Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 2 of 18)

Literary Recipes

I’ve been meaning to do this post for many months now but was unable to carve out the time. Recently, there was an Intro to Anthro With 2 Humans podcast about Roman food (“Pour Some Garum on Me“) and just like the Egyptian sex poems book, I was able to find literary crossover as a stream of books come through the house.

As I flipped through one book called Gastronomical Time Travel, I also happened to be reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and I realized some of these recipes were related to famous literary works.

So I thought I would list some of them out.

Absinthe

I visited an Absinthe bar in Paris in 2008 and since then I’ve been noticing references to absinthe in paintings, novels and biographies. Painters and writers include Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Paul Verlaine, Picasso Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde.

Absinthe recipe

The Mint Julep

The Mint Julep was made famous in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Here’s a Medium article on “The mint julep’s jaunt through literature.”

Mint Julep recipe

The Madeleine

The Madeleine is probably the most famous depiction of food’s impact on memory and the sublime, from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way.

Madeleine recipe

New England Clam Chowder

New England Clam Chowder as depicted in Moby DickI’m going to Boston in early August and hope to have some thick, creamy New England clam chowder!

New England clam chowder recipe

Fried Chicken, Cold

Cold Fried Chicken appears in many novels from Pride and Prejudice to A Moveable Feast.

Make the fried chicken recipe, then refrigerate.

Haggis

From the Robert Burns poem, “Address to a Haggis.”

Poets love to write about food. Here are 10 anthologies of poetry about food:”10 tasty food poetry anthologies for hungry readers.” I have The Hungry Ear which has anthologized food poems by contemporary poets.

Haggis recipe

Oysters Rockefeller

In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas talks about Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s return to America from France in 1934-5 and their discovering the new foods Americans were eating. One of the dishes was Oysters Rockefeller and Toklas captured a recipe for it. Mark Twain was also extremely fond of oysters in any dish, including the Oysters Rockefeller.

The Decades-Long Comeback of Mark Twain’s Favorite Food

Oysters Rockefeller recipe

More Lists of Literary Foods

Learning New Things

I am still making my way through a year’s subscription of New Yorker from 2021 but I only have a few issues left. I came across a good article last week called “Starting Fresh” by Margaret Talbot and it’s about learning new things as an older person and how this is good for preventing cognitive decline. This article interested me for a few reasons:

One, the women in my family have always been keen on preventing cognitive declines. My grandmother Ladd did this by religiously doing crossword puzzles and keeping track of storyline plots of soap operas. My mother does it with online games like Words With Friends, and cooking when she is able to still do that.

Secondly, I had a brain explosion many, many years ago when I took a ceramics class and got over the daunting idea that I would never be good at it. (See raspberry mask above.) We live in a society that instills in us a terror of attempting anything we might fail. So most of us like to stay in our comfort zones.

But as a writer working my way through my later years, I feel the need to keep exploring, as best I can anyway. This article talks about the benefits of learning new things later in life beyond the spiritual resetting of embracing a beginner’s mind. And also of the dangers of perfectionism earlier in your life.

“Maybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent among college students in the past three decades. Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. This is not, the researchers point out, good for mental health. In the U.S., we’ll be living, for the foreseeable future, in a competitive, individualistic, allegedly meritocratic society, where we can inspect and troll and post humiliating videos of one another all the live-long day. Being willing to involve yourself in something you’re mediocre at but intrinsically enjoy, to give yourself over to the imperfect pursuit of something you’d like to know how to do for no particular reason, seems like a small form of resistance.”

Yes it does.

Talbot talks about what kinds of cognitive abilities decline with age and which ones improve with age. There’s no perfect age, as it turns out, for the best cognitive ability in all areas. “Fluid indigence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence–the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age. And there’s more to it than that: particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across the life span…”

The article states that your overall cognitive function will also improve if you try to learn a few new things at once. You don’t even have to be good at it. Just the attempt to do it. And researchers think this is because the act of learning multiple things at once replicates how children learn.

I’m fascinated watching how children learn things cognitively and socially. Following early child development educator Dan Wuori on Twitter is just as interesting as watching people try to solve mysteries or design things on TV. It’s watching the wheels spin. You can see it on countless reels of little kids. The first Dan Wuori video that hooked me was a little kid learning how to sort bags of different kinds of snack chips and it was compelling. The face of someone thinking is a wonderous thing.

