Fear of Sucking

So I'm working on translating another piece of published juvenilia (modeled after, or derived from, or ripping off a Mark Halliday poem from Little Star). Twice removed from worth anything, except some poor deluded soul or committee of souls chose to publish it in a small journal, so I guess it's worth something. And it's actually OK, a little less image-heavy and more narrative than my usual crap.

Anyway, at the same time, I am studying an article called 25 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic and fighting a wave of headache and nausea and actively hiding from the day. As I contemplate making an honest effort to increase traffic, it seems to me that Not Bob's list of 25 omits perhaps the most essential: don't suck. How many people read blogs that suck? (How many people are reading and answering this question right now? The answers to those questions, says my sunken self-esteem, are identical.) The golden rule of "Don't Suck" does not make the list. Instead, perhaps its opposite: "Post Consistently." All in a panic, I think to myself, "I barely have anything to say twice a month on this blog ... What will I say if I post a few times a week?"

Of course, having developed (somewhat) my theory of the Poetry of the Impossible, which comprises these points:

1. Poetry is not that serious
2. Poetry does not affect Reality directly, only acts from the fringes to filter down into cultural understandings of Reality
3. Reality is quite beyond our ability to understand
4. Language is a terribly flawed means of communicating our understanding of Reality
5. But still, Language is the best means of communication we have
6. The limitations of Language create the tools and tricks of the Poetic trade
7. Poetry is essentially a game using those tools and tricks to force Language to move closer to a true representation of Reality, bridging the Subjective and Objective
8. Poetry is essentially a game we can never win, a game in which we can never be certain of the score
9. Thus, all Poetry is Objectively equal because entirely dependent for value upon the Subjective
10. Thus, there are no more or less legitimate forms of Poetry
11. Thus, there is only Poetry I like better and Poetry I don't like so much 
12. Thus, concerns about Am I a good poet? are best understood as more superficial concerns, such as Will my poetry be acceptable to these literary journals? or Will my poetry get me into that MFA program? or If I show my friends my poetry, will they laugh at me? or Does my poem rhyme good?
13. Given the superficial Subjectivity of these "core" value concerns, every Poem will succeed in some contexts and fail in others; every Poem will simultaneously Suck and Not Suck (Like Schrodinger's cat, we put the Poem in a box and its value equals all probabilities at once until someone opens the box ... The Poem, however, either Sucks or Not depending upon the person opening the box, whereas the cat is either dead or alive, one or the other, regardless)
14. Given the impossibility of winning the game, of forcing Language to represent True Reality (or of even knowing what True Reality is), there is also no possibility of losing the game, and so no limitations on--no rules (except for whatever rules the Poet chooses to provisionally adopt) of--the game.

(god, that was a long tangent to arrive at this point)I must concede that Fear of Sucking is entirely irrational, and should not even be considered when posting on a blog like this.

But then, as human beings are irrational, Fear of Sucking is a legitimate consideration. What shall I do now?

So, how about every Tuesday and Thursday, at least, I post here one of several different things:

1. Revisions to an existing poem
2. Draft of a new poem
3. An old poem (Juvenilia)
4. My thoughts about poetry and poetics
5. A method of generating poetic matter and/or my results from using such a method
6. My thoughts on things I see around the Poetosphere (what do you think of that label? I'm not sure ...)
7. A critical appraisal and/or analysis of someone else's poetry, whether unknown or well-known

Think I'll try that. Echo echo echo ...

Reckoning the Impossible, Part III

I continue to write, despite the absence of clear encouragement. This is strange, as I am far too depressed to play my guitar or read (which require far too much effort and concentration). Even this, this semi-personal expository prose, is accomplished with more time and labor than it should require. I had reached out to a few people, asking for assessment and critique, but I have not heard back, after a month or two. My interpretation is that my writing is mediocre at most, which is fine. I am a poor judge of my own work, so I wouldn't necessarily know. And the world has plenty of mediocre poets. My (perceived) mediocrity won't drive me to suicide, as it did poor Hart Crane (not that I'm comparing myself). My suicidal impulses come from other places.

So, why write? Poetry has no objective value, in my opinion. Presumably, I'm not talented enough to make a career of it--not without an effort the size of which I haven't the energy to make. I lack my youthful outsize ego and desire for fame that might veil my eyes to the disappointing reality. It's not clear to me, but I seem to be writing for the only legitimate reason to write poetry: I have certain perceptions, memories, emotions, thoughts, energies inside me that I feel compelled to understand better, that resist embodiment, topography, translation into the structure of language. This internal compulsion, I believe, is what drives poetry, regardless of whatever other filters it passes on the way out of the poet.

Robert Lowell and What To Do with My Hypomanic-Depression (Bipolar II)?

I have thus proved that it is absolutely possible to write bad poetry quickly. I really don't know what else I'm doing here. I suppose I should be working on my longer works, doing some research into coroner's reports for Murder-Suicide in Loveland, into the mathematical equations I use in All Things Being Equal (so I can possibly make that jumbled mess cohere and maybe find some inspiration to craft metaphors that don't suck). But I feel drained, depressed, and, honestly, not at all impressed with what I've written so far. Thinking of going back to my novel. But I'd run into the same problems there.

This is the problematic cycle that, in my better moments, I work to overcome: the grand idea exploded into millions of axons and neurons and glial cells, trunk and limbs and fingers, arteries and veins and capillaries, feverishly begun, feverishly overworked, until half constructed and half polished, then abandoned for greener, spore-infested, algae-ridden ponds. The confusion that follows, the dull and heavy head that fails to understand the hypomanic trajectory. The resignation to the overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. The stasis and stagnation.

Lowell after lithium

Robert Lowell supposedly found his depression useful for editing, crawling through each line, each word, from a dirt-level realism that can be the gift of depression. He balanced his manic explosions (during which he wrote, if he was not off on some drunken binge in South America or wherever) with diligent and exacting work, pushing through the lower moods to finish the grand mess he had started. That's self-discipline.

24-hour chapbook: Hours 15 and 16 (and what happened to 8-14?)

After what I put my body through, there was no way I could stay up even most of the night. So I let myself rest. And this morning I need to take my daughter out to buy some things and get in some driving practice, and then I have group therapy, and I need to find some AA meeting to go to (which typically on Thursdays is hard). Can I still put a chapbook together by 6pm? I think so.

It's not that writing poetry is easy, see. And I'm not saying that any old string of words is a poem. But any old string of words is not not a poem, see. Isn't that the point of experimental poetry? Oulipa? Cento? Found poetry? You may say none of that is real poetry, or that only when the poet approaches the random with intention and skill. I agree, completely. I was going through the Chicago Review the other day, and some of that stuff just left me cold, and some was nothing but baffling, and I thought Who thinks this is poetry? Obviously, someone does, as it is published in a (as far as I can tell) well-regarded journal. The point is that whether or not it's poetry is not up to me. (Whether or not it's good poetry is up to me, as far as I'm concerned, but that's neither here nor there.)

Approaching the random is automatically a meaning-making event. The human brain can't help but try to order the chaos.

What else? Oh, yes. I was going to say that incident and accident play major roles in poetry and its relation to the world. The influence of poetry on the world is, for the most part, incidental & accidental. Why shouldn't the creation of poetry sometimes be incidental and accidental? And sloppy and haphazard and lazy? Or obstinately obscure?

Well, that's all. Back to the chapbook. Working with variations on the sentence

the blue coat rises against the falls fills and crushes as sleeping alveoli, as lilies