Yet More on Perfectionism: meds & poems & fear

I remember my post here about Kristin Prevallet's [I, Afterlife].*  I was sleeping maybe two hours a night by Fall 2008, and searching the streets of Manhattan for one prescription for one antidepressant I knew would help. Of course I had no insurance.

The story had a happy ending with me getting the pills (outpatient), and accepting, finally, I had to stay on them, or similar. Between the meds and being laid off, more woolly baa-ing sheep have frolicked in my bedroom in the past two years than romped in my crib (of the variety harboring infants).

Enter perfectionism, Stage Right.  My past two or so postings, by me, showed me refusing to finish one novel and two novellas, my perfectionism being a manifestation of a fear (of not being perfect or "God's perfect child" as Barbara Wilson wrote in her memoir God's Perfect Child about her Christian Science childhood).

Back to the pills.  Now that I had them I where should I store them?   I've debated--since I my twenties--delivery systems to guarantee I took daily vitamins.  Why not buy a rectangular Monday-through-Sunday pill box available at my friendly pharmacy? I'd been studying them over the years but found one far too capacious for my puny intake; another just not cute enough or too plastic or the wrong color or colors.

The above debate ended a few months ago. On a Sunday morning I shook out seven antidepressants and slapped them on the dusty top of my cranky refrigerator, then ingested one. There were six left, each of which disappeared into my waiting mouth, one-at-a-time, Monday, Tuesday and so on through Saturday. The system is no fail and has helped to regularize my vitamin takeage.

When interviewed on Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg said:

I remember I was thinking, yesterday in fact, there was a time that I was absolutely astounded because Kerouac told me that in the future literature would consist of what people actually wrote rather than what they tried to deceive other people into thinking they wrote, when they revised it later on. [Ginsberg]

Of course Ginsberg is referring to our Utopian future in Shangri La.  On the Road was a ten-year edit.  Ginsberg's poetry wasn't "automatic."  I continue to write and print out, edit, input, print out, edit, rewrite, edit, print . . . my poems and stories. And of course there's me and my pills.

I know I'm not the shining light of the poetry world, fiction world, of pretty much any world. Maybe I'd have published more earlier if I were less fearful (because that is what perfectionism is, fear . . . of mistakes, scorn, dismissal...). 

Regardless of output which is no measure of quality, I'd have lived less fearfully if I was a bit more of a perfectionism conqueror. A less fearful life?

Who deserves anything less. 

*Click on the link to read Lovingarms's posting on Kristin Prevallet's [I, Afterlife]

I'm Writing Faster (Redux): Release perfectionism

Grow a pair [of patron saints or spirit guides or good flesh & blood critics or muses or . . .].

To follow up on my posting of Saturday (I'm Writing Faster: The Force That Won't Take No for an Answer), my epic outburst  --epic for Sarah Sarai-- of fiction began when I let go.

I had decided to add my two novellas to my short story line-up and so hadr to complete the two novellas, both of which had been hanging around for years because I was unconvinced they were ready to go into the world. Thank all creatures of Heaven I didn't have children! They'd be forty years-old and living on cots in my kitchen!

Who ever knows. Maybe the novellas are still unready, or never will be but each made a good case for its adulthood and maturity. I pushed myself to make decisions about characters and situations and folded the novellas into story collections; each  (A Vote for Ross Perot and From the One Side of Heaven) is the finale of its own (titular) story collection (which I submit when there is opportunity).

Please understand. My reason for writing today's posting is to encourage you: Let go of perfectionism. Grow a pair [of patron saints or spirit guides or good flesh & blood critics or muses or . . .]. Yes, I was working on a novel, those novellas and touching up this or that story, but fact is I generated only a few new stories in the past ten or so years. Yes, I wrote poetry, and as some of you will understand, Poetry Saves Lives. The Future Is Happy (see Tab on this blog). Still.

My hope is to step up the encouragement and advice here. To help. To be of service. My list of complaints about the poetry world, the literary world, academia, politics, institutions and Times Square at rush hour defines endless and eternal.  So what.

Please feel free to backchannel or post a question about writing.  I'm not able to fully change my cranky nature; even so I can help you.

Keep writing.

From Clever to Poem

I want to capture this process what it's relatively fresh.

Three Sundays ago I started a new poem. I was at the Met. The spark was in the collection of European art, one of my favorite wandering zones--where, as an acquaintance said, "it's all that Jesus, all that blood." She volunteers at the Modern.

Not mine to worry about my love, why I love. Just grateful to love art.

I'd wandered there and here and as usual was grumbling to myself about inadequate signage. I explained to two very sweet college students that flash bulbs could damage the paintings. I might be overdoing it but what's wrong with an effort towards conservation.

I think--think--the students were pleased to be told the art was archived online; the reproduction would be better than any they might snap. So there I was in everyone's business and world but mine, when I stopped short.

What was this? The painting that nabbed me was Jesus Christ at the Last Judgment, making decisions. It was a little eerie, as if he was deciding who should go to the right or the left with all the historical associations there. My mom said Heaven and Hell are here on Earth and we can make our lives either. Not going to argue, but there is a part of my Christian-Jewish-Sufi being that entertains a teensy concern about the next phase. I know what I've done.

