The Dead-Zone of Slick

It’s no secret that I haven’t been writing here much. Even if it were, the easily accessible archives would have foiled my attempt at secrecy. When I started Fallen Verses, almost a year ago (crap! over a year ago, and I missed the mandatory blogoversary post/navel-gazing!), I intended it to be a site about poetry, and the poetry I was writing, and other “neat” or interesting things I cam across. I never really meant to have a personal journal sort of sight where I contemplate my own life in public, or, being a poet somewhat in the confessional school, only in the areas in which it informs my writing.

I achieved a variable amount of success with that.

I wonder if that reticence may have been detrimental, or if there really is enough self-pitying on the ‘net without my adding to it. That ship, however has sailed. Fallen Verses is not a personal journal, hasn’t been, won’t become one. That does leave me with a bit of hole in the content. Other sites are much better sites to catch up on poetry and I haven’t been writing any. I have also not found a whole lot out there that I want to share with the world. So, expect continued slow and sporadic and pointless meanderings here for a while.

But I specifically want to talk about why I haven’t been writing poetry recently.

We all, I’m sure, are familiar with the dictum “write what you know.” What we all know best is our own lives, and since I began writing that has been the main fuel for my writing. Not as baldly as the true “confessional school” poets, and not exclusively, but it has been a large focus. I feel whenever I attempt to write these days (and I do attempt) that there is nothing of interest in my life to write about anymore. I’ve written everything I needed to say (so far).

Though, I don’t think that is true. I think the rest of what I need to say would be uninteresting, self-pitying drek, and I am performing a public service by not allowing it to pollute the interwebs.

The problem I’m finding is that I am left with little inspiration. I am a terribly undisciplined writer and without that unconscious prompting, it never happens.

I was going through the feeds in Google Reader today and one of the posts by Seth Godin seemed appropriate. Go read it, then come back here.

Okay. I think in poetry we have the same kind of curves, whether they should be called real and slick, or appolonian and dionysian, or modern and classical, whatever, who cares. however you want to divide things (and there are probably many valid ways to do that) there is a division and the two sides are distinct. I favor the Dionysian/Appolonian split.. One side born of passion and emotion and intensity and all those ephemeral words. The other about perfection, refinement, discernment (”cold” words, you could say).

Most of my poetry has been written from the first style (some even being “well-written” but, still, poetry of passion). I’ve burned through that and there is no more firewood for a while. A time to step from the art to the craft of poetry, right?

But my internal editor won’t let me get past that dip in the middle. I cannot knowingly allow myself to write things with the expectation that they will be terrible. Neither the impassioned imagery, nor the crafted sentences, but some terrible hodge-podge. <shudder> I know that, to be a better writer, I should be working in and through that point, but writing something so bas even I don’t want to read? Hard to do. And that is why I haven’t been writing. As always, I’m curious to know what other people think (and that curiosity isn’t really a limited thing) so feel free to chime in on the comments below.

Update

For the few of you who will see this, I updated to the most recent version of Wordpress this afternoon. I also messed around with the comments section and enabled avatars (and wrote hacked borrowed code to make them display). If you have any problems with the site or get any errors, let me know.

Blogroll update and Pimp your blog!

I have FINALLY gotten around to updating the blogroll. Click ‘links’ up above to see the grand results.

If you got missed, excluded or ignored, this post is your chance to make that right! Leave a link in the comments here. If it isn’t porn or insurance kind of spam, I’ll approve it and you might get a click. If your site or blog wows me, I’ll add it to the links.

Motivation and "The Path"

I don’t often mention it here, but I do play video games, including World of Warcraft. I’m not sure why I remain reticent to mention it, save that I still have a sense of the video games = geek stereotype rapidly vanishing in the 21st century, Old habits, I guess, trying to be cool and fit in with the poetry community. Eh. So, if I am reticent and have some foolish notions of both my "coolness" and the reactions of the people I sometimes communicate with via this medium, why in the world do I mention it now?

This will ramble a bit, but I promise, there is a point. Or, at least, I intend a point, Together we can explore whether I get to it.

Just before I wrote this post, I intended to tweet: "Need motivation. Anyone know where I can buy it?" However, twitter was down at the time so I reached for another outlet for a rare moment of… I can’t really call it creativity. Perhaps an attempt to open doors of communication with the other internet dwellers and further the Conversation. Reshuffle and explore connections. Or not. 

