Letters From Little Rock

Well, the last time I decided to get back in the swing of things here I promptly caused technical difficulties galore and, owing to hellish amounts of overtime at my day job, never got around to correcting those problems for quite some time. I am not working quite so much overtime now so it should not be too darned tough to keep up with this a bit more regularly. Mind you, I’m not a fanatic.

I am still a relatively unpublished and unpublishable poet, although I am going through one of my periods of actively submitting to every magazine under the sun. I am also shopping around a couple of book manuscripts that are also likely to wind up self-published before long if they continue to draw the same level of interest they have found so far (which is to say none). People who spend a lot of their time submitting articles and poems and what not to little magazines are accustomed to rejection letters that come in two flavor, form rejections and personal rejections. Most folks prefer to have a personal rejection even if it is just a hastily scribbled “thanks, but no thanks” rather than a form letter. I’m almost to the point of deciding I’d rather receive a form letter. I’ve gotten a few rejections in the last year or so that are of the “really enjoyed your work. We can’t use it, best of luck elsewhere” variety. I don’t know why it bugs me, but it bugs me. I think I’d feel better if they just came out and abused the work. I mean if they don’t want to publish it, doesn’t that mean they don’t like it? Why not tell me so? Maybe I should introduce them to some of the women I’ve asked out in the last year. none of them had any problem with finding fault.

On the other hand, if women had a form letter for that, the world would be a better place.

An odd little thing happened in my head about a week ago. Not to make too much of it, but it struck me rather forcefully. I was sitting in my chair listening to a little jazz and drinking a little coffee, basically following my after work routine as per my usual. I had picked up a book of Chinese poetry over the previous weekend and I was thumbing through it and enjoying the matter-of-fact expressions and descriptions of nature. I was drifting in the Zen zone when I was briefly interrupted by my dogs. Dogs have to go outside occasionally. When I got back to my chair, I picked the book up and realized with a start that I was in fact browsing through a copy of Raymond Carver’s collected poems. I had also picked it up over the previous weekend. Now, I know there isn’t much excuse for not being able to tell the difference between Raymond Carver and a comprehensive anthology of 3000 years of Chinese poetry, but in my defense the random opening of the book had put me in the middle of some poems that were not filled with telephones and automobiles or other obvious artifacts of modernity. Besides that the books are of similar heft and, though it’s hard to tell from the images in the links below, the dominant background color (especially on the back covers of the books) is a nearly identical light tan. Easy mistake to make.

I don’t know why this was such a total discombobulation to me, but it was. I guess the thing that bothered me so much was to know just how differently a person’s expectations could affect his reading of a poem. As a poet it would kind of bother me to know that someone who expects a poem noir experience might open one of my books and discover precisely what he expected despite the total absence of any intent or content of that type in my work. I understand how important context is, but without overstating it Raymond Carver’s poems really were ancient Chinese poetry there for a little while in my mind at least and I have a suspicion I might have performed the exact opposite feat of mental gymnastics if I had opened the Chinese anthology to Han Shan while expecting Carver. I’d like to think that the choices I make in diction and meter make a difference in the meaning of my poems, that the entire meaning of the poems I write is not dictated solely by a reader’s false impression and preconceived expectations. The very idea that I could be read as anything other than what I am distresses me. I don’t very much wish to be thought of as a beat poet or as a surrealist or as a post-modernist. I’m not sure why it would bother me to be misread so badly, but it would. So please don’t make the mistakes I have made, read the name on the cover twice before you crack the book open, and if you like a little splash of something-something in your coffee, at least splash it in after you’ve certified your reading expectations and reading material are cohabitating the same mental landscape.

On the other hand experience is real whether you understand it or not. In fact, I’m willing to state that Raymond carver is currently one of my favorite Chinese poets and probably always will be.

