Records

For as long as I can remember, I've been the sort of person who keeps records of various facets of my life.I don't consider myself a sappy sort of person, in any way, but I think there's a misconception about recorders being sappy, sentimental types, really.  I don't know the origin of this habit, but I've always noticed in others a lack of attention to the details around them, and perhaps it's my way of filling in those gaps in observed things/events/moments/whatever. As you can imagine, I enjoy lists, so allow me to attempt to expand on this statement:

I kept a written diary throughout most of my adolescence and started a five-year journal a couple of years ago. I made mix tapes of my favorite songs on the radio that I still have, decades later (in addition to VHS tapes of a similar nature, with my favorite music videos and band interviews). I keep a list of books I've read that dates back several years. I date practically everything, whether it's a handwritten note to someone or a to-do list. I write events in my planner even after they've happened, just in case I need to go back and recount something. I make a strong attempt to keep every draft and edit of every poem/story/novel/play/whatever I write, which all writers know, can amount to dozens of copies of hundreds of pieces, which leads into yet another idiosyncrasy: my flash drives that contain the entirety of my college work, the entirety of my writing (dating back to my teens, anyway, and though the obsessive record keeper in me laments not having any sort of copy of my writing as a child, my more rational self understands there would be little point in hanging on to such embarrassments), pictures covering the past decade, and every miscellaneous file from my adulthood, including old online chats with friends, resumes and work-related diatribes (I once wrote what can only be described as a manifesto detailing the management of a gift department at my job - yes, indeed, I do not mess around), and past submissions to literary journals.

(This is the part, by the way, where many of you tell me I'm not crazy and alone in having this quirk, that during your longer-than-it-should-have-lasted childhood geology phase, you also kept notes on the names and types of rocks you found, including when and where you found them. Basically normal, right?)

I should clarify that none of this feels as exhausting as it comes across here. I suppose doing it for the majority of my life makes it very second nature, after a while. Now, this tendency has been heightened tenfold, since I've ventured into parenting. Hard to believe I could become even more obsessive than I already was, but I suppose it makes sense, since I'm now not just keeping a record of my own life, but someone else's, as well. There was the pregnancy journal beforehand, which was a little too sentimental for my taste, admittedly, but I kept it, in the event I ever want to recall the experience (an experience we probably forget much of, over time). Then of course, after the spawn emerges, there's the saying you hear constantly from those around you: "Enjoy it all, it goes by so fast."

For the record (oh, the pun-ery), I've often found myself disagreeing with that, as parenting has made me feel entire years of my life have gone by in the span of a few months. But that's beside the point. Fast, you say? Well, then, I must record it all! There are the baby/toddler books...also overly sentimental, but more important than the typical milestone photos, in my opinion, are the sometimes copious notes I've taken about his accomplishments, his likes and dislikes, his mannerisms, and his routines.

The one record-related thing I do that technology likely limited previous generations from doing is I take pictures of him every day. Or I try to, anyway; a day inevitably gets skipped, here or there. And part of the reason I do it is that it enables me to permanently capture something that many don't think to capture - daily life.

Nowadays, it seems, we're obsessed with milestone photo shoots. Engagement photos, wedding photos, pregnancy photos, newborn, six months, one year, birthdays, first day of school, piano recitals, prom, etc. These are all occasions worthy of photos, but they're also the events we're not likely to forget, and as of late, I've become more interested in getting pictures of what I likely won't remember years from now - my spawn's day-to-day life. Riding in the car, eating lunch, chatting with stuffed animals, playing with our dogs. I'll also take photos of seemingly un-photogenic things, like the back of his head or his foot or his face when he's upset. People think I'm crazy.

And obviously, I don't care. Because I'm obsessive and on a mission. The fact of the matter is, I've already forgotten what the hell he was like even just a year ago, and for someone who somewhat obsessively records life and its surroundings, the solution starts with the realization that what is mundane in our lives today may become some endlessly fascinating tidbit we yearn for, later. My effort is largely to become more conscious of the little things I want to remember - and to record as many of them as I can.

Word Babies

I'm wondering if, for now, I need to get away from the idea of completing a collection of poetry. Of the three dozen or so poems I wrote in the past two months, I managed to salvage nine. Which is far less than I'd wanted to pull from that group. In addition, none of them (or only maybe two or three at a time) are cohesively bonding in an I Want To Be In A Book Next To You way. So my goals, for the most part, sit stagnant and incomplete.

