Jill Alexander Essbaum
Never wait for inspiration to strike. Strike back! Do exercises, weird ones, obnoxious ones, strange ones. I take other people's poems and 'translate' them into English, then 'translate' the translation... If you do that enough times eventually you have something so far removed from the source that it's your own (or, alternately and what usually happens with me, is that a bell dings and I have an entirely unrelated idea and then that's the rabbit I chase). I ask other friends to feed me lines to riff on. I feed them lines. I take single words and meditate on them and write throw-away pieces. It's imperative however to write daily. Even if it's crap. Especially if it's crap.
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