Journal VII: Polishing.

It’s been advised to me by Heather that if I just took the time to re-draft each poem I wrote, I’d be much happier with the overall resulting piece and with myself in general. I will also float on a cloud of puppy dog’s kisses and the winks of an elf all the way over to the sherbet kingdom to take my rightful throne.
I don’t know where that last sentence came from – disregard that.

I’m a writer that works extemporaneously, so I don’t relish the idea of going through whatever I’ve written and picking through it. I do this very specifically because I feel that rehashing and disturbing what I’ve put out tampers with the product that I’ve created – for the same reason you can’t change how a fleck of paint hits a canvas by going back and painting over it. By working off the cuff and in a more stream of consciousness manner, I also think that I can capture a more resonating item for the reader.

In the interests of experimentation, however, I am willing to sully my pristine works with the vile canker of annotation. This is a piece that I haven’t published on the site yet, but will later – I’ll post the original here, then the edited version beneath:

“So a child will ask:
what is a weapon?
And he learns
that a weapon is a stone
or fist in any form
or a gun and its trigger
whether it hooks to a thorn.
A rose has more thorns than petals, he knows.

So a man will wonder:
what is the worst weapon of all?
And he observes
missiles, pens, planes, bacteria,
fire frenzy ash destruction,
the lens of a camera,
the bottom line,
the dotted line,
the barbed wire fence.
A bomb has more forms than flames, he knows.

So an old man will know:
man himself is the weapon.
He has grown to see his friends
live and die,
the vapour trail sizzle in the sky,
and observe -
man flies the jet,
man signs the plan,
man picks the target,
and the catastrophe left
is evidence.
So it was they laid blame on
God and Country,
but cast them off for peace and sanity.
A man has more excuses than sins,
he knows.”

“What age a child learns to ask,
‘What is a weapon?’
is too early to know,
but he learns so fast what forms it can take:
the fist so fast,
the stone so hard,
the stick so sharp,
the gun so deadly.
He learns those words so early, they have no meaning anymore.

When a boy becomes a man, he has used a weapon,
And he’s felt its weight in his hand and the look has been in his eye.
He asks ‘What weapon is worst?’
He dreams in his boxes about burning and boiling,
about cutting and killing,
about bombing and billing.
These words he tries to master,
Both in theory and in hand,
But the farther he goes,
The closer he gets to the truth.

The man grows to become old.
He has met his future and has nowhere left to go,
and he knows,
Man is the worst weapon.
Man always signs the papers that order trigger squeezes,
Man always pilots the planes and chambers the bullets,
and Man always knows how to shift the blame.”

It’s not up to me to say which is better. I’ll collect some opinions.

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Journal VI: Back for BLOOD!

When an artist – a real artist, not just a person who makes art – decides to produce a body of work, they attempt to convey something beyond the physical trappings of the piece. Picasso did this with his impressionistic works; an old Spaniard working by candlelight that wanted to show everyone the way he saw the world changed more than hundreds of his contemporaries because he had a unique form that spoke out from behind his peers’ homogenized work.
There are always people who stand in the way of forms of progress whether or not they have good reasons, or that what they stand against is valid or invalid. This is present in science as well as more ephemeral creation, and is ubiquitous where there is radicalism in ideas: that Galileo observed the heavens and made calculations based on mathematics that anyone could verify, didn’t change the fact that people strongly resisted whatever he put forward simply because he contradicted popular opinion.
This creates a problem: it’s hard to say that there’s a “bad” idea.
Sure, you can say that an idea’s inefficient, or that it simply cannot fulfill its goal, but “bad” is qualitative: and idea you don’t like isn’t bad, it’s just an idea you don’t like. This even further confuses the idea of ethics when applied to criticism, as by under these principles one cannot dismiss an theory that functions.
Earnest critical eyes in the 21st century are proving difficult to find, then – criticism is essentially in flux because it is convenient to dismiss and ignore. In fact, one could argue that our whole social structure is designed now around our ability to discard information that we don’t wish to see, even before we know what it is. Is this healthy? I’d say it isn’t.

This is a real life example that happened to me two days ago, stemming from an incident that happened months beforehand where I’d submitted a poem to a poetry contest. Regardless of its crappy quality, I put my shoe in and put in a modified poem of mine from earlier in the year, and then promptly forgot about the whole incident.
Flash forward to about a month or however long it took for the next school newsletter to come out, and I see the faces of my fellow applicants and the names of the accepted poems to be passed onto the Dorothea competition. I wasn’t there, but that was fine because I never thought I’d be. I told my friend the chain of events, that I hadn’t gotten in or heard back and she said something to the affect of:
“Well, what do they know? Besides, it isn’t your kind of poetry, really. Think about how many poetry competitions Bukowski entered and how many he won. Forget about it.”
That’s all fair. She makes good points. She’s a good friend of mine, I was happy with the answer, I forgot about it.
Again, we move forward, this time to two days ago. I’m sitting with my teachers/supervisors for SDI and it somehow comes up in the conversation while I gave my terrible presentation that I actually had gotten into the Dorothea contest – in fact, the school’s judges liked my submission and I’d been invited to attend a small photo opportunity for the school newsletter for the article that was advertising the poets who had been selected; I had not turned up, so I was discounted.
I’m not going to complain here about the matter of me not being informed that I had an event to attend, and as such could not – this isn’t the place for that, and I’m sure they exhausted all possible avenues of communication to try and get in touch with me (after all, they only had my personal email address, my school email address, my house’s address, my personal phone number, my home phone number, my class schedule, all of my teachers within a call, my parent’s corresponding forms of contact, my emergency contact’s information and months of time – I mean, they aren’t miracle workers), so I just rolled with the punch and finished up the presentation. I told the same friend of mine that I had told beforehand about what I’d found out, and this is what she had to say:
“Fucking idiots.” Verbatim.