Which is all to say I’ve started learning how to type on a braille typewriter I bought a few years ago. Back then I invited a friend over who works at a local school in Albuquerque where kids have some disabilities. So she has to take a braille test every year. It was a daunting lesson. First we had to figure out why the machine wasn’t working. Then she had to show me how hard it was to use!

I did a series of typewriter poems a few years ago and it took me like 60 pieces of paper to type out 6 poems. But I’m a comparatively good typist so that was easy compared to working with braille. There’s the same high expectation that there be no errors, (no white out sheets for my typewriter poems!), but you have to learn to type very slowly with multiple fingers engaged for every single word.

It took me quite a while to write a poem I thought worthy of the thing. Years. Then I used an online text to braille translator to map out the poem this week. Now it’s just days and weeks ahead of making many mistakes.

Wheeee!

Poems in Pop Culture: Ghost (UK)

I’m pleased to report another poem in pop culture today. My last reported poem in pop culture was the poem in the Al Pacino movie Sea of Love which I rewatched during Covid in 2020. And the most popular Big Bang Poetry post of all time is probably the hilariously bad poem from Bob’s Burgers.

So now we have another one. For Ghost show fans, you probably already know there is the British TV show Ghost and the U.S. version of Ghost. I watch them both. The U.S. version has a lot of heart and can be very sweet; but the UK Ghost is indisputably funnier, which is not surprising. The cast is also mostly carried over from the skit comedy Horrible Histories, a show Monsieur Big Bang is a big fan of so I’ve seen many of those episodes and you can see how the UK cast coheres better for being an existing and robust comedic troupe.

Recently we’ve started watching the final season of the UK show on Amazon. And last night’s “Home” episode (#2 of season 5) centers around the writing of a poem. This is not surprising either because the UK show has a poet.

The U.S. show’s ghost-types include the mansion matriarch, the 60s hippie, a Revolutionary War captain (and his British counterpart boyfriend), the Native American, the jazz singer, the scout leader, the playboy stockbroker, the occasional visit from the plague victim and Thorfinn, a visiting Viking,

The UK version has the Romantic-era poet (played by the funny and handsome Mathew Baynton), a caveman, a WWII captain, a Conservative MP (the trouser-less counterpart to the playboy stockbroker), a Georgian noblewoman, a scoutmaster, a peasant woman (gone from season 5) and the mansion matriarch. Besides the poet, my second favorite character (played by the talented Martha Howe-Douglas) is Fanny the matriarch because she makes hilariously interesting faces.

Anyway, in the “Home” episode, the poet Thomas tries to ruthlessly finagle a poem from the matriarch so he can earn a publication in a modern-day poetry contest. This is the poem Fanny writes thinking she is just explaining to Thomas her love for her historic estate, a parcel of which is about to be sold.

Home
By Stephanie (Fanny) Button,
transcribed by Thomas Thorne

Have you never stood to regard our home
from its farthest corner,
the long grass shimmering in the sunlight
as the wind combs through the field
like gentle waves in a great calm sea of green?

Flowers die. The trees fail.
The house can change brick by brick
until nothing of the original remains.
Everything changes.

So home is not the walls or the gardens.
Home is the souls within those walls.
Home is the memories made on the spot.
Home is not a place. Home is a feeling.

The End of NaPoWriMo

A little bit of catchup to do. I was in Cleveland for a month dealing with some family stuff. And then my dog. And then my computer. And then my sanity.

New Mexico Poetry

When I arrived home from Ohio, sitting on the doorstep, (literally), was the Albuquerque anthology of poetry, Open-Hearted Horizon, from the University of New Mexico Press. This was the first piece of good news I had had after many, many days of increasingly bad news.

I knew the book was coming out sometime this spring but I hadn’t heard an update since the fall of 2023, including any news of the book launch party which happened in March while I was gone.

Sigh. My streak of being unable to network with local poets continues.

But two of my poems made it into the anthology, including one from each of my books, Why Photographers Commit Suicide and Cowboy Meditation Primer. I’m very excited about reading this collection, which includes some famous local poets and Joy Harjo. To be in an anthology with her is pretty awesome.