I was enough unsettled to settle on a bench and write a draft of a poem. A few days later I input it, then every day I edited, crossed out, honed what was turning out to be one of the cleverest pieces the western world had ever known. I was soaring.

I like to keep the latest print-out of a poem by my bed so I can take a look when I wake or any time it catches my eye. One of these times it hit me like a tiny brick--I don't need a ton--that I wasn't writing a poem. There was no tension between the scan the words the music the breaks. It was a paragraph from a book I wouldn't buy, an idea, a clever leaden pastiche that no one would want to read, including myself.

Since I do most of my work online once I've written out the first draft, I can't reproduce the drafts themselves. (I don't archive. I'm not T.S. Eliot. Getting anyone to buy The Future Is Happy is work enough, let alone worrying if a library will purchase my letters. I'd probably make more from a med. school purchasing my body.) When things are hopping I go to the library daily to print out.

I gave into my sinking awareness. I deleted. I sacrificed. I sacrificed more. I kept reading it out loud.

It's been over a week since I figured out that was I was working on needed a sea change. I keep reading it out loud. It will be a poem. I'm even pushing to say something. My emotions have led me around for so much of my life--true of many. What a nice trick to mine them. To rise from the well and make my golden way.

Writing by hand, online, typing drafts: untenable - and good - examples

Once a poem’s online I forget about it. In once sense only that’s a blessing, and I’m not sure there’s much sense in that sense because a poem is a thoughtful creation, crafted, not a geyser of emotion or cleverness, erupted.

I have posted a few unpublished poems on this blog, and in a few cases typed first runs right in. And then forgotten about them. What’s the point?

With rare exception, I work on and over and in poems as long as requested. With NO exception (except a few on this blog as mentioned previously) I write first drafts of poems by hand, then type, print, edit, type, print, edit . . . And when there’s nothing else to be done I send out the poem. Sometimes I send the poem to Siberia, a file where poems that just don’t work live. They are warm and fed but their biospheric life does not include guests. Kafka’s messenger never reaches them and they don’t care. These poems aren’t sullen. They’re differently abled and know it.

A poem submitted to a journal is most often rejected at least once and when I get it back I take another look, ask if it wants to get off the bench and back in the game (Look, Ma! I wrote a sports reference!) or needs a massage. Maybe an amputation.

However, as far as prose and nonfiction are concerned, this blog unstuffs me and that’s been a great victory.

Most reviews I’ve posted here were typed into the blog and “published” or gone live. I might spy a typo or stupid sentence construction and go back in to fix. It’s not like the blog is a dangerous mine and reentry risks life.

When I wrote reviews as a freelancer for The Seattle Times each one took an enormous amount of time. I was utterly convinced I was a slow writer, no change possible. If my current reviews were worse than those, less insightful or fun or effective in tribute where called for, I’d agree I should return to those awful weeks in front of computer, me trying to hammer out a greater piece of writing than I am capable of creating.

But what I write now, although each could be expanded – now, that’s for sure – is fine. I am writing for a blog, not an journal, and length needn’t be too long. No one’s paying me for this. A few pieces here on my life might claw at me later. They might demand more attention, more words. We’ll see.

No poem is ever done. But some poems, many, are done talking to me and so they live out in the world, make new friends and decisions about me I may not like. That’s the deal.

So no more poems typed into my blog. Only poems pasted from my collection or after they’ve been in print long enough I do no disrespect to the kind journal.

First book advice: The Future Is Happy

Now that my first book, the poetry collection The Future Is Happy has its own page on the SPD (Small Press Distribution) website, I am ready to talk.

Now independent bookstores can order it, and independent book readers frequenting independent bookstores can buy it. This is big. At least for me. The Future continues to be available from Amazon, my publisher (BlazeVOX) and from me.

I'm a lucky duck to get published over-the-transom. I did try four or five contests run by literary presses or university presses, didn't win, knew I could not afford the fees and slightly mistrusted the process (not fair of me, really), so I started searching elsewhere.

When my manuscript was accepted I was given a piece of advice, as if advice were a cherry pie I could gobble down. A friend with three books out told me not to try for a perfect book.

"It'll lock you in. You'll always have to live up to it. Who wants precious?"

I appreciated permission to be imperfect. Those gem poems of mine were in the book, but so were poems a little more ragged - though loved by me. Who's to say in the long run which is a more meaningful experience of a poem? Well, the reader is to say. Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. But really I write for greater closeness and salvation, corporate and always mystical.

The way is sure but it's got to be varied. So many are on the path.

Because my book was accepted during the ongoing economic meltdown, there were delays and more delays. By the time I received the first proof I saw a few things I wanted to change.

With Geoffrey's (my pub.) blessing I swapped out a few poems. As with any project, time away offers perspective. My reasoning in choosing new work, some of it written after the book was accepted, was to make the whole more whole, the more whole stronger, but not to make it perfect.

I am not a perfect person and less so a perfect poet. I am not a perfect poet and less so a perfect person. A stream of hot radiant light is focusing my next book. I have nothing to live up to, in following The Future Is Happy, but nothing to live down. I am proud of it, amazed it ever happened - I am sixty - and ready to be ready.

Note: Cover photograph by Susan Tamany.

SPD: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781935402350/the-future-is-happy.aspx

BlazeVOX: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ss2.htm