Reopenings vs Closure

Thanks to those of you who have joined since my last post. (I won’t call you out by name since writers are shy, retiring folks.)

I feel something is elusive. It tickles like a stray hair.

I’m not getting squared somehow in the manuscripts underway. I drop a plumb bob and there’s a slant. Is it overwriting? Is there an omission I need to see? How far down do I need to rebuild?

I hold poems at a distance. I can’t get intimate with my poems. Is it a performance anxiety that I see the words through others eyes before my own? I’m too destination/objective minded instead of process-minded. Editing before speech. Could be. Or.

To get out of a rut you need to jolt your schema, get a new influence, new experience or realization.

At Versefest, Phil Hall’s workshop included questions including, what is your root preoccupations? If you look back, what themes were there?

As chance had it, I dug up a chapbook I made at age 11, which had a colophon page and preface. (And it noted that it was a first printing. Although technically in markers.)

Alt text seems very poor in this app as does photo scaling. Apologize for failings there.

Forest and fire. Light and night. I still spend as much time as I can tromping the woods.

And social airs.

I intended to go back with a marker once I looked up the proper spelling of disguise. Shall I do it now? Never too late to complete an intention…I completed a cross-stitch letter I started in primary school..,

Nearby in time and space this scrap.

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Early erasure poetry? Love/extortion letter?

Certainly it was a bid for connection and equality among differences. That still seems like me.

There’s a word in architecture, intervention, for inserting a new element into an established urban landscape. New workshops can be that.

There’s still movement from VerseFest with Phil Hall and Eileen Myles, workshops and listening to their readings.

They are letting things in. Speaking out for the rightness of the extraneousness.

Poetry is not only an act of narrowing down, curating control & shutting out, but seeing, being, allowing in.

The world can enter, not intrude or interrupt but be accepted. Writing not as Chekov’s pistol ruling the listener experience but exploration. Something closer to natural thought.

Subclauses, and bracketed asides are said to be an ADHD trait. Ampleness, muchness, relishing chaos, high tolerance for ambiguity.

I used to blurt with glee, ride these waves. I have always loved the random, the off chance, the coincidence, the marginalia, the including of everything. Part of it stemmed from fatalism, believing that accidents are impossible. Once not superstitious, there remained something energizing about what didn’t fit. Something redeeming about the weed, the awkward clash, the misfit visitor. It wakes up. It shows the constructed nature, the imposed forms.

I lost that love of offbeat or it dimmed. How to Build a Girl was defiantly what she needed to be, carving her own path. That spark.

Is it grant context? Needing to elevator pitch scope and purpose of a project or poems for mammon? Bending to stay within the pre-decided frame? Perhaps in workshops that wanted to make copy edits and magazine copy. Milieus where Accessibility, Safe Pathos and Clarity are top values, universal defined as for the white middle class suburban reader. I was skeptical and didn’t kowtow but didn’t find my people. But it taught me to make digestible cookie poems.

I’d kinda forgotten poetry is bigger than precision and emotion.

I read unmet by stephanie robert’s which is more porous than most.

I read Pause Button by Kevin Davies which leaps and leaps.

I realize I started to let myself be trained out of extraneous disjunctures, which is a concession not to Good Writing but to Masking and wanting approval

or at least cessation of internalized disapproval. To blank looks and failing when chitchat is what do you “write about”. I have a lot of lyric poets in my cohort. Storytellers.

And narrative can be gratifying. It has a place. Perhaps making more tools, more options by exploring what can be recognized by that means.

Nothing is singular source or effect.

Just now, Blue, the neighbour’s dog, missing for 2 hours, last seen running on lake ice, looked in our door. I leashed her and walked her home while B texted them to say she’s found. Blue is often high energy but you couldn’t find a mellower dog at the moment. Soaked and contentedly calm after a good long run.

How much of our nervous energy needs a flat out run instead of micromanaging our writing? What comes next is what arrives. Not what would fit or be appropriate or lead the reader. While writing there’s no need for a reader. Or market. Or marketability. Or posture, or framing. Trust the language, the unconscious. Not asterisked with the chagrin of I can fix this later.

Perhaps it was external and internal combined that argued form = internally consistent = simple = Good.

My ability to think obliquely was impaired by the knock on the head. Topic poems were then not too slow for my brain & I could stay pace with them. But that’s 6 years or more. Finally I can parse and analyze towards the old speeds.

There were a lot of simultaneous changes. Concussion, and meds changed me so my brain isn’t constantly mid-air in fireworks. I was constantly trying to stay in motion, FOMOing myself blotto. I was director/president/volunteer/media pass/photographer/editor/publisher/MC/ubiquitous attendee. Until *Poof*. Done. Then countryside. New province.

Relieved of expectations and social framework. Fly little eaglet. Gauntlet training didn’t work so very well. I went feral.

Once I wasn’t keeping overstimulated in frantic and crash cycles, I could not give a flying shrimp about maintaining usefulness. Maybe it was depression. Maybe it was an exhale.

(Inhale was for later and inevitable and not my concern.)

Once, in meditation perhaps twenty years ago, a teacher said we are the filters, we breathe in toxins, breathe out health for others.

That’s noble and loving kindness, but putting a lot on self is it not. if we visualize the goodness we breathe in and let go of our poison, we can harm no one with our metaphor. We visualize being healed rather than being secret remote healers.

I’ll leave the penultimate thought to 42 years ago.

The question now is what is worthy of expending very limited energy and time.

Ah, spending. The metaphor of finite resource, upward spiral of value, hoarding, saving, donating, investing.

I need a better metaphor for inner work which is poetry. Suggestions?