It’s been a busy poetry week, not to mention the revving up for the holidays (which I don’t participate in at full bore). I’ve been to two readings and met with three different workshop groups. I had on my schedule to go to another reading this afternoon, but decided to stay home instead. Starting in October it was my intention to branch out more into the poetry community here in L.A. until I’m off and traveling later in the spring. I’ve made it a point to attend and participate in more workshops, readings and events in the local Southern California area–to get a taste of who’s doing what. I also wanted to do more open mic readings, to get myself out there. What I’m understanding more and more is that although I often enjoy these outings and find them useful in my own process, not to mention supporting fellow-poets, they can be a drain on my creative energy. It’s not just the physical aspect of driving the L.A. streets and freeways to get to these things and staying up a little later than would be my preference. It’s more about realizing that there is only so much of other people’s poetry and opinions my psyche can handle, quite a bit of which I don’t find useful and often times find detrimental in enhancing my own creative process. Suffice it to say, I’ll be cutting back on some of these excursions and pinpointing those activities that really do have the maximum amount of juice for the effort—small get togethers with writers I know and trust to be honest and supportive and quality readings where the poet uplifts and inspires with their work and with their humanity. (Such as the reading last Monday by Robert Hass.)

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a “poet.” What I’ve come up with is that I’m not interested in being any one thing and truthfully, what I’ve observed in our cultural is that there is way too much baggage that comes along with any particular label and I don’t want the parts that never will apply to me and the parts I don’t want to ever apply. I know that sounds rather vague, but the distinction really is between being tagged as falling into a general category or being me, Hari Bhajan, with all the subsets underneath: Woman, Mother, Daughter, Wife, Friend, Sikh, Life Coach, Business Administrator, Writer of Poems, Workshop Facilitator, etc. You get the idea. It’s way less pressure not to feel squeezed into a mold that will never quite fit and actually be a distraction from the truth of the whole, of who I am.

Oh, by the way, a regular reader mentioned the other day that she hadn’t seen any of my poems in the e-letter or on the blog in quiet awhile. The reason is that I’ve been submitting many of my poems to journals for publication these last few months and generally they do not accept any work that has been previously published, even if it’s on your own website. The good news is (well, it’s good news for me, anyway) several of my poems will be appearing in issues of journals around the country very soon. I’ll keep you updated on which ones with links to their sites. The latest two are at Poetic Diversity, an online journal that published a poem in their August issue and Lilliput Review, which is a small journal devoted to small poems. In their most recent issue, #159, they published the poem Spirito, which I wrote for my father on his 85th birthday, just a few months before he passed away.

Here’s a little Christmas fun for you…our next door neighbor, Billy, and his family built a gingerbread house to enter into a contest to benefit a charity. It had to be constructed of all edible materials. My husband helped them load it into their SUV to take to the hotel where they were all being displayed. I haven’t heard how it fared in the contest. I don’t think Billy much cared. He was just having a good time putting it together. It’s really quite amazing!!