As to the tweet: I have hardly any motivation these days. Visitors to this blog (at least those not looking for a quote from Across the Universe) may have noticed I don’t update frequently, and many of the posts are but snippets, rather than meaningful content. In theory this is a poetry blog. I haven’t written anything this year that wasn’t for class, and since the end of the semester I have not written a line of verse. It isn’t writers block. I just have no desire to write. No motivation.

World of Warcraft is far cry from older video games. It is not just a game, but also a complex web of social interactions. I’m pretty good at the game part, and as with most social interactions, I’m not the among the easiest to handle or get to know. But there comes a point in the game where the two have to co-exist. No further content can be explored without other people and the complex web of personalities that ensue (this ignores the identity issues inherent in the system, but perhaps another time I can go into that).

And on top of the social aspect, there are continuing changes in the rules that require changes in the social aspect that then feed back into the rules. It’s an interrelated relationship that is has continual feedback and adjustments from both sides. One of those changes prompted a blogger going by Rohan to write an article about "Being on The Path." Setting aside, for these purposes, that some of the language is jargon, here’s a snippet:

The key is the concept of "Being On The Path" for endgame content. In nutshell, the number of people who reach the highest point of endgame is less important than the number of people who are working towards–and feel that they one day could achieve–that point.

In World of Warcraft, there are definable goals. Easily definable goals. And Rohan, in his post, was making the point that a change in the rules was going to completely remove a certain set of goals from the realm of possibility for most players. His view, one that I am in agreement with, is that is a bad thing, and is going to have a ripple effect of consequences due to the heavily social nature of the game.

I think most things fall into this kind of view, be it career, hobby, etc. We find goals, perhaps not so easily definable as in video games, and we can work toward them. We can "Be on the Path" toward the thing we value. Particularly as artists the end goal, be it art as career, or as immortality, we know the likelihood of success is minimal. So few people can accomplish their end in these arenas, and yet we continue striving because we believe we can do it. The chance, however small, is there.

I wonder if that is the key to motivation. Working for that chance to succeed.

But all paths have a beginning and an ending and a someway in-between them. Since we are drifting in the realm of concept, the beginning is always where we are, the path and the end moving around the fixed axis of our universe (ourselves). I suppose the question I want to send out to the ether is what do you do when you cannot see an end? What do you do when no goals exist for you that you believe are obtainable? When there is beginning and end and they exist in separate universes and no way to bridge that gap.

Late to the Game - 100% Honest Day

Right now either my laptop’s wireless card or my router is totally messed up, thus meaning I can only browse the web and feed reader (and twitter) on my desktop, which is more often used for things like video games. That means I haven’t checked anything on the intertubewebs since I left work yesterday! And that means I’m late to the party started by Dana!

Anyway, I had this big thought about nowish that went something like this: Wouldn’t it be great to be so ballsy self-assured that I could just be 100% honest with people?

Well I sooooo am that ballsy stoopid self-assured.

Tomorrow, a one-day event: Dana’s Be 100% Honest Day.*

Swing by. Ask questions. You are sure to get interesting answers. And don’t you think I am only doing this on the ’nets and such. I am so fuckin’ ballsy ridiculously stoopid self-assured that I will be doing this from waking until I turn in for the night, everywhere and with everyone.

Quite a few other people have joined in on this extravaganza of stoopidity forthrightness

100% honest day participants

• as it happens
• blood and gutstein
• bruce covey
• confessional highway
• daisy-bones
• in palinode’s palace
• mariacristina
• mom trying to write
• my gorgeous somewhere
• my little golden book of phobias
• paper napkin
• poéfrika
• polka dot witch
• pro tempore
• so you think i can
• still standing on her head

So Go On, ask me anything you want**. Since I’m late, I’ll do what the Polka Dot Witch is doing and give you all some extra time. 24 hours. And then some since I’ll be at work tomorrow. 27 hours. Until noon, central time.

*Of course, because I am late, tomorrow is Today.

**Not, though, that I guarantee interesting answers. I do invite everyone to try their best to elicit them.***

***Maybe Dana is on to somethign with these recursive footnotes.****

****Is it still a footnote when it footnotes a note?*****

*****I bet the Chicago Manual of Style could tell me, but it’s at home and I am not.

Sleeping and Temperature

This post brought to you by a sleep-addled mind.

