What I Assume

OR, Casual LinkedIn Connection Leads to Disturbances of Awe and Envy

Ah, the joys and perils of LinkedIn.com. Today I happened to connect with former Logan High School classmate Mike Stocker. Mike and I weren’t ever more than acquaintances, but no matter—LinkedIn and similar Facebook-esque sites are as much about quantity as they are about quality of connections. Glancing through Mike’s connections I spotted another familiar name: Paul Ferny. Whereas Mike and I had been mere acquaintances Paul and I politely ignored each other. Part of this I recall was a bit of jr. high rivalry—at least on my part: I had wanted to be a graphic designer at the time, and Paul was arguably the best artist in the school, being particularly apt at caricatures.

Even so, when I hit Paul’s gallery of oil paintings I was astounded at the stirring and toothsome works featured therein. The blazing power and range of Paul’s work testify to his labors, appropriately shaming those of us who have fallen short of the dream.

A few favorites from Paul Ferny’s online galleries

• The Artwork of Paul Ferny
• Untitled Paintings - Paul Ferny’s Blog

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.”

Every story, every poem, is toxic ectoplasm I Must Expel…

…even if in the end it’s deemed fakerey, insubstantial, or only true for the medium.

The other night at Borders I picked up a few books off of the discount rack: the 2007 Writers Market (the dream persists), a (meagerly) annotated edition of T.S. Eliot’s major poems, and The Best American Poetry 2004.

The latter I picked up out of curiosity more than passion.  Let me now claim to be enthusiastic about poetry, a devotee, an eternal student, a reader, and a listener.  Though I tend to trust most of my precious available reading time to the classics and the Western Canon (to paraphrase Harold Bloom [fair warning for those of you who detest him], Life is Too Short to Read Bad Literature), I do my best to listen to and read new poetry whenever possible.  I usually ‘get’ modern poetry, and believe several living poets to be among the best that American writing has cultivated. Having said that, I haven’t bought a BAP in half a dozen years, perhaps partly out of disappointment but certainly in part out of laziness and disinterest.

My expectations for BAP 2004 were mixed. On the one hand I’ve read enough new poetry to know what to expect: A poem launched from a cliche that turns our understanding on it’s head.  Poems that vigorously attend to white space.  The poem where the narrator does something by himself, reflecting on relationship, strained or wholesome.  The poem that serves up a dated political lambast.  The poem that accuses a part or the whole of civilization (in quotes) of murder or injustice. And maybe, just maybe, a wholly readable poem with brilliant turns of phrase, unusual but precise application of words, and meaning that both provokes and satisfies.

I also expected, structurally, that BAP would start off with it’s strongest poem(s), much like a rock album (Dirty Three and the White Stripes spring to mind for some reason).

But I couldn’t get past page 26 of Best American Poetry 2004.  I had begun reading it at Borders in the cafe, and though I was let down with only mild amusement at the predictable haughtiness of the first poem, Kim Addonzio’s “Chicken”, I continued on, slowly, carefully.  I continued reading at stop lights and even as I sat in the drive-thru of Taco Bell on my way home.  5 or 6 poems in was stupefied.  Not because the poems were so bad (they were neither poor nor great), but because I could not imagine that they would be accessible to Normal Human Beings.  

This point was emphasized by my environment at the time, for I was comfortably by myself, one link in a chain of many cars–a crouching train of idling engines, waiting for our turn to drive off, receive food, pay, order.  We were all hunting our “Fourth Meal”, subjects in a scene of benign banality, of innocent, ignorant human appetite, as un-literary and low-brow as one can imagine.  Mixing poetry into the equation seemed both ridiculous and perfectly appropriate, a very modernist posture to take.

And as I struggled to parse through the overstuffed and obscure vocabulary of Will Alexander’s “Solea of the Simooms”, stuttered over Bruce Andrews’s gleefully obtuse and surreal “Dang Me”, I caught the scent of exhaust from the car in front of me, and a horrible epiphany hit:

It’s no wonder people neglect this, the supposed highest form of art. These poems are so inflated, vulgar, convoluted, or simply inaccessible that they can only be counterproductive to the cause of poetry.