In getting away from the mindset of a larger collection and focusing on groups of three at a time, however, I realize the latter is a method that leads to vitality in one's writing, whether writing a book or not. It's an obvious point - editing requires meticulous attention and focus on the small parts that improve the quality of the whole - but one that I tend to forget when I've got the bigger picture of a project in mind. My attentions are so scattered, for that of a writer, really. I can never grasp how poets write a whole book around the same theme, as I sometimes can't stick to one subject for more than one poem, even. This, all added to the fact that by the time I got around to this three-dozen-poem batch, hardly any of it showed any promise of getting to a polished state...likely because I've read a lot of poetry in the interim and learned much more about writing it and how I want to write it. It's exasperating. If there's such thing as learning too fast for one's own means of creation, I own said conundrum.

Yet another comparison is illustrated between writing and parenting; both are unpredictable and entirely in control of your achievement, and you're only as good and strong as your weakest one.

NaPoWriMo

One of the stigmas surrounding National Poetry Writing Month (and other events of its kind, such as National Novel Writing Month and Script Frenzy) is that it compels would-be writers to trudge to their desks for a month and churn something out (that serves the main goal of quantity over quality), while they spend the other eleven months of the year ignoring literature completely. I have but two retorts for that notion. While I don't know how the statistics break down when looking at the entire participant pool, most of the participants I come across are regular year-round writers who take part in these events for various reasons. Personally, I like the change of pace. I write all the time, but certainly not as much as I'd like to have time for, and one month is a decent amount of time in which one can increase focus and output - it's reasonable for most people with busy lives to take on any of these month-long events and accomplish something substantial.

As for others who do only come out and write during these months, so what? I've been working steadily on projects for a few years now, but I certainly know what it's like to be in a rut, and if NaPoWriMo can be the catalyst for increased productivity, all the better. Hell, it's great when it gets virtual non-writers to adopt the craft. More writers, more poems. And I don't necessarily subscribe to the theory that that's a good thing...but you know, poetry is vastly under-appreciated, and it really can take just one person's verse to inspire someone else to dive further into the medium. It doesn't have to be solely about quantity over quality, either; you can achieve both by building some mental notes and ideas beforehand, as well as making tentative plans for the project's destination afterward.

That is all, getting off the soapbox, now.

Poem At The Bakery

The Bakery posts freshly baked, tasty poems, and mine is one of them. Read and/or listen to Seesaw here, and definitely check out their archive, as well.

Mission: Conquer Library

I've known it for a while, but I was recently forced to face the fact, while going through my books, that among the writers I list as my "favorite", there isn't a single one whose entire body of work I've read. Atwood, Roth, Murakami, Denis Johnson - all writers I'm loyally devoted to, but I haven't read any of them extensively.

It's not a crime, obviously. I can only assume I'm not alone in this. Furthermore, I can still list Dostoevsky as a favorite, even if I end up hating something of his when I read it years from now for the first time. And yet, I've never felt quite right calling myself a huge fan of someone when I haven't read all their work.

My goal, this year, is to begin rectifying that. Which is also somewhat of a disguise for another goal - to read the books that are already on my shelf, instead of acquiring more. At the top of my list is to get through most of John Ashbery's poetry, and I don't know where I'll go from there. Some more DeLillo, some more Vonnegut, some more Nabokov. We shall see.

Jubilee Hitchhiker

I have mixed feelings upon finishing William Hjortsberg's biography on Richard Brautigan (which I won't go into here, because I already did here), but the one side of it I enjoyed more than any other was his journey through the writing and publication process. Before his major works were published, Brautigan, like most writers, received a lot of rejections, and the recurring reason was that publishers felt his work lacked cohesiveness as a novel. Known for short works with short, often disjointed, chapters and an arguably nontraditional plot structure and language style, Brautigan was probably considered experimental for his time, off-kilter, at the least.

What fascinates me is that he never once took such rejections as any kind of sign that he should change the style of his work. Somewhere in his head, he held such a certainty about, and passion for, the type of work he was doing that he could persist and proceed without doubt, until his career finally took off and he could bask in the results of his hard work. Perhaps I was partly getting caught up in the drama of "persistence in the face of rejection" narrative, laid out in a biographical format.

Partly. The other part of me was forcing myself to admit that my intrigue over Brautigan's professional rise comes from the fact that I am a writer with a lot of doubt. I have a passion for the craft, but I've never had the kind of solid direction in my work that Brautigan had. I'm constantly veering off into different language styles and poetic forms and what-have-you. If my work evolves into a different style, I often wonder if it's the style in which I'm meant to express myself. How does one know? In my entire body of work, published and not, there's only been one project that's struck me with such meaning and significance that I knew instantly it was the direction my work was meant to take. But I can't replicate that every time, because I don't know how I came to that conclusion. It just felt right, like home or a warm puppy or a Toaster Strudel.

Poem In Dressing Room Poetry Journal

My poem "Camera" appears in issue two of Dressing Room Poetry Journal, and you can read it for FREE here. Definitely read the rest of the issue, as well, if you get a chance. I don't often come across a new journal that's off to such a great start, but the work they've featured so far is impressive and I find myself rereading much of it.