Raw Feed

As many of you know, I have all the poems I’ve written since 2003 (and a few from before then) in a binder, sorted into five loose subjects: Religion, Therapy, People, Nature/Metaphors, and Writing.

It used to be that I had that binder close at hand at all times. I would take it places so I could show them to people or explain myself with a poem I had already written.

Then I stopped taking it places, but I still always knew where it was.

Then it started getting in the way and I moved it here and there.

Then I wouldn’t think about it much at all until I suddenly panicked slightly when I couldn’t quite remember where I’d put it.

That happened yesterday. My Poet’s Market 2005 is still out on the coffee table, as is a mound of poems I wrote on scraps of paper but haven’t typed up and edited yet. But I looked for my binder and couldn’t remember where I’d put it. Then I found it, but couldn’t find the poem I was looking for.

Suddenly I realized as I flipped through the binder that I had not filed any poems in it later than 2005. I looked in the pocket of unfiled poems and saw that there weren’t any there later than 2006. The few poems I have written in 2007 still sit in that untyped pile on my coffee table, or lurking in various notebooks I had with me at the time.

People (especially my first cousin once removed, the published poet Nancy Williams) have asked me why I haven’t submitted my poems for publication. They’re good, they tell me. I know, I reply. I’m quite sure that, if I submitted some of my best ones and the places I tried didn’t accept them, it would mean I’d chosen the wrong publications and just needed to keep trying.

Of course, this puzzles people. If I am so sure of myself, why haven’t I done it? I told them I didn’t feel like spending the time. After all, I have a job that seems sometimes to consume my whole life.

Now I’m pretty sure this was a kind of resistance (ala The War of Art). One of the things the author talks about is how one of our biggest fears is fear of success. How will succeeding at what we were made for change us? How will the world knowing I am a poet change me? How will I have to live differently?

Frankly, I felt like a fraud. I had stopped writing, stopped actively seeking poems, by the time most people were suggesting I submit them.

Writing poems to me has always been mostly about getting out of the way so the vision has a chance to speak. I don’t often have much control over how they initially come out, and I certainly don’t control whether or not people think they’re good. After some time being completely true to how they arrived on paper, I realized that editing them is not a violation, that it’s really just a way to make sure that what’s on paper is really representing the vision I got as accurately as possible. But I have to be careful not to let the vision get stale or fade away, or editing is like hacking through a jungle for the hell of it.

No matter how much I tried to express to people that the poems just come, people praised me. I started to get a swelled head about my own modesty. (By the way, people who know me well also know I’m not modest. Sometimes I am unself-confident, but when I am confident, I am not modest. My modesty should have been a clue that something else was going on here.)

Then the poems slowed to a trickle. The poems I wrote started coming from me, not from that mysterious other place. Needless to say, they weren’t as good and they didn’t feel right.

Of course, giving up then was also resistance. The reason there’s a section about writing in my binder is that the river keeps trying to break through and tell me that it’s still there, that I’m forgiven, that I need to start writing again, that it’s not too late. Now that I think about it, I think the act of showing up every day would let me work through the me stuff back to that other stuff, the real thing.

As I’ve come to realize in so many things, there’s no other way than through. Roll up your jeans and start wading, honey.

The poems used to come when I was, as they say in therapy, doing my work. I wrote morning pages, I prayed and meditated, then whatever crap I was dealing with would somehow be answered by a poem, or two, or three. Or I’d do all that and the poem would appear on the bus. Sometimes it would appear while driving, which was annoying because I had to get to wherever I was going with this scrap of poem in my head and not forget it. In the best times I would end up editing it in my head to be even better, or adding to it. In the worst of times I would forget it and it would never return. The most persistent ones would come back later. Some of those damn things wouldn’t leave me alone for weeks.

Occasionally I would get stuck, because the poem that wanted to be written wasn’t the one I wanted to write. So it would block my way like a sumo wrestler. You don’t deal with me, you don’t get any more. After a few weeks of running, I would submit to being poetry’s bitch, work through the crap, write the poem (which was often a really good one — do you begin to understand how writing a great poem is often an f.u. to the ego rather than a compliment to it?), and then be able to write other stuff.

This time I’ve been running away for so long now that who knows what I have to work through. But I’ve taken the first step: I’ve committed to showing up to this blog every night. I was tired tonight. I didn’t want to. I did anyway. It will get worse. Pray for me or root for me as your belief system permits.

Here’s my plan for what’s next.

Second step: Type up the old poems lying around.

Third step: Print them and file all the unfiled ones in the binder.

