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.

Death

In a post titled "Creativity Not" I spoke of my father-in-law's effect on my writing schedule. I now report that he has died and was interred last Friday. At nearly ninety years one cannot endure a fall, broken hip, pneumonia, surgery, heart attack and brain damage. Now what do I say about my creativity, my schedule?

There is that struggle with first he was here then, suddenly, he wasn't. There is mourning (muted because he was so old and, frankly, pretty mean (for much of his life)). But I have also established another schedule that is hard to break from. Instead of writing I was reading-- non-fiction in the morning, fiction in the evening. I grew comfortable with this despite the discomfort of not writing. There isn't enough time to read all I want and to write all I want. There will be a loss switching tasks here. I have read and heard of others who could not switch back to writing without great struggle and some who never returned to it with the same verve.
I doubt I'll have that much trouble but I have again learned:

If you want to write, write and write regularly and don't surrender.

Life is a potent distraction and often means the deaths of things. I'm a writer or I'm not. Creativity requires work. Inspiration can and need be cultivated or it withers.

So long for now.

Place Maps

At that most recent meeting of The Manchester Chapter of The Connecticut Poetry Society I decided to speak about "place" and was surprised at how animated and interesting the discussion grew. It seems that the people there had not thought consciously about place in their poems and their lives and wanted to do so.

We identified many places: Physical place at the keyboard or writing pad, the room, the house, the neighborhood (I see my neighbor leave at seven every morning and even that affects how I write at that instant), the community, the city, the state, the country, the world, the cosmos; additionally, psychological place, mood, emotion, time all affect and define the "place" we work from and the places we put into our poems.

One poet wrote of climbing a tree to pick apples. We easily spotted the tree and the ground and the apples and then moved on to childhood which is when the picking occurred, and then she moved us into the factory where her mother had done piece work and where she had acquired rapid enough dexterity with her hands so that at an advanced age she could peel apples faster than her daughter (the poet). The poet was unaware of several of the places she was inhabiting or inserting into the poem as she wrote. This is part of the magic of writing-- that we don't know all that we are putting in to it.

As we write, an increased consciousness of place can deepen our work quickly and efficiently.

Study it; it's worth the effort.

So long for now.

Do the Work-- We've seen enough of the spirit side

This is a variation on a theme that will come in other variants from time to time. I begin with a list:

***Screw your inspiration
***Screw the workshops
***Screw your starry eyes
***Get down to it

I can't remember his last name (may have been Jarvis) but his first name was John. He was Italian, liked to sing and made a living managing a commercial truck tire department for Sears in West Hartford, CT. Most importantly, he was a par golfer. I was young, just learning to swing a club and knew I would play good golf pretty soon. I went to John and asked for a tip. His answer was simple. "Stay off the golf course. Go somewhere and hit an awful lot of golf balls for an awful long time."
You poets: Go somewhere and write an awful lot of poems for an awful long time. Again I say "LEARN THE CRAFT". To quote Robert Frost from a perhaps apocryphal story, "Go write some rhymey-dimey stuff." Learn form, meter. Get the mechanics.

***Screw your inspiration
***Screw the workshops
***Screw your starry eyes
and...***Forget about publishing

So, again-- do the work. And, although I got to where I could play bogey golf on a particular nine hole course I never did get very good at the game. I don't know if I'm any better at poetry but I have written lots and lots of poems and haven't golfed in a decade.

Next post: Thoughts on publishing
So long for now.

Quick Rules for Writing, Part 4

This is a repeat of sorts: Practice daily and practice specifically. I think it was John Keats and Leigh Hunt who spent afternoons in sonnet competitions-- they knew the forms, by heart. Charles Wright was the first to impress upon me the need to write every day. He reminded that the concert pianist practices hours a day at an art no greater than my own. We have to treat the art as an art, one that is demanding and never fully achieved. Treat yourself as an artist. For periods as long as fifteen months I have written daily. The result is that I am a far better writer and a far quicker writer. Little of it is really good but a greater percentage of it is decent and I am certain I never would have written as well without the practice. Additionally, practice specific things whether forms, meters, styles, etc. Spend a month copying somebody else. Spend a month writing sonnets. Spend a month writing nothing that rhymes. Spend a month writing about a single topic. Exhaust your inspirations.

Remember that the discoveries will be the unexpected seams in your mind, the little spaces where poems reside. Days when you are certain you cannot possibly write will blossom into your most productive. You need not spend a lot of time-- I typically averaged thirty minutes daily, usually in the morning although I urge you to also learn that you can write at any time if you will.

Bottom line: If you want to write, write. Second bottom line: If you want to write, read.
Tomorrow the fifth part.
So long for now.

Self-censoring a First Draft

I offer two rules for this:
1. DON'T DO IT
2. DO IT
in that order.
First, as a beginning writer, an inexperienced writer at any age, it is essential that you not edit yourself as your write. Put it all down. Leave nothing out. The reason is simple: You are in the zone and don't want to miss out on anything, don't want to be limited. You will have plenty of time to revise, edit, censor later. Do not deviate from this.

Well, don't deviate until you have reached a more accomplished stage in your writing. At some point you may know and understand your own voice, may have worked in it enough so that you know what you are doing as you do it. At this point you may have read and learned enough about poetry so that you know what to cull on the fly. This is a much more efficient way to write than to write down all the claptrap you once needed to include and excise later when you could better make decisions. If you are not comfortable doing this, don't risk it. For my money you can't really get away with it during your first ten or so years of hard writing work. When you reach that point, don't bother any longer.