This book will also be included in an upcoming page I’m working on that will be an ongoing roster of poetry anthologies and poets who write about New Mexico. I have a shelf of these books! It’s the kind of page I wish I had found when I moved back here in 2010 and was looking for examples of how poets write about the place to understand how I might do it.

You can buy Open-Hearted Horizon from the University of New Mexico Press page or from Amazon.

NaPoWriMo 2024

This was my last year doing the challenge as I’ve hit the goal of over 300 poems (311 to be exact). Quite frankly, I’m shocked I was able to get this year’s challenge completed, almost without a hitch.  I say almost because on the last day,  (April 30), I accidentally copied over the poem prompt from the day before, (for April 29), with no backup available locally or online. I hadn’t yet printed off the set and had kept no offline copy. Why I forgot to do this? I have no idea but it’s a great example of  the precariousness of NaPoWriMo challenges because almost every poem starts that morning without much pre-writing. So I literally had to re-invent that entire prompt from scratch.

I guess it’s surprising this had never happened to me before in all the 11 years of NaPoWriMos. It was an almost miraculous bit of luck that I was able to slowly remember most of the poem. Unfortunately, it’s not an exact copy. I know a few lines here and there are missing from the summary and the poem. It was an interesting mental experience to crawl back into the flow and see what memories came back in what order, the most recent memory being a missing piece that woke me up very early this morning  and I kept mulling over whether the line was “instead of someone to  spend all this time with” or “instead of someone with which to help spend all this time” or finally “instead of someone to help spend all this time” and then I fell asleep and forgot it all over again and had to start all over when I woke up again, the second time finally scribbling it down on a piece of paper in the dark and then going back to sleep again.

This last challenge is interactive with 30 multimedia prompts covering food, handwritten postcards, music, maps and scavenger hunts so you can write along. I had really no idea how each poem would go each morning, with the exception of the Winslow weekend posts which I had to preplan.

Here is a summary of the last 11 years of NaPoWriMos:

2013-2017 and 2019 can be found (somewhat degraded over the years) on Hello Poetry.

If you’re interested in interactive poetry projects, you can also try the 52 Haiku prompts.

The NaPoWriMo poems will stay up for a little while until I find the time to edit them better and compile them into a book. The nature of this challenge is that poems are quickly scrawled off and edited only within the span of a day. So they will be improved before their final resting place.

Winslow Writer’s Trip

One of the things I’m grateful for right now is being able to have taken a writing trip to Winslow, Arizona, a week or so ago. I so needed it. The trip was to meet up with the Sarah Lawrence College off-campus writing group that started in the early 1990s at the house where Murph and Denise’s were living in Bronxville.

Over the years we have stayed in touch and a few years ago we started a reading group to tackle Infinite Jest. We kept going after that. Last August, when I visited New York City, we met for dinner and agreed to meet again in Winslow in 2024.

We caught up on life stuff, writing projects and generally became a closer, fiercer gang of writers. It was perfect, aside from the fact that three of us miscalculated the time-zone change driving back east to Albuquerque and I had to floor it to get them to the airport to catch flights back to Philadelphia and New York. Good times.

 

To be honest, I almost decided not to finish the NaPoWriMo at all. This spring was so rough I was very much feeling like “what am I doing all this for?” But then I decided I would get to the 300 poems done if killed me. It did not kill me. But I have some quiet reflection to do right now.

People, Place or Thing: NaPoWriMo 2024 Is Coming

This will be my last National Poetry Writing Month Challenge year. I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo for over 10 years now and I said I would stop at 300 poems, which I will hit this year. I wanted the last set to be something more interactive, like an asynchronous group activity. So I’ve come up with a theme  on looking back on childhood and putting the past in a very tiny book.

Although I’ll be posting things every day in April related to the theme, I’m not seeing it as a project that has to be finished in a NaPoWriMo amount of time or even in 30 days. The point is to just get through the 30 little challenges. I’m starting to create a calendar to get it all organized.