I have always believed that, though there is ample room in the art for experimental poems and even poems laden with difficult, intertextual richness, most poems should be written for Normal Human Beings. Not scholars, not critics, not other poets.  If I who am passionate about poetry and in fact trained (BA in English lit, MA in Language Teaching, and a voluntary drop-out of a highly-ranked English grad school) to read closely become so frustrated with so much new poetry so easily, the question is begged: Who _is_ the audience of modern poetry?

Though I say I am trained, I don’t claim to be a definitive expert. Though I do have a Masters, I dropped out of my subsequent grad program in English lit because I found little chance for pleasure-reading from under the strictly academic mantle. Rather than profess literature I chose to worship it.  Yet what more damning evidence could there be than for Devotees/Readers to read poems from BAP and say, “I don’t get it” or, worse, “It’s boring/What’s the point?”

Putting aside the clearly narrative poems, the meaning of many of the pieces in BAP were nearly inextricable on a first reading. To make matters worse, I could find little pleasure in reading them even superficially, the way I might “read” a non-representational painting that I might not “get” at first glance.  A relaxed, pleasure-of-sound reading is hindered when vocabulary is sinfully overwrought, toilsome, excavated from the bottom of the list of entries in thesauri so as to be toothless.  I’m not afraid and think it not naive to suggest that much of what I read was simply adjectives for adjectives’ sake. “Big, stuffy words that nobody uses” is one of the most common indictments of poetry from the non-literati (and this is often admitted with some degree of self-consciousness and guilt, for no one wants to appear an ignoramous), and so many ignore or avoid poetry.  How pretentiously this practice scars our noble art!

Hemingway remarked that literature is akin to an iceberg where 7/8th of its mass is under the water, but if we can’t even visualize the tip of the iceburg with any reliable degree of clarity, how will we ever desire to discover the whole? Who will this sort of poetrt appeal to? How will this bring any more significance or reflection to normal peoples everyday lives? Who will buy these books? Read these poems? Thirst for more?

Apoplectic with the obviously talented but (what word can I used
except) corrupted poets, I tore out a page in the drive-thru of Taco
Bell & wrote my own poem about a train, the exhaust of
civilization, hunger, and groping for brotherly love. It was not a good
poem, but it was a simple poem, one in which I sought to bash out in
plain language to contain what the poems I’d just finished had lacked:
tangible imagery, and at least one meaning that could be accessed by
any member of my immediate or extended family, adolescent or older.

12 hours later I’ve had a chance to read more of BAP 2004, and even reflect on some of the strong choices in earlier BAPs.  There are a number of good poems in the collection, but no where near a full 75.  I think of the Willesden Herald’s short fiction contest, in which no winner was chosen due to lack of quality entrants. One argument against this abandonment of a winner was that the contest was not so much about granting an award to signify quality, but a stimulus for discussion of the short story.  Perhaps BAP is something like that, and the bother to fill up the 75 (which is not a requirement but nonetheless has not been strayed from in 19 years) is more of a provocation than a gift.  For those of us with less time to lose, we might just wait for Harold Bloom to reflect and edit out another Best of BAP.

P.S. Immediately after finishing writing this I leapt into my car, and Robert Bly was reading on the radio. In less than a stanza this great poet reminded what the art is all about, and has not only depressed my general criticisms, but also buoyed my hope for poetry in spite of everything else.  I have not changed the rest of this entry to capture the true frustration and destitution that I’d felt the night before, so that some day I will remember how Important Poetry Was to Me.

I’ve been resisting posting up anything on vox to friends, family, neighbors, let alone public for the last few weeks primarily because I’ve debating if there is really any significant value in posting any writings or reflections on a public blog at all. This is despite the fact that I have had a lot to post in line with my original objectives in keeping this vox account, and that is to document or publish a journal-like account of my writing efforts, and to “show off” an occasional work-in-progress.  In the last month I’ve significantly revamped my objectives in an effort to rejuvenate my interest in the novel, and though I halted work on it in favor of finishing a short story that I just had to get out (thanks to a handful of characters and events at the ITC conference in Florida last week), I plan to resume the chore of finishing it once I’ve worked through a 2nd draft of the short story.  I’ve also written two-and-a-half poems.

