Yesterday was a meditation on writing just as it was on a day of not writing. When I was watching the boys as Carrie went to a Fiber Fest, I didn't know how to handle the excitement of five boys doing different things at the same time. It's not one of my strengths and it's something I should develop, but it makes me think about writing and this idea about finding your voice. It's true we find a voice which means finding a better way to use language and writing and developing from the tools of each discipline. However, finding your voice actually means finding your strengths. Like I am still never likely to publish a short story even though I've been writing fiction for a long time. Carrie like some of my stories and I do too, but nevertheless I know my strengths are more in poetry than they are in fiction. Frankly, I can think of Life as a measurement of what we decide to use our strengths in. That goes for whatever occupation we choose, whatever we do we follow that cliche accentuate the positive. Find your strengths and focus on those. Likewise, after having a couple of days of painting with primer I was very ready to paint. Writing can be that way that you've had a couple of days to write, and then if you tell yourself you will be writing at a certain time while longing to write you are going to be riding at that time. For example, if you can't write on Saturday but tell yourself I'm going to be riding Sunday morning, you'll be doing something like I am right now, finding a way to write that you wake up wanting to write and you do it.
I've realized that the teacher in me, knowing I will be teaching to poetry courses next semester, has turned my blog into a meditation about writing. I thought about Bloom's book the anxiety of influence, and for me it's the influence of anxiety.
I'm an anxious person and sometimes my poetry reflects that so people don't like my poetry if it's too fast. Isn't there a place for poetry that is too fast?
About teaching and writing it's true that when someone who would be a creative writer I'm practicing writer is teaching in the middle of the semester they find little if no time to do their own writing. However, the flip side is when a writer takes on that really negative View and I've heard what the people have said like forget about the students. I could give you the number of stories about this but all I can say is I know that my work ethic
It's not that view that I put the students first. The sabbatical is taught me yes I need to reserve a couple of hours for my own writing and meet myself there but it's horrible to think someone accepts a teaching job just as a glorified position. But this happens all the time! Even a certain poet from Topeka who went on to make it big was let go from Indiana University because he refused to teach even though horses were assigned to him and that was the job he agreed to do. Okay I'm going to stop there with my stories, but the point is how do we do others how do you see other people do you see each person as a sacred being or do you slip back into the notion that you should only care about your own writing and maybe some friends poetry and everyone else is just a waste of time.
About the Poetry Wars I totally understand about teaching poetry out of a certain movement that one feels strong about again going back to writing out of your strengths and maybe teaching out of your strengths, but putting down a certain poetry movement doesn't help anything. I've had the joy of going through different types of
And modes of writing like starting with lyric freeform going to the traditional forms figuring out how to break those and use those forms and contemporary ways yes I would say I was post confessional, and going to a school that put down language poetry and going to another school where I could focus on language poetry. It's about understanding just like everything someone doesn't like what they don't understand but it's about how is figure out why someone uses a certain technique or form or movement in writing
Julia Cameron in her book The Artist way talked about morning pages that you wake up in the morning to write. It's a really good process and I think the reason why that book is still popular after decades.
Thinking about the overall sabbatical part 2 where I was going to write about toxic masculinity, it has really shifted with a recent Revelations I was given this summer and I now see that the poems about my son's will still be part of it but the overall emphasis will be about toxic masculinity and being at the movies. I think the title at the movies with The Predator will be the working title now.
I think this is also telling about the creative process because if it was just a research project I was working on I would be doing the research it would be clear-cut oh I'm writing about this and maybe Revelations would come later but with creative writing the revelations are always coming on
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