While I can only speak from personal experience, I find it incredibly difficult to sleep when it is the wrong temperature. Too hot, too cold, even by the smallest margin, and the night is spent tossing and turning (and probably some muttered invective as well). Too hot means you need to turn the AC on to whatever level is appropriate to correct the temperature. Too cold…

Too cold is a whole other story.

While you could turn the heat up that may not be the best course of action. You then have to remember to turn the heat back down. There is also a cost factor for heating which is perhaps unnecessary. Particularly if it is only slightly too cold.

One solution that comes immediately to mind is to share the bed with someone. Then the radiant heat of a second body would raise the temperature the small amount to the more desirable comfort level.

But that isn’t much of a solution, is it? It introduces all sorts of uncontrollable variables into the equation of sleep and temperature!

Most likely, the delicate level of temperature that is most comfortable to you, would not be the same as that desired by the hypothetical bad-sharer. Only the incredibly lucky find someone whose desired temperature level has sufficient overlap. Everyone else will lay there slightly chill and perhaps slide a little closer. Meanwhile the other person is pilling blankets because they’re freezing. Then you’re roasting and the night wears on and then the other person starts kicking off blankets because it really is too hot and then it gets cold and the blankets come back on and the vicious cycle continues.

The only real solution is to dome the entire planet and get rid of temperature fluctuations entirely. Then everyone only has to become accustomed to one temperature.

Okay, that might be a bit out there, left field, etc. More easily accomplished: have a selection of blankets with a range of thermal properties so temperature variance can be accommodated. And sleep alone.

You are now returned to your regularly scheduled silence.

“How to break up with your girlfriend”

I love it!

The Fundamental Tension in Art

Within the realm of poetry, and art in general, and life in general, there are two forces at play: perhaps they can be called order and chaos, reason and emotion, id and superego, the primal and the civilized. In the context of aesthetics they are often referred to as the Appolonian and the Dionysian, based on the Greek gods.

Roughly, the Appolonian drive is tied to order, craft, reason. In poetry, this applies to formal verse, verse grounded in concepts and societies and focused on the experience of a people. The Dionysian, in contrast, is focused on the experience of the individual, emotion, ephemera. It is associated with much wilder leaps of metaphor.

It is easy to consider these two forces as opposites. Forces that only exist is tension, and I think that is fairly accurate. Many myth systems are less about good and evil, and have dichotomies based on creation and destruction, or the previously mentioned order and chaos, where there is no good or evil applied to these concepts. They are merely the forces underlying everything.

Poetry, or at least good poetry, relies on tension. Tension gives the poem dynamic energy. Tension between rhymes, between meanings, between line and syntax. Perfectly crafted formal verses may be appreciable based on its technical merits, but it is dull without more wild elements. The strangest of the Surreal can be so fanciful as to be unintelligible, but when it is connected to life, crafted to include considered repetition, is going to be superior.

Poetry cannot follow one impulse or the other. It exists between the two forces, constantly being pulled this way and then that. The struggle, especially as an artist, is to find the particular balance between the two that is ideal for you.

Critical Mass of Crazy

I wonder if there is a certain amount of crazy that a group cannot exceed and continue to function. Perhaps not so much an exact number, but a ratio of total crazy to number of group members. I think about this because I work with some really nutso people, and it doesn’t seem one building should be enough to contain all of this.

Then again, perhaps it works the other way? Maybe a certain amount of crazy is required? As if crazy was fertilizer and Beethoven music. It may be that the best gardens require the most disparate seeds.

Really, imagine how dull life would be if everyone agreed with you all the time.  Certainly, if everyone agreed with me all the time, the world would be a smooth and ordered place, but what opportunity for debate, for new ideas, for synthesis….

There’s a happy balance, I suppose, as there is in most things.  Some ideas are just bad.  Detrimental to the accomplishment of their purposes.  Detrimental to the survival of the species or the planet.  Those are problems.  Excessive oddity? Not so much an issue, but I still wonder how we can function in this messed-up workplace.

"That’s why I had to buy an external hard drive…"

"…Just because it’s midget porn doesn’t mean the file sizes are smaller."

Attributing anonymously by choice