In writing this short story and the poems, however, I’ve had to face-off against the problem of the appearance of biographical elements in fiction.   I’m still personally taken aback at how much Fear of Truth and Fear of Being Mistaken for Truth is a detriment or obstacle to my writing fiction. Anything any writer produces is bound to bear some resemblance to one
or more aspects of his/her own life, often in the form of a character. 
Writers may choose to indulge or resist this in different situations to move the story along. 
However, engaging in mimicry of this sort becomes perilous when close friends or family read one’s work, as they may
make assumptions about themselves or the writer based on characters or
events in the story.  Often these reactions are not unfounded for the autobiographical elements suggested above.  But I’ve found as often as not that readers make assumptions about the auto/biographical nature of one’s writing regardless of it’s actual resemblance to reality.  I think of this phenomenon as akin to the psychic who
through vapid generalizations is able to convince people that s/he
truly “knows” them.  Listeners/readers hear what they want to hear, they “read into” the text, overlaying their own experiences and understanding of the world, and, to some extent, interpreting this slippery thing called language according to their personal motives and persuasions.

I have seen that for a writer, truth presented as fiction is likely to cause self-incrimination. And yet even fiction presented as fiction may be perceived by readers as merely truth presented as fiction.  This is complicated by the fact that most writers understand early on: fiction sans truth is soulless.  So I must assume that this a common writers’ dilemma.

The complexity in such a conflict, if the conflict is real and on-going, would give rationale for the recurring appearance (stereotype?) of “writer as loner”.  While I myself am naturally a loner, I will state that this fear of social uproar over perceived reflections of reality in my writing (either themselves or myself) does indeed push me away from them; I do not share anything I write with any family members, and nearly as few friends.  Total strangers are the best testing ground, providing both objectivity and social distance.

Though the idea came along in a nightmare that I had over a year ago, I didn’t start writing until August 07.  Nearly 6 months later, on a regiment of approx. 4 days a week (with some stops and false-starts) I’m a mere 100pp into it.  With a whopping 37 chapters fully outlined currently (I let myself add 3 more last week born of character sketches) I can say I’ve got at least another 12 months before draft 1 is done.

I look forward to that day. While the creative energy of outlining a story and it’s characters is the most liberating and pleasurable part of writing for me (maybe that’s why I keep going back to the outline to change, add, subtract, cohere, reconnect), the act of writing–you know, that 90% perspiration stuff–is a chore, mostly because every day as I swing up the lappy screen I must wrestle down my self-doubt and inhibitions. I’m really depending on the release I will experience on the day that I can say, yes, all the substance is there, your main work is done.

At this point I’m not worried about diving in for the second, third, and fourth draft (but let’s hope there’s not more than a fourth!);  I actually enjoy the work of revising and editing far more than the work of composing, and am confident that editing and revision will let me pare the superfluous descriptions and extraneous plot or character points out.  I certainly don’t want something bloated here (J. K. Rowling springs to mind), and the effect and completeness of my story does not seem to warrant significant length or depth as does, say, Moby Dick or The Lord of the Rings.

Yet I should not trick myself into thinking that the story is not big. And this is only the middle part of what my imagination is holding for these characters.  The first part is already begging to be released from the dungeon of my mind, saying I’m ready, I’m a Whole Person, I have love and pain and fear and joy and hope.  I’m can tell you about  Survival, Family, the Future, the Past. I am the raison d’etre of the story you are now writing.  But I also know it’s the part that can tear the current plot out of the mere fantastic to the realm of supernatural (admittedly a door I’m extremely wary of passing through; I abhor fantasy/sci-fi fiction, though I love the genre).  The Good Life + After London + The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn + We. And if you look hard enough, and if I let it be, there’s a little bit of War of the Worlds too.

But what am I doing right now? In this early morning hour I should be typing, but not on this pointless weblog entry–on the story.  I have to finish the first third. I have to complete the characters, I have to get the story rolling, I have to provide a reason to finish writing, and for the reader to finish reading.

“In this corner, weighing in at 128 pounds with his glasses, wearing black trunks (of course), the Challenger: Literary Aspirant!

“He’ll be facing off against the reigning champ-een. Here he is, weighing in at a massive 300 kilonewtons, and wearing only a tan trench-coat, the indomitable Mortal Fatigue!”