Materials you will need to complete the challenges:

  • an iphone camera (if you want to memorialize your little scavenger hunt assemblages ((spoiler alert: there will be scavenger hunt assemblages)),
  • recipes (see below),
  • 5 books from childhood that you loved, (access to childhood stuff),
  • 5 postcards,
  • a tiny little notebook. I purchased my tiny little notebook (pictured above) a few years ago at the gift shop of El Rancho de Las Golondrinas, the Hispanic living history museum near Santa Fe. I was just waiting for something to do with it all this time.
  • Optional: A youtube or streaming music account

Example topics will look something like this:

Childhood Foods

  1. A childhood comfort food
  2. A recipe from childhood you still make
  3. A recipe that breaks your heart
  4. A recipe you associate with your mother, an aunt or mother-figure
  5. A recipe you associate with your father, uncle or father-figure

I’ll document my progress as we go and anyone who follows along (and wants to share) can send pics to and progress to mary@bigbangpoetry.com.

Speaking of NaPoWriMo, on the plane to Cleveland, The Birds and the Bee version of this song below came up on my phone’s music app shuffle.  (And I really do love these hipster versions of this song, truth be told.) I remembered driving home from work at AECOM in downtown Los Angeles years ago and Steve Jones on his radio show extolling the virtues of the song’s structure.

I also remembered it was the last outtake of NaPoWriMo 2022 and it got displaced for April 13, 2022, for a Genesis song. Here it is.

Fathoms Deep
(“How Deep Is Your Love,” Bee Gees from the movie Saturday Night Fever)

It’s tempting to pick the proliferating
hipster versions instead of this vulnerable
little embryo of a song
by the original vibrato brothers,
its morass of whispering
away from disco foolhardiness.

Regardless, I feel we must ask
the key, foremost question
posed here in a love trill,
addressed here in plain,
manifest English.

Because I really do need to learn
where this knowledge lives,
where it is, for what it longs.
And this is an inquiry to the heads
of the realms where we are both from.
A question to the pilot, the head honcho,
the chairman of the board, the grand poobah.

How many fathoms deep is it?
And can we believe in it?

Board Game for Poets

This amazing world, huh?

In August my friend Ann told me about a poetry board game called Dead Poets Rise, a game that was not yet for sale. I sat across from Ann practically losing my shit. A board game for poets? I’m a poet! I love board games!

I tried and failed to get in on the funding by sending a message to the game Facebook page. Possibly I was too late, but I did get added to the mailing list. The game went on sale  last fall for $100. This seems like a steep price when you consider games going for $20-40 on Amazon and Target. But I’ve noticed really popular and well-designed games are going for $100 on eBay, games like The Gallerist (about planning art exhibitions at your gallery and rumored to be the hardest strategy game out there, a factoid told to me by one of the clerks at my local board game hangout) and Shakespeare (where similarly you plan out a theatrical show).

This is a very nice game and I can see why it’s listed at that price point. I got a copy as a Christmas gift. Thanks Mom!

The Stuff

It’s a beautiful game in an awesome hexagonal-shaped box. The only flaw is that the box doesn’t close properly and needs a paper strap that’s hard to get on and off to keep it closed so that the contents don’t all spill out when you try to stash it in your closet. The paper is already tearing and will give up the ghost before long and I’ll have to be careful with storage. Right now the game is not being stored with my other board games but with my conspicuous poetry consumption objects.

The cover also acts as a hexagonal board with quotes printed along the edges. There are also juicy elements like a die, three decks of cards, tons of marbles! And a board that looks like Chinese checkers. Also included are mechanical pencils (with little eraser hats and a box of replacement graphite), pads of paper and a sticky notepad for all your writing prompts.

You also need a phone to look up texts and videos as part of the writing prompts.

The instructions

The instructions attempt to explain in words how to set up the board but we had no idea what we should end up with. The instructions need a picture of the board at the start of play. The main issue was that there were too many marbles for the available marble holes and we needed to have a combination of black and green marbles. But how many black marbles did we need? The instructions didn’t say. And should there be more black marbles in games with more players? There were black and green marbles and big shooting marbles (to represent the players). Shooting marbles went into easily marked holes around the edges of the board. We just had to guess.

Instructions should be specific about how many black marbles to “roll out” per number of players and then instruct the players to fill in the rest of the holes with green marbles. Why were there so many bags of marbles in the first place? There was a nice tan bag full of big beautiful shooter marbles, a beautiful black bag with the game logo full of green marbles. Then there was an extra plastic bag of 12 black marbles and another extra plastic bag containing 4 green and 2 black marbles. We never did figure out what all the different bags meant.

