Stuck Inside the Clogged Drainpipe of Creativity

The Story - Brandi Carlile (mp3)

My latest work of fiction stuck in writing limbo is haunting me.

It's not alone. My writing limbo is quite roomy and crowded. In fact, since back in college when I completed what might well be the worst piece of shit I ever wrote, I'm not sure I've finished anything fictional that was longer than a sestina.

When I say this 1993 short story was a piece of shit, it's not humility. Inspired by a friend's descent into drug use, I attempted to write a short story from the first-person perspective of someone on 'shrooms. The fatal flaw -- and it's not a minor one -- came from my clearly having never touched a hallucinogen in my life. The closest I'd ever been to a 'shroom was watching the guys on Young Guns take peyote. Even the damn friend who inspired my writing had never done 'shrooms. He was an LSD man.

So not only did I lack some crucially vital experience, but I didn't even have proper connection to anyone who had. Unless watching a few Lou Diamond Phillips movie counts. Quoting Dirty Steve and his obsession with the size of chickens as a crucial hallucinatory moment of inspiration is simply insufficient.

What my experience in writing a piece of shit taught me was that, if I were ever to succeed in writing anything fictional, it would need at some level to cast a harsh and critical eye on some aspect of myself. Almost 20 years later, and I still ain't finished anything.

I'm about to insult poets, so if you are one... well, first, I'm just sorry in general. But more importantly, you might not want to read what comes next.

Some 25 years after realizing I would spend the rest of my life writing, scribbling and typing words, pushing them out of my heart or mind or soul, down through the muscle fibers in my arms, and out of my frail knobby arthritisy-doomed fingers, I at last realize why poetry was so much easier for me than fiction writing.

Most poets know where the end is before they begin. If they don't, they find it pretty quickly, like a tourist who knows the keys are in her purse but has to dig around a little to find them. Poems are Bonsai Trees. They reveal detail and inspire awe in a way regular-sized trees rarely can. But when Mr. Miyagi starts clipping away, he already knows most everything about his tree, and the work is in snipping and binding, in pulling out and attending to the tiniest of details.

I'm part of the human condition that, even if I'm better suited to Bonsai trees, I can't help but stare out the window and long to be amongst the giant redwoods and towering pines. Look! There's Paul Bunyan! He's soooo much cooler than Mr. Miyagi! Unfortunately, although too many salespeople and educators tell us differently, it's not always true that we can be anything we want to be. You can't just wake up, work hard at it, and be the next Shaquille O'Neal or Jonathan Franzen.

Having left three lengthy writing projects in Fiction Limbo, most for decent enough reasons, a fourth now sits on the precipice, and I'm hoping I can find a way to keep it from falling in.


The story is inspired by a single autobiographical event and lets me have fun exploring some topics that reveal my own hangups while embracing a character on paper inspired by the woman who cut my hair recently. The opening scenario is so specifically out of date and pointless now -- a teenage boy's pathetically desperate midnight search for his first naughty magazine -- that I find myself laughing a little when I'm writing it. My generation never appreciated the "walking uphill both ways" stuff, and the current testosterone-addled teen will never appreciate needing to walk into a convenience store and pay a clerk in order to see naughty bits.

But, dammit, what began as a short story, in the hopes of me avoiding the rut of never-finished novels, has stretched. It's about to hit 4,000 words, and the end is nowhere in sight, even though I'm fairly convinced that there's not quite enough meat on this literary bone about boners to comfortably fill out a novel.

Thus, my current state of limbo. Which probably makes no sense to real writers. I doubt real writers ever get stuck just because they don't know whether something will end up a short story or a novel. If they do get stuck, it's probably less a seasional hibernation than those dudes whose head lolls over momentarily during a boring meeting.

But for now, I remain stubbornly willing to believe I might be, one day, somewhere in the future, a real writer. With the same kind of tense, awkward, nervous hope that the teenage boy in my story carries with him as he searches from convenience store to convenience store for the one night clerk willing to sell him a dirty mag.

Yeah, I might actually finish this one...

Take Thee This Poem and Shoveth It

Sonnet 18 - Bryan Ferry (mp3)
If You Want My Love (live) - Cheap Trick (mp3)

OK, so even if no one remotely felt like responding to my poetry stuff yesterday -- thus proving my entire freakin' point about how close to "DNR" poetry has truly become -- I'm foolish enough to post a poem I wrote over the last couple of hours while also watching Wednesday night's episode of LOST.