I stayed in all day, feeling low and mean. My day-job, which is actually a night-job, went a little crazy towards the holiday season last year. I work for a corporate aircraft completions center (the planes fly to us plain-Jane and are supposed to leave as luxury jets) and our schedule was pretty much ten hours per day during the week and eights on Saturdays and Sundays for the last two months of the year. Needless to say, I’m not the sort that likes having his routine affected in that way. One of the reasons I quit my warehouse job several years back was to get away from nonsensical working conditions.
Corporate jets just seemed like they couldn’t help but be built in a more professional environment, and by and large they are, but the last two months have been pretty basic business 101 affairs. You know what I mean; “If one man can do a job in 40 hours, can forty men do the same job in one hour?” The answer is pretty obvious, but we kept running the experiment just to make sure. Luckily, I work in one of the few industries where there is still some competition for employees. It’s our custom to shut down for two weeks at Christmas. There was some danger of not getting that break this year. I must say I’m just as spoiled as the rest of my co-workers because I felt pretty much entitled to it and pretty hacked-off that we might not get it. I did remind myself from time to time that when I worked my warehouse job I had to work Thanksgiving and Christmas day more than once. Luckily, the magic number was reached and we did in fact get our time off for the holidays. But I still don’t feel like I’ve had a day off since about last November.

I can’t say that the work is so stressful or that my life is either, but sometimes the creative bug begins to grow and metamorphose and you become somewhat anxious about the end result; begin to wonder whether there is a butterfly or a hopeful monster lurking in your future.

I’ve been going through some slow process of evolution as a writer and I know I’m on the cusp of something substantially different than what I’ve written before. Of course, we all grow and change—that’s not unique to those of us who have a creative streak—but sometimes a change in style or voice can be a little trying while you’re still finding your way. The endless days of overtime held me in a painful state of suspended animation, certain I had new wings but unable to test them. Even during shut-down I couldn’t seem to get back on schedule and only half-heartedly made the attempt to write. It’s difficult for me to adapt to fluctuations in my schedule and it’s only with difficulty that I even sat down to edit what I hope will be my next collection of poetry, a sequence of some five-hundred or so haiku forming a loose narrative. It will be more-or-less the diary of a year with a strong taste of the seasons as is customary with haiku. I hope to have more news about that soon. I spent several days during shut-down trying to find a better deal than 1stBooks.Com currently offers and it looks like I might self-publish through Lightning Source next time. I’m not sure when I will have a definite announcement to make on that account as during the editing of my book I discovered that there was some imbalance in the final structure and to correct this I really should write another twenty-five or so haiku just to flesh out certain ideas I want to give proper exposure. That is the crux of yesterday’s miserable feeling. Most of the haiku—practically all of them—were written last year and prompted what I feel is the current change of direction in my poetry. But I’m not certain I won’t be strangling the changeling in its crib if I stop myself from exploring the bounds of these new rhythms and voicings to go back and complete last year’s thought. Still, this sequence of haiku is important to me for a number of reasons I won’t go into, and if I don’t bring it to its full realization, I’m quite certain I will regret it one day.
Of course, I’m going to try to finish off the thing with as much grace and panache as I can, and no small amount of affection, but the difficulty is real, though surmountable. It reminds me of when I was in school and quite certain I would one day make my living as a cartoonist. Every summer I would see my skills grow and change and then have to endure the nine months of stagnation and atrophy we call high school. It used to take me a couple of weeks at the beginning of every summer to get back to where I was the previous fall when school interrupted. Compounding my frustration, then and now, is the fact that October through December is my most fertile period. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know, but just like there are morning-people and night-people, I’ve always been at my best in the fall. I like everything about it, from autumn leaves to Halloween to peace and goodwill to my fellow man. Actually, I think it’s my life-long curse of procrastination that makes me feel fall is so productive. In my early twenties I always added up the total number of poems I wrote every year as though it somehow mattered and inevitably somewhere along about September I would go into a state of deep depression about my lack of production for the year and somehow or another turn out most of my work for the year during those last few months. I know it’s silly to add up poems like so many bushels of peas, but at the time I was trying to prove something to myself (showing off in front of god, I think they call it) and having something to show for my effort was a vital part of living with myself. I guess that is the reason the timing of the current change of style has been so stressful to me. Thinking about it, it occurs to me that there have been many watershed years for me as a writer. In fact, every few years I find myself looking back and saying, “You know, that is the year I really started to get the hang of it.” I’m sure I’ll look back one day and realize I didn’t get the hang of it until someday that’s still a long ways off.

Now there’s a comforting thought for a winter’s night.