The black and green marbles were referred to as common and uncommon marbles which seemed unnecessary. In fact the game had too much new terminology that was maybe intended to create ambience in the game but it ended up just being confusing.

Instead of getting a specially made single die with low numbers, the instructions had a die translator. This annoyed me more than it did Monsieur Big Bang who was playing the game with me.

A word about Monsieur Big Bang, he hates board games. He grew up with bar games like pool and foosball, not that he’s crazy about those games now either (maybe with the exception of pinball). During Covid I got into board games somewhat excitedly. I focused on finding 1) games I felt deprived of as a child like Mystery Date or Go To the Head of the Class, two games my girlfriends had, 2) detective games with map boards and 3) games with pictures of famous art or art-related games (which is a crossover of #1 and the fact that my eldest brother had the game Masterpiece and refused to play it with me for mysterious reasons so I’ve been obsessing about that game ever since.

A word about me: I am notoriously bad at board games. I just like the doo-dads, setting them up, sorting it all out, losing the game and then putting everything back in the box. Just typing all that out makes me want to do it right now. My eldest brother did play games with me from time to time, but only war games like Risk or Battleship, during which he famously won by lying for the whole game and I guessed every single space until it was impossible not to have hit one of his ships by then. I lost by gullibility but then he was 7 years older than me so…I don’t feel too bad about that.

Getting Monsieur Big Bang to play board games is always a struggle, especially these days because he is very busy. And my local friends have their own games they want to play, so I’m collecting quite a stack of unplayed board games. I even bought one called Plunder with a pirate raiding theme (and little tiny ships with attachable masts and cannons) thinking it would entice Monsieur Big Bang (who also used to like Risk) but that was a no go. One of the last games I made him play was the aforementioned Mystery Date. I had a few friends who had this game but they never wanted to play it (also mysteriously). It has such an awesome opening door feature and I was always wanting to play it.

It turns out my girlfriends didn’t want to play this game because it is mind-bogglingly boring and takes too much time around the board before you can ever get a chance to actually open the technological marvel of that door to reveal your date for the night. I recently snared a copy and talked Monsieur Big Bang into playing it and (can you believe it?) I kept losing this game too! He kept getting the ball-room prince and the ski hunk and I kept getting the ‘dud,’ by which the game just means disheveled guy.

Oh yeah, so another annoying thing about Mystery Date is that is was created in the late 1950s and has seriously outdated ideas as to what makes an attractive date for the typical 1970s little girl. Twenty years later and that ‘dud’ looks pretty much like the most attractive guy in the deck and the others look like the duds.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not very good at board game strategy. And this game would prove no exception, professional-poet expertise aside.

Dead Poets Rise has two stacks of Creation and Chaos cards. You use them to write a poem while your working to collect marbles on the board.

Creation cards give you prompts for lines of your poem. Chaos cards sabotage the directions you were headed with those lines.

Examples of Creation cards: use the words always, never, sometimes in your next line, use alliteration with pr, pl, gr, gl sounds, search Google with provided prompts for words, write about a smell in the room, write about two disparate objects in the room, fill in this sentence when I hear ambulances I want to ….

Monsieur Big Bang said at this point the game felt like a Mad Lib.

Examples of sabotage cards: change one of your words to the opposite, change your verb tense, change the past to the future.


Unfortunately, there were quite a few duplicate cards and some triplicate cards. Coming from a family of poker players who can do fancy acrobatic playing-card shuffling, I can tell you I also suck at card shuffling. So I have to shuffle like ten times and still we couldn’t get them shuffled enough to reduce the duplicates  We also caught a typo in the word ‘corresponds’ in one of the cards.

Hopefully these things will get rectified. All the prompts should be original.

We played the short game for two people. The object is to roll the die and move across the board collecting a certain amount of black and green marbles. Once you have all your marbles you can move into the center area of play called The Sphynx Challenge.

Each turn also draws Creation and Chaos cards that help each player create a poem in the style of one of the “dead poets,” obscure poets that comprise another, most interesting deck.

