Where There Is Nothing: A Lantern #WritingwithWoolf #NaPoWriMo2020 #NationalPoetryMonth

For National Poetry Month, I am writing poems inspired by words, sentences, or ideas in Virginia Woolf’s Diaries.

In an attempt to keep depression at bay in 1926, Virginia Woolf uses several entires to try to capture her “state of mind” as she feels “the waves” rolling over her, trying to drown her. I was struck by the line “where there is nothing” and her observation that keeping her mind busy–the opposite of that “where there is nothing” state–helped. That line made me reflect upon the process of writing itself and how words somehow emerge from where there is nothing.

The form today is new to me–a lantern, apparently so called because it resembles a Japanese lantern? The syllable count is 1 2 3 4 1.

Day #7: Where There Is Nothing: A Lantern

first
there is
nothing but
silence, then a
word