Okay, so I wasn't back. Life intervened. Perhaps this will be life now, which brings me to the subject of death and how to writer about it.

Sandy Hook, CT-- I've been there a couple of times, used to live not far from it. I was in Dr. Daar's dental chair when the news hit. The dentist, his assistant and I all froze when we saw the report jump from two dead to more than twenty. One of those events that we'll all remember where we were when. I'm sure it dampened the Christmas season for all of us nearby. It wasn't hard to find someone who knew someone who was there; certainly fewer than seven degrees of separation.

The question: How to write about it? Some asked, "Should we write about it?" Some said, "Don't write about it." Some said, "I have to write about it."

All the above are true. You should, you shouldn't, you can't, you must, you musn't.

I did...about eighteen poems so far. I think I'm done but I may not be. To answer the question about how to do it let me answer how to be objective about it and this will apply to any emotional low or high.

The answer comes in a pair of points. First, write a lot, a real lot. I mean get into the habit of writing a lot, every day. You must be able to forget today what you wrote yesterday and the only way is to write so much that you can't recall it all. Writing a lot has as many benefits to writing as walking to your health.

I like this quote from Oliver Sacks:

"Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives."

The second point is more technical. Learn to write from a point of view other than your own-- scrap the first person. I have written in the voice of the shooter, a gun, an adviser to God, a denier, a new member of a gun club and I can't tell you right now how many others. Using another's voice is a good way to get objective, Use this technique a lot. Imagine how someone, something, not you thinks, feels. Imagine what another wants to say.
Also, resort to form. Write villanelles, sonnets, iambic tetrameter, pentameter. Make up a form. Even Spenserian stanzas will work. The point is to force your overwhelming feelings into a container. The creativity evoked will at times be astonishing. It will also be a relief, a genuine curative. As Oliver says above--- "one's memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives."

So, when the overwhelming calamities conspire to rob you of your art, you can still write if you want or must.

Three and a half years...

...you've begged me to return to this and here I am. I was held hostage by selling my home, moving to Virginia, getting stuck in the middle of somebody else's divorce, moving back to Connecticut, the death of a cat, publishing two books (poetry), a near-death experience and who knows what else that I may have let slip under my radar and under my feet until the gods decided that I had paid enough ransom to be freed that I may return to blogging and living. I've been writing the whole time, have enjoyed the Writers' Roundtable at the Leesburg, VA Senior Center, have begun a Poets' Roundtable at the Bigelow Senior Center in Fairfield, CT and am about to get my current magnum opus ready for publishing via Createspace.com. I have reached the point where, after a life featuring more permananet addresses than the Leatherman had temporary ones, I am down to a vision of just two more before I slip off the grid although I am far from Already Gone and hope to delay that slippage for ten more years or until my age and IQ are the same, whichever comes first (assuming I haven't reached that point already).

I choose not to re-read what I wrote in earlier posts and apologize in advance in case I repeat myself, something I am at risk of since, as age advances other things retreat. So I here offer, as if beginning again, a couple of rules for writing:

1. Start well. Hook me in the first five words or I will not read further.
2. Finish as well as you start. If you don't then I will be too  pissed off to give you a second chance.

There. Now go and fill the in between with interesting stuff, details unique to the moment you are trying to consecrate in the poem. And pay attention to the sonic elements-- the music, the rhythms, the sounds that overlay the meaning with meaning. The poem must end up being felt as well as understood. The poem without that feeling is merely craft and anybody can practice that. Only a poet can elevate it to art. It's hard work.

It's good to be back; bear with me; I'll hit my stride soon.

Ekphrastic Poetry

June 29, 2012

Wait a minute-- what poetry isn’t ekphrastic?  I couldn’t write another poem without the other poems I’ve read.  Without the arts there would be no arts.  I consider all poetry ekphrastic in some sense.  So let’s day it’s about “ Gurenica ”.  Fine, ekphrasis.  Or about Michaelangelo’s “ David ” or a Turner sky , Grieg’s Piano Concerto , something from Elvis’s Sun sessions , Burl Ives “Blue Tailed Fly”  or “I Want You to Want Me” .  All ekphrasticisms.

        Ekphrasticism has morphed into ekphrasticitis, has taken over more workshops than   loosestrife in Minnesota  (watch out sestina) and I’m sick of it.  I think people like the word.  It’s hard to spell, difficult to mouthe and impresses others a lot.  Poets around the world are having ekphrastigasms in groups and in public.  There’s even the thought that our poems derive shiny particles of greatness from their ekphrastic gods.

        I bow before art, worship the ones whose work went before, the ones I cannot measure up to.  I write because of them, sometimes in response to specific works.  This is not unique.  If ekphrasis causes you to  ponder, deepens the  pool you dredge your poems from, then good-- great.  Incorporate this into your practice of writing and living.

Otherwise I propose to ban the word for five years, or maybe twenty.  Re-name the seminars with something like “The Importance of Stuff that Came Before” or “Plagiarizing Passion”, or “Stealing Wallace Stevens’s Jar”. Honor the art.  Don’t cheapen it with haute demotics.  And when you go to poetry camp refuse to write ekphrastic poems.  Instead, watch films of Sam Snead swinging a golf  club or Joe Dimaggio running the bases .  Your poetry will be better for it.

Yes, I’m still going away the 7th through the 14th.