You actually start things off with this dead poet deck, which includes separate little packs containing a handful of cards each for one obscure poet. At the beginning of the game, you all agree on the poet and everyone pulls a poet card with some biography and samples of poems. The players also choose a random theme from a list in the instructions. You use the theme and the poetry samples to write “in the style” of the poet you are attempting to “resurrect.”

It sounds more complicated than it is.

The back of the dead poet packs have biographical information and each player gets one of cards with snippets of their poems on it. These are the cards we drew:

 

By the time of The Sphynx Challenge at the end, you have pretty much a completed poem and the challenge is to read one line of your “fake” poem lines and two lines of the real poet’s poem and others have to guess which line is yours.

We each guessed each other’s fake lines.

In fact, Monsieur Big Bang won on the technicality that he was the first to make it to the Sphynx area with is big marble. And our decision to have him guess my fake line was just courtesy play.

The punishment for losing the Sphynx challenge seemed too much for the short version of the game (three green marbles) but then again your marbles don’t win you the game so who cares.

The Sphynx challenge introduced the elements of points which seemed sudden and out of place and the game provided no material to track these sudden points (grab a piece of paper). It felt like an after-thought, an additional confusion. And yet those points would determine the winner as people won or lost the challenge. Then again, it was also possible we weren’t playing it right. The whole points layer was confusing.

At the end of the game, we felt like the game was missing something and I couldn’t articulate it. The box had all the do-dads, after all.

Monsieur Big Bang had some ideas though. He said you could almost dispense with the board play and use the card prompts for writing exercises, like for students, friends or just playing alone. He said it was lacking a sense of a game’s highs and lows. There was no real feel of competition. And so we discussed board games that lacked this competition element and yet were still fun, like the Encanto movie board game. In that game you work together against a clock to save the house. It’s still fun but not cut-throat.

My friend Julie recently gave me a very Dungeon and Dragons like haunted house game, Betrayal at House on the Hill, (which I haven’t found anyone to play with yet), and the first half of that game is cooperative to set up the board pieces and the second half of the game, once the monsters get tripped off, is competing against a common monster and against each other.

Dead Poets Rise did feel like a writing exercise more than a game. I also didn’t understand the rationale for collecting the marbles except to extend our writing time with the prompt cards. The game does seem to needs more conflict, if not against each other than with some external element.

Monsieur Big Bang also felt the game didn’t have enough person-to-person contact. And you didn’t feel invested because there wasn’t enough drama, which prompted a retelling of the the joke I learned at Sarah Lawrence, “why are poets (and thus poetry board games) so cut throat? Because the stakes are so low.”

The stakes felt very low for this game. And maybe that’s where game drama lives.

The final imposter challenge did seem most satisfying at the end and maybe that could be worked into  regular game play. Considering it was one of the most fun aspects of the game, it was disappointing that the first person to enter the final Sphynx challenge area quickly won the game before anybody else could experience the fun of being an impostor.

I also really liked discovering, if not feeling like I fully “resurrected,” the dead poet. Our poet was Celia Dropkin and our theme was “the war within.” I had never heard of this Russian-born Yiddish poet who immigrated to New York City at the turn of the century (and passed away in the 1950s) so that was great fun for me (more so than for the non-poet-player).

Although there are some fixes needed, I do want to emphasize it’s a fun box of beautiful things and I will be playing it again and showing it to other poets.

My resulting poem turned out like this:

Untitled (the task of adding a title could be added to the play somehow)

Maybe my mother’s yearning
is never in me like conception (Not a bad start)
and the silence of the Gods gone quiet
like all the fires of the world going out,
grounded, groused and groveling for air. (What a mess of a run-on!)
And to survive I strive to organize. (True, dat)
When I hear ambulance I want to
melt into the water like ground (Good prompt to switch those words)
where the italicized roots of Latin are buried. (I had to change roots to monks. Boo.)
And the world revolves on the sight of glass
and dollars and dead poets. (I like the end)

Why Do I Write?

Sometimes when I need to find a page quickly on my website and I don’t know where it is I’ll just google it. Like “Mary McCray NaPoWriMo.” It’s faster than browsing around for things. I learned this trick at ICANN because the site has tens of thousands of pages (full transparency, you know).

If I search my name on Bing, that search engine asks me very politely “are you sure you don’t mean porn star Marie McCray?”

