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.

Ethics

I've been doing some of that inevitable, silly New Year Syndrome thinking, mainly about my writing and what I hope to accomplish in the near future. Aside from the more concrete goals, lingering in me also is a kind of desire to express myself more authentically than I ever have. I don't know how common this is for other writers, but somewhere between what's in my head and the words that actually get written, there's always a filter keeping the piece I'm writing from being organically "me". It's of me, obviously, but I've begun to feel that's not enough.

And then, strangely, I came across the poem "Ethics" by C.K. Williams:

"I want to act not because I've coerced myself to,
but because I'll have responded from the part of myself
that precedes will, residing in intrinsic not projected virtue."

 Which more or less nails my point. But I wonder how easily any of us could go about even bringing to the surface that buried part of us acting in a way that "precedes will." It requires, I would think, an ability to exist in one's own head and strain out any consciousness of how those around us think and function (as if writing isn't already a lonely enough job).

I mean, even to stop and consider everything that influences our thoughts and actions on a daily basis - books, advertising, other great (and, unfortunately, not so great) human minds, the severity of rush hour traffic - is overwhelming. I hit up a damn Wendy's, the other night, just because I saw their ad on TV. Filters aren't just created by us, but everything operating around us, so I think it'll be a challenge to block them without a Thoreau-like effort to remove myself from society.

And then there are the things that positively influence creativity, like nature, that you wouldn't necessarily want to excise from your brain. But I suppose it's easy to be more accepting of that imposing on your thoughts and actions, nature being, you know, natural and stuff.

"I have no wish to be good, or pure - inconceivable that -
but I wish not to have to consider who I am or might be
before I project myself into quandaries or conflicts."

All I know is I'm ready to stop composing poems about others' thoughts on cats and start writing ones about my hatred of cats.