The same idiots that I submitted my work to? We get back to the convenience of dismissing criticism. If these people are idiots, why would I want to ask for their approval in the first place? Why listen to anyone if you can just dissolve their opinions.

Alfred Whitney Griswold said that the surest weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. That’s the ethic I try to bring into practice.

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Journal V: Under the Influence.

I have a confession to make: I don’t actually read a lot of poetry.

Now, before you start throwing full wine bottles at your computer screens, let me offer this as a cop-out; I enjoy listening to Spoken poetry. I’m going to give you some examples of the type of stuff I listen to here and allow you to draw your own conclusions.

Amir Sulaiman.

Saul Williams.

Rives.

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Journal IV: Statistics [Draft]

One of the good things about having all of your work centered on the internet in a certain fixed place is the ability to read and react to what pieces people are most drawn to. In a print scenario, we don’t get nearly this level of feedback to published works. For example, in pulp press situation an anthology of stories will be published each month from a variety of authours of different styles and levels of skill, but these variable factors can’t really guarantee that a person will buy an issue or subscribe to the publication – usually preference is due to tradition, or personal relationships to a particular story that’s been published. The subscription of a person after reading a story that they like is the investment that they will continue to get stories of a similar manufacture to the ones that they’ve read and enjoyed.

Establishing something ethereal like a non-personal relationship through text is a pretty difficult task to grapple down (it was one of the redacted Twelve Labours of Hercules, right after having to clean the Augean stables, if I remember correctly). Publishing on the internet reveals a unique opportunity to have an open forum on which pieces were “liked” and “disliked”, which is a contrast to the older means in which scarcely anything was known about the readers’ opinions unless they went out of their way to inform the editors of such. Many great works of literature were discarded out of hand for this same reason, the excuse given as “before their time”; the internet affords us the ability to have our slaved-over works dismissed immediately as dross – something which is very convenient for the writer.

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Journal III: From the Brain to the Page [finished]

Today I’m going to talk about the process I go through of uploading the poetry I write to the SDI web page/wordpress page. It’s probably not going to be the longest of journal entries, all things considered, but it’s much better than not adding any journal entries, and hopefully it will be illuminating to those wondering what the actual logistics of my creative process is.
As I’ve mentioned beforehand, I rarely, if ever, set aside time to write poetry – most of it comes straight from the top of  my head and goes down without a second thought: I find this is the healthiest way to work, especially with the poetry I typically try to get away with writing simply because it clears my mind of it. I have very little patience for writing long form works and often get frustrated with their lack of movement, as well as hating looking back on the work I’ve already done and trying to match it: a sign of a good writer, I feel, is someone who can maintain and refine an idea and intensity throughout their pieces, rather than someone who fails and progressively becomes more of a derivative of their original concept.
This is why I work almost completely in the moment and do not edit; unless I feel I can expand on an idea I presented to the reader in the first “draft” then my editing is really more akin to tampering with a product that exists and functions copacetically.
Mechanically, the operation I partake each time can be summarized like this: I write a poem into my mobile phone, save it twice for safe keeping, copy it down into my poetry book, then upload it onto this website. I’ll be the first to admit that this way of uploading content is quite byzantine – in fact it may well be counter-productive; by the end of the process I will have four copies of one poem which will probably be completely unchanged from beginning to end. The reason I do it this way, I’ll look at in sections below, but for the most part it revolves around security and efficacy.
The first step before any of this finger-flicking tomfoolery is the actual formation of a poem. I’ve already tackled this in a poem, coincidentally, http://bit.ly/cDeGm. In it I say that inspiration to write a poem is everywhere, which is true, and that all you have to do is capture it. If you’re wracking your brain for ideas constantly, I suggest that you quit trying to write. Find something to inspire you; wrestle it to the ground and drink it dry.

The second step is dislodging it from that jumbled husk of tissue that you call a brain. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling – you need to get the grist of your poem from A to B. Imagine this as transporting bubbles from one bucket of water to another: the longer you wait while you hold it, the more bubbles will disappear, and if you wait until it forms a shape of its own, you’re going to end up with a handful of nothing. Write it down as its conceptualized; this will not only clear your head, but it will help the idea form.

Step three is just mechanically putting it into a book, or writing it down somewhere safe. Now that you have a digital copy of the work and a hard copy, you can manipulate and alter the text to your wishes, and this is the opportunity to do so.

Step four is the last step, in where your drafted and edited hunk can be uploaded to the internet. This is usually when it’s best to give it a title and look at its format on a screen, making any final adjustments you need to do.

This is the process I take to making my genius known to the world at large.

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