where's poetry

I have not written a poem in three years. That is a terrible sentence to look at. I continue to publish poems, but not write them. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever write again in this way.

I stopped writing poems after a graduate seminar in poetry, during a semester in which my mother got very ill--I so desperately wanted to write about the experience of seeing her again, of visiting Boston, of the statue in the courtyard of the hospital, a mother and child sculpted in dark granite. My mother's doctor told me that in winter, snow filled the mother's lap. I could see rowers on the Charles River and the black skeletons of trees from my mother's hospital window. I really couldn't come back to school and write of these things in the way I wanted, or let them "simmer" awhile. It is hard to lose poetry, which is the thing I really am drawn to; losing it was the very thing I feared most about going to graduate school.
There are certain experiences I can speak of only in poetry.

Still, today I bought The Wild Braid, a small book on Stanley Kunitz, and realize now what had been so destructive during that semester, forcing poems the way people will force bulbs out of season--there is a point in the book in which Kunitz says, "You must be very careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin." I honestly think now that is what happened--that in forcing the poems, I ignored the wild root of how poetry really does work in me. I can't believe still that I have not yet recovered, but I do see hints of the "wild origin" coming back as I continue to do Morning Pages. I realize now why the process is called "artistic recovery." Hopefully as I keep puttering around, a poem will put its leaf out for me again, maybe when I least expect it.