If I search my name on Yahoo!, that engine just gives me results for porn star Marie McCray.  (“Surely that’s what you want, right?”)

If I search my name on Google (and this is why Google is king, I guess), I get a handy information card to the right that actually returns Me. But Google has decided for some reason that I’m a Journalist.  Which is very funny because I’ve never written a piece of professional journalism in my life, unless you count those old reviews on Ape Culture (which had the grand distinction of not being very good).

I can see now that I need to get new pictures. One of the things I dread doing (more on that below).

I have some good friends on the East Coast who I saw last August. They’re a couple: one is a writer/poet and the other is a musician. I’ve known them since back in the Sarah Lawrence days.  We’ve had some great conversations over the years about being artists and I remember touring the lair of the musician last summer and the two of us got to musing about why we keep working even though we haven’t “succeeded” and how we would still keep doing it whether we were successful or not. Because we love the doing part and we probably couldn’t stop even if we tried.

I figure feeling this way helps us forego the constant assessments of our value. It’s more about what we value. But this doesn’t make it easy.

It’s tough out there. I know three graphic designers (web and print) who struggle to find work because the Internet has decimated their opportunities, just as it has for writers.

But often I have to remind myself that for poets, it’s been this way for about 100 years already. We were once on top of this culture heap, but then dime-store novels sent us packing; and then motion pictures arrived to soak up everyone’s leisure time. And then TV came. And then the computer games. And then the Internet.

And motion pictures were far from the first disruption to human kind. The printing press put those monks out of business, which was a shame because apparently they were drawing little hidden penises in everything).

Media change is relentless. And we find ourselves in the middle of yet another disruption because annoying human beings keep inventing things like stone tools.

But considering there are still thousands of poets writing and reading poetry even though it’s been 100 years of deeper and deeper losses, we must be working with a different rubric of success. But if you want to join the Irrelevant-Media club, you know where we are. We keep on like dysfunctional little windups.

Alternatively, I know two writers, (one of them lives in my house), who, if there’s no money or promise of money down the line,  they do not write. Period.

Another close friend I spoke to recently works in a medium that I would consider mostly a labor of love. And for years they’ve been doing it just because they love doing it, they said. Recently, this changed to working for “something big,” a term that is a vestige of this person’s former life in Show Business.

It’s such a commonly ringing bell lately, I can’t help but think that, despite what anybody says, fame and money are what everybody wants.

Sometimes I even doubt myself. I mean even those monks wanted to be remembered by someone, otherwise they wouldn’t have been drawing all those funny little penises in all those old books.

I’ve been reading an essay about Robert Frost over the last few days, “Robert Frost and Tradition” by Siobhan Phillips.” Phillips says “Frost courted fame on the widest scale and became by some measures the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century.”

Frost said, “there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips.”

And esteem buys you no butter, that’s for sure. You can’t argue with that.

I have another visual artist friend I’ve know a very long time, a very talented artist, but this person has what I would call a  problem of self-motivation and over the decades hasn’t produced very much. Recently I had dinner with this person and they said apropos of nothing, “I really thought I would be famous by now.” I had some very unfriendly thoughts at that point and then when I got my sea legs again I said, “So how is Becky?”

I mean I have problems of my own but I have some self-awareness about it. For example, I also another friend who gives good advise about networking: go out and hob-knob with other poets (oy!), join poetry groups (no), give readings (good lord!), network through teaching (I’ve seen that and I consider it a Faustian bargain). I didn’t want to do any of that. And that’s on me. I like to think of it as a handshake with mediocrity.

I’m also been reading a poetry anthology sprinkled with rediscovered poets going back to the Colonial era, poets who never published in their lifetimes but are being uncovered even now like hidden treasures. And I think how nice that sounds to me sometimes. You get the fame if not the money and you don’t have to deal with any of the bullshit, like poetry grunts at public poetry readings. (Thank you to Ann who reminded me I sent her that poem many years ago and completely forgot about it.)

But I’ve been thinking more deeply right now about where this ambivalence around success comes from. And like most things, it probably resides in my early childhood experiences, particularly with bullies. I grew up in a place where you would be a target if you won or if you lost. So the safe spot was right in the middle. When I learned what grey rocking was I was like Yes! I am a master of grey rocking. I imagine a little black belt around my little inner grey rock. Literary grey rocking. It’s perfect.