It's rough. It just might not only be unimpressive but also unsalvageable. But it's a Friday, and it's the last day I'll ever be 36, and I feel like posting a poem, dammit.


High Chair

We are drooling love-eaters
Love lands on our trays
in bite-sized chunks
Some of it stringy and fibrous
others sweet and plump
We squish love in our fingers
We cram it into our jaws

Can we ever ingest enough
to want down from that chair?
To feel a belly overplump
with the basic nutrients?
Like celery our bodies burn love
calories faster than we devour them

We are often picky
leaving the greens and vitamin-rich
portions untouched to grow stale
banging our dangling feet
against the plastic footrest
the treble shill of objection
our desperate grab for control

Just mewling bottomless pits
who eat love out of house and home

-- January 22, 2009

To Everything Turn, Turn

Everything Good is Bad - JJ + Mofro (mp3)
Beulah the Good - James Jackson Toth (mp3)

Nothing about the Inauguration moved me more than the recitation of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem. I found myself listening and trying to determine where her line breaks were, where the change in verses occurred (or if it was all one continuous verse). Either because it was easy, or because the poem hit me at the right moment, everything she read made sense to me and felt perfect for the moment.

Then I read David Ulin's commentary where he basically pisses on it. He pisses on it because he didn't get it. I don't say that in a snooty way. If (sigh) there are two types of people in the world, there's the people who could give a rat's ass about poetry, and there's the remaining five people in that coffee shop wearing black turtlenecks and trying to act interested in the other poets until it's their turn to read.

So, it's not Mr. Ulin's fault he didn't get it. Poetry isn't very get-able, which is why so many people detest or fear it. To make it worse, poets are snooty-ass mofo's, so even the people poets most need in their corner mostly think all other living poets suck. It's a pretty tough place to earn credit. And it pays for shit to boot.

For a solid decade of my young life, poetry was a mental sauna where I could close the door, escape the outside world, and pull out my emotional sweat from its pores.

Poetry for me was entirely about communication. (Ironic, no? That I would use the least popular form of modern written expression to attempt to communicate with people? No wonder why I was/am an odd bird.) It was my attempt to cram my entire emotional wardrobe into a tiny suitcase, jumping up and down on its overstuffed form like Daffy Duck, hoping that the compact size might make my plight more appealing. Poetry was the antithesis of my blogging. Without question, writing the newspaper column in college and after graduation was the beginning of the end of my obsession with poetry. It seemed people were more willing to read my babbling rants than my slanting rhymes.

My prose writing is more like how I actually think. Poorly-organized. Side turns and sub-references. Run-on sentences and fragments. A pathetic inability to self-edit. Poetry, on the other hand, required concentration, care, delicacy, and a certain finitude.

Poetry at its best is a nuclear power. Maximum energy in minimum words. Thus, for me, poems longer than two pages are tough cookies for me while sonnets are a food of the gods. (Haiku, while occasionally pithy, more often feel like a J*zz In My Pants moment: over too quickly to be any good.)

Alexander's poem isn't likely to go into the annals of poetry immortality. Still, the poem is worthy. Even without knowing the exact line breaks, we know it's about commonality amidst diversity. It's about all of us being individually busy, collectively self-absorbed, yet all striving for and yearning for so many similar things. Albeit in different ways, we all yearn to be creative. We all have moments of great anticipation and hope. We all encounter words. (Yes, this is insultingly obvious... yet it's also so completely taken for granted and important.) We all yearn to be safe, to boldly go where no one has gone before, to pursue noble causes and experience noble moments. We all hunger for love, a love that's like cotton candy because you can never get enough of it to feel full.

Mr. Ulin was upset because she begins her poem with the pedestrian line "Each day we go about our business." But even January 20, a day the likes of which we might never see again in our lifetimes, was ultimately a day of national routine, of national business, filled with individuals doing their own thing. And all of us, even the most cynical and conservative amongst us, can't help but feel that we are, as a country, in a moment of tremendous importance. A brink moment that will determine the fate of us as individuals, employees, citizens, parents, and children, and also one that might well determine our fate as a collective.

We're all anticipating what comes next.

Yup, the world would be a better place if we all sat around once in a while and masticated on a good poem.