How to Take a Writing Vacation

     It seems prudent to write about writing on vacation.  I say, DON'T DO IT.  In your canvas chair you'll sit in the mountains or by the sea thinking He Who made them and the lamb and the tyger will speak and that finally you'll hear Him in the voice of that beloved dead uncle you never met whom you've been listening for for years and years.  In the words of Sherman Potter, "Bullcookies"!  If it's not happening at home where you live and move and have your being it's not going to happen in Chatham or the Great Smokey Mountains or on the shores of Gitchigoomie.

     Take your journals, your pens, your crappy attitude toward your in-laws who will visit and leave their wet towels on your canvas chair and write every day but don't expect much and don't expect a breakthrough, to be struck by lightning, to see the white buffalo or the black swan.  Sleep, swim, tan, nearly drown, hike yourself breathless, get poison ivy, drink, smoke 'em if you got 'em but don't expect that cat named Kalamazoo to say a mumblin' word.
     Empty your head, change it, abandon yourself to lesser things for a while.  Your mind will work in the background, the unconscious, the subconscious as it always does.  Your're a goddamned poet.  You can't stop it.  But you can't start it either.  Back at home where the lawn needs mowing, where you need to give a spoonrest from Provincetown to the neighbor who (may have) fed the cats and cleaned the litter boxes at least once and the dryer is getting noisy and the 800 number caller from Newark DE is looking for your late car payment IS WHERE YOU WORK IS GROUNDED.  Somehow the poems live there in that stupid place you need a vacation from.
     I urge you (& myself) to learn to write wherever you are.  I also urge you (& myself) to abandon the notion that your magnum opus will arrive at a temporary address during that very week you've chosen to get away from it all when the poems are in it all.

     PS  I'm happy to be back and will be on vacation from the 7th through the 14th.  I will not have internet access and will not post during that time.  And, I will not write anything worth reading in between lobsters (although I actually did once but that took a dying sister to change the equation and I don't think she'll do it again).
     Really, I'm back.  See you later.

I'm about to resume the blog

And so I'm running this test...get ready!

--
"Things are a lot more like they used to be than they are now."

Publishing: So What?

Now that you've published, what do you do? I'll confine myself to those who self-publish with the intention of giving copies to valued friends and family since I've done that and suspect that many others also do so now that publishing is so easy. The answer is:

Buy envelopes and postage, address the envelopes, affix the postage, toss them into the nearest mail box and FORGET ABOUT THEM.

Once they've been posted they're on their own and expecting anything from your loved recipients is an exercise in self-love that won't be satisfied. It was two weeks before my wife, worrying that the “Ten Short Addresses to My Grandchildren” may have been lost in the mail, asked one grandchild if she got it and she said “Yeah” and spun out of the room to beat her little sister with a toy rabbit for sticking her tongue out at her. One friend emailed “Thanks for the pomes (sic)” and he's a poet too. I told my wife to not ask. The point is that not many will care much about your poems and those who do won't worship you our your work unless you are on your death bed our you slip a c-note into the envelope.

Keep in mind too that poems given to your family, written to/about your family probably aren't your best anyway-- and don't waste your best on them. Go smugly forth knowing that they won't get them, as in understanding them (or you), and that you have better places to place your best work. As I said before in an earlier entry, one of the first exercises for beginning poets is to understand the size of the audience that doesn't care

When it comes to publishing, win contests, submit poems to legitimate presses and magazines, accept the rejections as better than what you'll get from your family and friends and learn to write better. It is possible but rare to self-publish and sell a million (or even a hundred) copies. If your work can't pass muster with contests, presses, magazines it's not likely to pass anywhere else either and I am duty bound to inform you that if it passes muster with those contests, magazines, etc it still may not be very good, just accepted.

So jaundiced a view about publishing begs the question: Why write? Why publish? Write for the truth. Publish for vocational identity in public as a poet. Don't hide your light under a bushel. In fact, publish all you can without expecting anything from it and don't let your desire to publish affect your art beyond the writing lessons you'll get from even the most scurvy editor. If your effort to publish saps the art, feed the art, quit the publishing.

So long for now.

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Editors Suck; But We (really) Need Them

But back to the poetry.  Having edited two journals for the Connecticut Poetry Society and having several manuscripts in hand worthy (IMHO) of publication, I decided to publish one on my own.  I downloaded Scribus, an open-source program very much similar to MS Publisher, and went to town on the thing, ultimately printing (at Staples) “Ten Short Addresses to My Grandchildren” just in time to miss Christmas.

The experience was wonderful once I got a handle on how to go about it and I had one of those lessons in humility we all need every now and then.  Despite my every belief in my skill, there was a lengthy learning curve.  We all complain about editors but I can assure you that even though I was working with myself, I as an editor brought my self as a writer into several unanticipated internecine struggles and an equal number of shaky agreements.

What did I learn? 

Editing is difficult. 

Anyone can get published.

I have on my bookshelves any number of self-published volumes, some by close friends, some of the books are pretty good and some (most) really crappy.  The gatekeeping function of the editor may be saving us from slogging through even more mediocre poetry than we dare imagine.   A couple of good editors have saved the world from some of my most pedestrian work.  But those editors also gave me the most focused, concentrated lessons in writing that I’ve ever had.

The moral then is to get your work in front of serious editors for their consideration.  It’s part of the process of learning to write, even more than a process of getting published.  No matter whether the editor is a fellow-writer (never family), a trusted reader, a professional.  Then, once you’ve gone through that gauntlet with your manuscript, go ahead and publish it yourself, or any other way you wish.

Next time I’ll tell you what to expect once you publish.

So long for now.

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