in a state

Today I went out and wrote. I’ve been doing this for a while now, but recently it’s been complicated by a few things and it’s been more a struggle than a lovely thing to do in the morning. As always, I defer to real writers for whom it must be even more intense. For them, I cannot even fathom what it must be like. But I’m plugged into at least a bit of it, and it’s been a struggle. But today wasn’t a struggle.

Let me get this straight. Today wasn’t The Day(tm) . I didn’t find myself outlining my own next big thing. I didn’t write a perfect paragraph. I didn’t accidentally trip over something like ‘skill’ or ‘a distinctive voice’ that will magically replace the years of hard work and practice which still yawn hungrily on before me. However, I did realize something that I need to acknowledge.

I’m a poet. Anyone who knows me artistically from about high school onward is probably aware of this. Poetry is my natural state of observation. It is second nature to me. It’s my own private fishy way of speaking my own private fishy world into reason. Think of me and poetry as a caveman with some ochres and charcoals drawing on the walls in order to explain where the buffalo have gone for the winter.Unsurprisingly, this is actually how I paint, too.

This is the one area of my abilities and self-hood where I don’t really care if it sounds ego-centric. There are a lot of things I’m not great at,  but poetry? It’s pretty much my autonomic response to everything.

A poet can write a short story, yes? Or a film, right? Hell, poets can write novels probably? Don’t you think so? They surely can, but this one cannot continue to try without dragging her poems around behind her. So the thing I just finished? It was a challenge. I still think that the idea is very valid, very workable. It has potential as a story. I promised that story that I would do it justice someday, and I intend to keep that promise.

Today I realized that one big reason it was so bone-crackingly difficult for me was because I *specifically* left my natural voice behind. My MO seemed to be that, in order to tell a story, I needed to be in some more ‘logical’ place where things happened in an order, where there were deliberate clues on a page that tell a reader when Speaker A is speaking aloud to Character B and that Narrator C should always ground each paragraph in where they were before saying anything…real. That the physical motions must be choreographed in order to convey the scene. So and so must account for that cigarette that he lit four paragraphs ago by the end of this passage. Certainly, these things need to be present as to not get one’s reader dizzy, but they need to provide subtle edges. Not the bulk of the page.

Basically, I see now that did a lot of work for nothing. Sound and fury signifying boredom. I never got to the way I write (except in a few little spots), instead bogging myself down in details…which surprisingly do not include much about physical setting. I cheated myself out of the story. I didn’t let myself appear on the page except where it couldn’t be helped (after all, it was me mashing all of those keys). I did what I thought was right and I made a mistake.

I already *have* a voice. My struggle going forward is not (as I previously thought) to CRAM that voice into a workable structure. The voice gets silenced that way. The challenge going forward is to let them build the page together, let them fight it out. Let myself get lost in my words. Go on those tangents that make up so much of my waking life. Say those things in telescoping sentences that nearly rhyme or not. Let that little particular tower of blocks hypnotize and crash to the ground.

I already am a real writer! It’s just that I’m more of a work in progress than some. I have a lot to learn and a lot to work on, but goddamnit, I have a LOT to offer as well.

~ by weltschmerz on February 21, 2010.