Fourth step: Here’s where I get confused. This week I haven’t done morning pages, because I stay up so late blogging that I don’t want to get up early and write more.

Sometimes when I do morning pages, I get locked up in my own perspective and lose sight of the world. Right now, with my focus on blogging, I worry that I will get locked up in the story I want to tell others rather than dealing with my own stuff. Clearly I need a balance.

After my initial foray into it, I realized I should never do seven days a week of morning pages. Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way — she’s where the idea of morning pages comes from) is great, but she doesn’t know me. I could write about myself all day. This is not healthy, and in large quantities it is counter-productive. I get morose and start wanting to fix everything I perceive as wrong — and under my own microscope of self-contemplation, every flaw becomes a huge chasm. Although it takes more than that for me to lose my sense of humor, I definitely lose my sense of perspective.

In fact, this happened to me last week. Only a reality-check lunch with a friend and that book The War of Art saved me. Man, was I getting worked up about not much.

So what’s balance for me, then? Who knows. I guess I have to keep trying out different combinations.

Fifth step: Submit my best (and most relevant, of course) poems to the journal Nancy edits. I really like this journal, so I think it might help to subscribe.

Sixth step: I’ve read advice to aspiring poets that you should read other people’s poetry. Here’s what I don’t like about that: A lot of it really sucks. I just get arrogant. “My stuff is better than that. What a waste of print.” Maybe I should widen it to say, Read what inspires me.

The choir sang a song this past Sunday that had words that I think were from a George Herbert poem. Suddenly I want to read some George Herbert. OK, cool, time to look into that.

I bet I can find other artists who have things that get me inspired: poets, writers, graphic novelists, photographers, musicians.

I don’t want to read other poems to study the craft. I don’t want to deconstruct my own poems at this point. Maybe I want to put some well-written stuff into the hopper that is my unconscious and see what it spits out, but this is not journalism — I do not want to make the inspiration march to the beat of specific rules and regulations.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these are good tools for editing — the very linguistic analysis I did in my French Lit thesis on that Baudelaire poem could now help me to figure out why one line sounds right and another one doesn’t quite work. I’m just really afraid to kill the tiny seedling sprout with too many Baby Einstein videos, if you know what I’m saying.

I don’t have a great big whammo conclusion here, except that I intend to keep showing up. I have presented a problem and I have action items (I do love working in the corporate world). Now I need to go forth and action. Wish me luck as I start wading.

This book is a graphic novel. I love graphic novels — I loved Maus, and Persepolis — and I love the comic strip Alison Bechdel is known for, Dykes to Watch Out For, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I was still unprepared for how much this book resonated with me.

The book is really a memoir of her father, a closeted homosexual who died when she was 20 in what may or may not have been suicide. It was a family that seemed mostly to communicate through books and ideas while seeming unable to communicate their emotions. It’s clear that this book is both a continuation of that intellectual method of dealing with the world, and at the same time a deliberate attempt to confront the emotional confusion of a very complicated relationship.

In a way, graphic novels are like poetry, except that where a poem is a kind of snapshot (and yet also a kind of very short story), each panel of a graphic novel is its own snapshot. Rather than lay the whole story out in a linear fashion, Bechdel chooses to revisit it from a series of angles, almost as if she can only bear to go in so far before she has to retreat, or as if the truth is so tangled up that she starts out heading for the middle but ends up on the other side without really going all the way through.

On a level I can’t explain, that’s exactly right. I can never explain in one fell swoop who my mother was, what my relationship was with her, what my childhood was like and felt like. I can only chip it off in little pieces. Mine are poems (I tried prose and couldn’t bear it for very long so the rest would get flat, like I had already checked out); hers are cartoons. But the artistic grace of her panels is breathtaking. The layers of meaning — the depths behind the most mundane acts she shows — are sometimes heartbreaking. I read the book a couple of weeks ago and now it’s Aaron’s turn, but I keep going back and reading bits of it again.

More and more I find myself resisting works that are depressing, so why do I love this book so much? Because in the end, it is uplifting. Somehow by working her way through some of the muddle, Bechdel redeems her father to herself. As I reread the last two lines, they are still choking me up. Using the metaphor of Icarus, she says,

“He did hurtle into the sea, of course.

“But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept.”

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how you lose even what you most try to hold onto. As I continue to live on the West Coast and my parents get older and become less and less like the people I remember, I sometimes panic and feel like I am starting to lose them. Of course, I already lost my mother long ago, and some days it still hurts. But recently I have a revelation that I think is similar to what Bechdel is expressing in the lines I quoted.

