress.

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Terri Guillemets

Have you ever faced a severe case of Writer’s Block?

There is nothing more humbling then proclaiming to be a writer and not being able to write. It is the equivalent of water not being wet, wind not blowing, or violets that aren’t purple. It is unnatural!

During these trying times I have acquired a couple of successful methods to break me out of my funk.

#1 -Remove the censer: Chaos Theory

Pull up the topic that you’ve chosen in your mind. Revisit what makes you passionate about this topic. Why? Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. Next, write without ceasing until you have a few pages on the subject. If it is a poem you are writing then throw in extra stanzas (even if they break rhyming or metric patterns).

Don’t delete ANYTHING.

Once you have thrown everything that you can think of at the topic leave it alone for a day or two. When you return you may be able to pull from this randomness and create order proving that the desired piece was always inside of you.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright

#2 –Prime the Pump

My most successful method to stimulate writing is to forget the topic that I’ve been working on and write about nature. The thought process of trying to explain the norms of this earthly world with new words is moving. From broken blinds to crumbled leaves to brown spots in the grass where my garbage can sits… there are infinite possibilities.

My experience is that once I start to write about any area with a sense of “awe” and amazement then everything else that was turned off internally turns back on. Unexpected thoughts that are totally foreign to grass or leaves or butterflies slip in and dance through my subconscious. The frantic mental fighting gives way to conscious clarity and righteous revelation.

I liken this process to when basketball player’s do a lay-up line. The whole intent is to get the individual into rhythm. Once I’m in “writing rhythm” my mind is back discerning between the almost right word and the right word. It makes me feel as though I’m a scribe and the story I’m writing exist out in the atmosphere and it is merely my task to find it and copy it.

Internalizing this, I return to my main topic and push forward, making the unreal real with a dream, a pen, and a pad. I’ve found that my confidence coupled with my candid take on a situation can separate the wall that stopped my writing flow brick by brick.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.  ~Joan Baez

Image by flckr user mikebaird

In the course of a normal week I interact with bloggers, singers, songwriters, poets, and novelists. Most of these extremely talented individuals fall into the category “undiscovered.” Loosely translated this means unpaid. Yet, the energy and zeal that radiates off of a vessel that’s plugged into their passion is undeniable. I’m left asking the question, Will everyone who’s talented and works hard become rich and famous? No.

Truth is the chance to be a household name as a poet or writer is a shallow source of motivation.

So why does one spend hundreds of hours over a lifetime writing and singing and practicing in pursuit of perfection?

The Non-Explanation, Explanation

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I want to go “where everybody knows my name.” The hope of endless income, thousands of fans, dozens of publishing contracts and performance opportunities sounds like a dream.

Still when I assess the range of outcomes that may result from my work as a writer I have to face the fact that there are few guarantees.

Again I ask, “Why write?”

Here’s why. I once wrote a piece that defied all my normal ingredients. I like free verse. This piece had a rhyming pattern. I generally write longer poems that dig deep into my topic. This was short and to the point. Even in poetry, I love happy endings. This piece ends with an air of uncertainty.  I tucked this poem, Tomorrow Knows, away for nearly a year before I shared it at a poetry reading in our campus library.

As expected, this was the piece that got overlooked out of the three that I performed. I eventually put the words of this poem to music and it became a song.

Many years have passed and I still look back and smile with admiration and glee at this piece. It captured something that none of my other poems every reached to articulate. To me, that’s enough. I hate to sound selfish but I write just as much for myself as I do for all of my potential readers. If the piece brings a smile to my face every time I read it then I accept that as a success.

The Breakthrough

Out of the blue, a good friend sent me a message saying that she shared this piece of poetry with a group and one of the listeners were rendered speechless. Later she would find out that the words gave voice to a collection of emotions that she was never able to clearly express before.

Why write? Because someone somewhere has had a nearly identical experience as yours.
Why write? Because someone somewhere has never had an experience remotely close to yours.

Why write?

Write for the non-writer who looks for cleaver ways to get out all of the unique experiences that life invites in. The waves, the trees, even the rocks will cry out if you refuse to share the beauty that your hands were meant to pen. Write to cast away the dark clouds so the sunlight can shine through. Write to mend the broken by releasing the beauty that is “you.”

Image by Flckr user: Valeriana Solaris

Tell us a little about yourself?

My name is Apollo Poetry, that is my legal name now. I changed my last name to Poetry. I have been doing poetry for over 15 years. I am also a film maker, photographer and an author. I started a project called the Traveling Poet project, that is a project that is using poetry as a bridge to create peace.

Tell us about your journey?

It started a few years ago. I was meditating in Sedona and I had this really amazing dream in meditation and I found my true passions – travel and poetry and I thought: He – travelingpoet.com and bought the domain and had the website built in a couple of days and started planning the tour. That’s one of the things about dreams – if you have an idea, I think the idea came to you for a reason, so it’s up to you to just go for it.

What are you hoping to achieve with the traveling poet show?

What I noticed was that in most high schools all across America they were actually losing funding in the arts. In the early 1900s poetry was actually taught in high schools but now they don’t even have art, poetry or music. To me creating is one of the most important things in the entire universe, that’s what the entire universe is based on. It’s based on creation and motivation and thinking about expansion so to me music, poetry and self expression is very important so I decided to create these programs where I went to high schools and got kids riled up about poetry.

How did you get into poetry?

I like to think poetry got into me. I like to think that we are all poetry and all of us are scripting our stories all the time. Poetry is more than just writing down, it has become a perspective for me. I started writing a few years ago and I just love the fact that you can take your thoughts which are invisible and put them on paper and create something.

Do you see yourself as a vessel for the message?

I’m on the line about channeling. I do think that everyone is channeling something but not in the way that most people use the word. I do think everything is made of energy so you just have to let the energy come through you.

How are you able to fund your passions?

Everything is definitely a step process. I have plans to go through every country in Africa, it’s not like I have the funds to do that right now, but when I started this vision I did not have the funds to go around the country (the USA) and 3 months later I was going around the country because I was focusing my intent on doing that – I got sponsorships. It really is about where I wanna focus my energy and I believe that’s true for everybody.

What has following your dreams taught you about life?

Through my travels and through my poems I have learned that different people have different perspectives. Poetry has taught me to respect other people’s opinions, most of the time we judge people from such limited pieces of information; we don’t even know what their lives are like. Nothing is more powerful than when a person stands behind a microphone and shares their perspective with me.

One of my visions for next year is to take poets from conflicting countries; have one poet from Israel and one poet from Iran and have them do a group poem together through skype and just unite the world through expression.

Video performance by Apollo

To listen to the full interview with Apollo go to Speak 2B Free radio at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/speak2bfree/2011/05/25/the-traveling-poet