What I Assume

I’m reading Nabokov’s “Ada” for the second time, and am struck by how authentically the author seems to love his characters, regardless of their flaws. To love a “round” character is to engage in an unconditional love, much like we often project upon God–a claim which, I understand, does nothing to reduce melodramatic conceptions of the author as god-like.

I’m working on a long work of fiction myself this year, and it is a frustrating and overwhelming experience. Nine days out of ten I sit down to write and must combat myself. I do not want to return to the story, do not want to smooth out the wrinkles as I go, untangle the knots that I’ve tied, or twist new rope and tie new knots for links. Part of the problem, I’m realizing, is that I may not love my characters as much as other authors do. I know them, I try to distinguish between them, I think I understand them, many of them I respect and admire, many of them I have just contempt for, and some I do feel a paternal love for, but do I love them all?

It may be that as I am only 1/3 of the way through the writing, and I am dealing with 6 protagonists and just as many antagonists, the characters have not developed enough on the pages yet to allow for a recognition of them as authentic, independent beings. And how can one love a thing of mere fiction; one can only love fictional things that represent and mean real things.

Hmm, hmm.

I dug this out of a moleskine I’d used on the ferry from Plymouth to Santander in 2007. I revised it as I typed it.

How the rainy years do vaporize!
Each day more translucent than the others!
We ache across the fog of gaping love
like estranged brothers,
throwing breadcrumbs to the wind-blown skies.

April has been declared National Poetry Month by poets.org, and a week into the month Chris Lott described how he planned to write a poem each day in line with NaPoWriMo. The name NaPoWriMo is lamely appropriated from NaNoWriMo, the generally obnoxious National Novel Writing Month wherein artistic conflates attempt to burn through writing a novel in 30 days. While the energy of NaNoWriMo inspires me in the same way the discipline and fervor of Ray Bradbury’s practice does, the idea of an organized, collectively proceeding writing effort frustrated and annoyed me, particularly since it clearly valued quantity over quality. It certainly favored people who had no jobs (a surprisingly large crowd, by the way). Add to that the vocal dominance of NaNoWriMo participants who are either self-aggrandizing or self-degrading, and I knew this was not an activitiy to me.

But Chris Lott’s engagement in NaPoWriMo intriguiged me; a poem-per-day struck me as do-able, and Chris’s very practical list of self-imposed “rules” demonstrated that he, at least, wasn’t afraid to do his own thing, independently. The idea of joining him in this effort also provoked some vague feelings of comeradery, so I chose to do the same, though I rejected the name NaPoWriMo and simply called my efforts “poem-per-day”. My hope was that I would stick to the schedule and thus forcibly return myself to writing poetry, a pasttime that I’ve sorely neglected in the last 6 years. The goal of writing one poem per day would be rigorous, but not so difficult as to negate the quality of the poems I was working on. I soon realized that quality could be a priority, but in the confines of whatever hour or two I had each day to put a poem together, it was impossible to make each poem “good”.

Though I can’t speak to the quality of my output during April, I did hit quite close to the mark in terms of quantity: from April 6th through April 30th I wrote 26 poems, and posted these on my web site, What I Assume. I wrote nearly every morning before work, and spent a few evenings catching up. On several days what I wrote were more poetic exercises than full-fledged poems. A couple of the poems I thought were good at the time of writing, and I know most of the poems had at least one good line, but I think only in retrospect, some months later, will I be able to look back with any sort of objectivity.

Another interesting phenomenon had to do with my choice of subjects. I began with a string of fairly gloomy, stereotypical subjects for a poetaster, but soon found myself terribly bored and in fact embarrassed with the uniformity. So I urged myself to change subjects, mash-up exclusive ideas, and write on things I really wasn’t comfortable writing on.

To add to the excitement of writing a poem-per-day, in the first week I also threw down the gauntlet and challenged Chris to write a villanelle sometime during the weekend. We both did, then he reciprocated my challenge with the torturous ghazal. I returned the final weekend with the deceptively simple-looking bref double. These excursions into poetic forms was both frustrating and delighting; I’ve always loved poetic forms, and in college fancied myself apt at writing formal poetry. But either I oversupposed my abilities back then, or I’ve lost quite a bit of of ability since then. What fascinated me in writing these forms is despite their apparent artificiality, their formal elements help, or rather, force the author to carry through certain themes, ideas, images, or resonances. And while I’ve often thought that formal meter and rhythm risked neglecting meaning or intent, I found the limitations–particularly in length of lines and stanzas–directed me to focus on my meaning and intention more precisely, and with less waste.

At least that was my perception during the writing; what the final outcome is, I’m too timid to suppose right now. But this very strong and impactful month is an experience that I intend to repeat–not next year, probably not the year after, but not too far in the future. It is a precious, exhausting experience that was worth every ounce of extra effort, but that I do not want to normalize by making it an annual tradition. But some year, some day, I will sit down again and decide, “Poem-per-day, for the next thirty days.”