In some ways, the parents I grew up with and loved are already gone. In their place are strangers whom it is my choice to get to know, which is what I am doing every week I call them on the phone.

But in some ways, I will always have those parents. They are locked away in my childhood, in my memories, in my heart. No one can ever take them away from me.

What are you most afraid to lose?

Is it already gone?

Isn’t it forever with you?

My friend C checked this out at the library, read it, loved it so much she bought it, and lent it to me. She said she thought of me the whole time she read it.

As soon as I started reading it, I said, Oh. This is why she wants me to read this. It’s perfect.

The subtitle is “Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles.” But that’s even a little too abstract, too nice. I prefer the starkness of the title, because here’s the premise:

It’s a war.

If you’re not doing what you were born to do, creating what you were born to create, you’re losing.

But it’s OK. Because you’ll stop losing once you realize that the very resistance you are collapsing under is a sign that you’re on the right track. You just need to push through it instead of giving up.

You’ve already gotten the punch line of this blog entry, haven’t you? The punch line is why this blog entry even exists right now for you to be reading it. Yes, it’s because I finished the book and realized the only thing to do was to start writing. I was tempted to reread all the best parts, because it was so good. I was tempted to start a triumphant load of laundry. I was tempted to write an e-mail to C and tell her why I was glad she lent me the book. But I realized those were all resistance, too. What I really need to do is write the damn blog.

I have a lot of reasons not to blog. I don’t have time. I have serious concerns about what is and isn’t OK to write, first in a blog, second in a blog whose domain name makes it clear exactly who is writing. I haven’t written in a long time, therefore I will look ridiculous doing it now. People will wonder, “Is this for real this time or will she fade out like the other times and the other blogs she started?” My list of reasons goes on and on, in endless permutations and well-thought-out detail.

All of that is actually crap. I want to write. A lot. Preferably about myself. I have always wanted to write. Laura Ingalls Wilder was my great inspiration. The woman wrote plainly about the most mundane details of her life and it was all utterly fascinating because it was so clear and so different from our time and yet she was so human. I’ve dreamed my whole life of writing, not the Great American Novel, but the Great American Autobiography.

So here I am, showing up. I plan to continue to show up. It’s a guarantee that the works of Shakespeare will not appear here. (Actually, that would be plagiarism, so that’s a good thing.) But it actually doesn’t matter. I’m suddenly at the point where I would rather sling crap onto a Web page every day than live hobbled by my 10 million somewhat rational fears.

Oh, and by the way, read the book. I plan to buy it now, too. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s simultaneously mundane and obvious and clear and piercing and true. I’d like to think you can’t escape reading the book without starting that thing you’ve been putting off that you know you really want to do. At the very least, I didn’t, and I plan to keep starting.

Yesterday was Chrysty’s birthday. Not that you’d know from my blog. Where I wish every single other person I know a happy birthday.

I celebrated her birthday with her on Saturday, at the 60th Annual Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair. But that was days ago!

Happy belated, hon! Now you get out of jail free if you don’t publicly acknowledge my birthday till the 2nd of October.

A friend sent me this video, “In the Dash.” I like this friend very much, so I watched it all the way through. My skull nearly burst out of my skin with boredom and frustration. In fact, I found myself yelling, “Oh, come ON!!!” at the screen at least twice.

Here’s what I wrote her:

“Thank you for thinking of me. The poem is lovely. However, I’m far too impatient for the video — I did watch it to the end, but I kept wanting to “dash”! Or to fast-forward it so I could get to the point. Is that horrible of me?

“I don’t feel that way with real people — I just don’t deal well with inspirational videos.”

I think it might be a generational thing. I don’t know. I’ve gotten them from friends in their 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. However, all my friends in their 30s loathe them and refuse to forward them.

Why the difference? I have no idea. Maybe we OD’d on that kind of thing young. Too many sappy Hallmark cards, too many moving commercials, too much MTV (which is so much faster than sunrise fading to mountain vista fading to closeup of flower fading to…).

I also hate being told to slow down when speeding up is really honest to goodness truly the only way I can even get half of what I want to done. I spent too many early years of my life reexamining my frickin’ priorities. I would now like to LIVE them, thank you very much. And I am. Slowing down to contemplate my navel has been proven to be a bad idea in large quantities. In small quantities, sure. But a video is not gonna do it for me.

If I want to slow down, I’d much rather have tea with the friend who sent me the video. She’s far more delightful, and more beautiful to me than the best generic photo of a sunset.