Words rediscovered

It is time for me to admit an onslaught of writer's block, the likes of which I have never had before.

Writing for the newspaper, the job that pays my bills, and writing for my own pleasure are two distinctly different entities that rarely cross paths. What's the reason for the lack of crossover, you ask? Well, the answer is that I am not a prose writer by habit or choice. That is to say I shy away from writing short stories, beginning the next great American novel or anything more lengthy than a few pages with a great many line breaks.

I am a poet by desire and attention span.

Of late, my line breaks and free verse seem to have dried up and left in its place is the activity that got me started in this business of molding words in the first place — reading.

I didn't become the carnivorous reader I am today until much later in life than one would imagine.

Until the discovery of a stigmatism, I didn't have my glasses and reading was a painful proposition at best. And after my glasses, there was, of course, the adjustment to being a girl who wore glasses.

After I had learned to embrace my glasses, I cracked open my first lengthy book and it has been all downhill from there.

While still in the world of academia, I found that I enjoyed reading that which was well outside the scope of my course studies; books of beat poetry, post-modern novels about social hierarchy and works of fiction that bordered on experimental.

Now that I have been removed from three-hour workshop classes and reading assignments I find myself drawn to the works I should have read in college; Chaucer, Dante, Zola and so on.

It is the words of other people that usually force me out of my own wordlessness and give me the refreshed point of view that is essential when trying to sound world weary and wise at 23.

In the past, I have turned to poets whose work I admire and read often, including Neruda and Harjo.

Neruda, a Latin American poet, had the ability to make a woman sound like a landscape to be worshiped. He could make something as ordinary as a chair sound like a shrine to someone's sacred posterior. His use of language has always astounded me in its expansive simplicity.

Harjo is a Native American poet, one that I was fortunate enough to hear give a reading during my college days. She was much less majestic than I had envisioned, but as she began to read from her latest collection of poetry, she took on the inherent posture of a person with royal blood. She addressed the grim and grotesque, the light-hearted and airy with candor that made the entire reading mesmerizing.

The tradition of translating observations of the world into something for everyone is one that I hope to follow in the future.

But for now, I will have to continue to read in hopes of unblocking the not-so-aged words of wisdom I hope to impart to the few people currently privy to my poetic work.

I'll keep you posted.

Pam Robel is the Columbia Basin Herald's news and sports assistant.