As I work on this poetry and prose blog, my motivation and outlook changes. Here's a record of that:
2024 Statement
March
It is with a great amount of sheepishness that I return to say I have not been editing. I have only been writing off the cuff. I know someone who knew someone who was addicted to gambling. When he was asked, "what's your favorite part?" He said, "when the dice are in the air."
I seem to be addicted to these silly poems, mostly awful but once in a while a turn of phrase which I really like. I am not taking them seriously enough to edit them in a loud booming voice into proper poetry or anything like that. I also don't care if they are a profound statement, clearly written, with concise amazing words. I simply want that moment of writing, where it's flying off my tongue/typewriter hands and I don't know where it's going--when it's in the air.
2023 Statements
August
I am painfully wishy washy on whether I want to edit or not, and I decided I will write one poem a day, and edit one poem a day. The editing is not my nature, and by habit perhaps I will change my nature. I am also curious what will happen if I write for one hour.
April
I think I finally turned a corner. I figured it would happen eventually, if I wrote long enough, and often enough, and it did.
February
Today I wrote two poems instead of one, this is progress. Sometimes we need to overshoot the runway to land at all. It's not clear that this writing is "exorcising" my weirdness effectively and then making my songs more like pop songs with accessible language after I get the lead out here (which was the original plan). I am, however, seeing that with a specific intention, I can control (and yes, I do have control of this!) the tone of the poem. I can decide the characters, setting, plot, language and style. Some of it, of course, is just letting it fly off the cuff, but I am realizing that as a writer I have the power to be intentional.
2022 Statements
November
I am gung-ho on changing the voice of the narrator. I've done enough poems in this kind of forlorn voice. I've noticed a pattern— the outlook of these poems is centered around the narrator noticing some some small, odd detail, and I find it way too passive, especially in bulk. I am going to intentionally seek and find a more authoritative voice in the narration.
October
I caught a stride here and there, and see the value of doing this daily. I am not editing these, these are all off the cuff. I find it exciting to write something that I like off the cuff. The trade off is that a lot of it is complete schlock. I will at least consider going back and editing. I noticed when I scanned them and spent 30 seconds editing here and there it makes a difference. At the same time, I don't want these to sound 'stiff'--there's a certain fluidity that I am trying to emulate.
September
How funny to think I could exorcise nonsense, only to find it's an unlimited supply?
May
I am adding some fiction with super short stories, as well as poems. The style of poem writing is loosely or tightly based on real life, but strewn together with images. I haven't quite hit the nail on the head with what the goal is, other than an exorcism of nonsense, but surely if I do this every day for 10 years I will find out?
March
I decided that these will be done in 5 minutes or less, because that is how long I am spending on them and I am not editing them despite my plan to edit them. This way, it's more of an exercise in thinking off the top of my head. I can then choose 1/week to rewrite. I am also calling them 'Word Swirls' so that it's not meant to be heavy poetry or anything like that. There's simply a playfulness with language which I am trying to capture with these.
January
My mission now is simply to write a poem each day, so I can call myself a poet. Yet I realize that doing something badly over and over isn't going to do any good. To that end, I have tried a few times to emulate master poems, reading them, catching the vibe of language, and trying to immitate it, in subject matter and delivery. I have given up on editing, it's just not my style--perhaps I need to slam the hammer down on a few nails and get myself into editing mode again.
I stopped writing the corresponding daily lyrics as they were just so bad that I could hardly read them, and lyrics are meant to be sung; writing them without music was robbing them of their nature (oh, the humanity). Although, a good practice is song mapping, where you know what each verse and chorus will basically say (not an original idea, got it from songtown.com) and I can perhaps try that with a poem, poem-mapping as it were. I have my work cut out for me, thank God for coffee.
2021 Statements
Keep 'Em Separated...Songs from Poems
I write a lot of songs and noticed that some of them were...well, how can we say it, downright weird. "What is this song about?" a friend might ask. "Hell if I know!" I would think.
On the surface, this may seem like one of life's inevitable miscommunications. But it's not a small issue because years of my life are riding on it.
The more I learned about songwriting, which I have been doing for 25 years, I realized that many of my 'songs' were ultimately poems. My goal is to separate the songs from the poems.
This blog has the poems. I am redirecting my wild words into one happy place. As you read, you may have your head cocked to the side. You may find an intoxicating phrase. This will either be a giant clusterfuck of words, or a genius way to solve the problem.
My songwriting can then be more clear. I will know what I mean, and you will too. I want you to be uplifted, nod a knowing glance, sway and dance.
Just as poetry and prose have their own little rules to follow, so do songs. It's exciting to let my freak flag fly on this blog, and then buckle down to write songs with Verses and Choruses and Bridges (oh my!).
You may have guessed this, but the songs have their own blog too. You can find the songs at this Lyrics Blog. Let me know how the experiment is working.
Self Expression is Still a Craft
"Each morning as I have coffee I will write a poem, or jam out to reggae, or string a line to the moon to hang wet laundry on. Welcome to the land of words and wry wisdom, as I try to bolt self expression to the wall."
I've been holding up self-expression like the holy grail of existence for some time. The words rolled off my tongue and stirred my blood. To get a sense of this, close your eyes and mutter them..."sellllf....expressionnnnn." Drunk on the wine of this, it was easy to go crazy and think every word chicken scratched into the chalkboard of my soul was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. However, writing is also a craft, and while all self expression is good, there is good and bad writing.
To that end, I've got work to do: not just writing, but editing and rewriting. If you see numbers on any posts that means that (1) was the first version and (2) was an edit, etc.
I've got decisions to make, like what is good, and what is bad. How do I decide? Do I, like a boomerang, keep returning to the self, or do I keep returning to the distance?