Robert Frost also wrote a great deal about futility, from the futility of building a fence to the futility of conceiving a child (he lost three, arguably four). However, he saw no futility in poetry. He famously said,  “every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” And how does one monetize that?

I was writing something the other day and I referenced the game Mousetrap. I played this game with my friends Diana and Lillian when we were kids. We didn’t even bother playing the game. We just set up the mousetrap and set it in motion to see all the ways it wouldn’t work. Due to small manufacturing mistakes, the contraption rarely did work. In fact, it was an exciting miracle if it ever did.

I started writing for reasons that are not all that flattering to me. It was over a boy, of course.

You know that thing you do when you find out somebody you like enjoys some activity or experience and so you try to get into that thing so that you can build a kind of bridge with that person?

I have a bad history of these bad ideas around boys. But in this particular case, through a series of happy and sad Mousetrap-like events, I started writing poems which randomly sent in play a boot kicking a yellow bucket, knocking out a silver rolling ball down a green staircase and through the red slide, knocking the green man off the blue diving board and into the yellow tub which shakes down the red mousetrap. And here I find myself 39 years later having written many hundreds of miraculous poems.

When I first started writing, I firmly believed you had to be a dead poet to be famous poet. (I didn’t know any but dead ones.) And misguided by that belief, I did not stop writing. I just lowered by expectations.

Real, real low.

Of course, there are many very well-known poets, but nobody in my immediate family would be able to tell you the name of a single one.

It’s all relative.

Romanticism idealized both eschewing fame and expecting it. And many of us are stuck there in that perplexing purgatory.

In the forward to Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, a Writer on Writing she lists two full pages of reasons why writers write including some really funny examples:

  • To show those bastards
  • To delight and instruct
  • Or else I would die!
  • Because I didn’t want a job
  • To make myself seem more interesting than I was
  • To attract the love of a beautiful woman
  • To rectify a miserable childhood
  • To serve art
  • To serve history
  • To make a name that would survive my death
  • To experiment
  • To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities
  • To give back

There’s plenty more. Later in chapter three, entitled “Dedication,” Atwood talks about the Lewis Hyde book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life  and quotes Hyde to say, “any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges.”

Atwood talks about economic exchange versus gift exchange. She says

“the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive it’s value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighted and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms, it is grace,  proceeding from the fullness of being.”

She says, “There are four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money; good books that don’t make money; bad books that make money; bad books that don’t make money.”

So obvious it sounds ridiculous.

According to Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and the realm of money….he may then remain modestly apart….Lacking such protection, he will have to maintain a very firm division in his own soul.”

Poets are obviously lacking such protection. If you’re a writer of privilege, as I am (I have a safety net or two), this is probably an easier “division of the soul.” Being a poet is a dangerous vocation, being an artist is a a risky vocation if you need that money.

Each of us in on a different path with different needs and opportunities.

Now all this is fully granting how awfully depressing it is when you speak through art and no one responds or responds in the right number of YouTube views or the response is confusing and ambiguous or your efforts don’t move the mountain of the muse itself. I know plenty of artists who tried for a while and then stopped.

And then some mediums of art cost more money than others. Films require big outlays, for example.

But then I think of a lifetime of effort I’ve spent writing many hundreds of poems, paying off a gigantic loan to have been able to go to Sarah Lawrence College (still not done yet).

I’ve never had a fortune in money, but I’ve spent the Imperial Palace in time. And how do you qualify that?

And it was my idea. Am I due a reward for it? Nobody came to me and asked me to do it.

“We really need this poem, Mary.”

I can’t get back this whole life. Nor would I want to. For me my art is like my love. Given freely or it has no value at all. No exchange required.

But then I think fundamentally I’m working under the paradigm of the gift exchange and not the market exchange. Of course I would like to be read, but on a much lesser scale of readership that those who are working under the market exchange.

It’s like throwing parties. My parties are very small. They’re like the parties in the Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Holiday (one of my favorite things ever). I feel like I’m essentially the Mrs. Potter character trying to find that very small party beyond the very big one, the more electric one on the third floor with all the eccentric and funny screwballs: Johnny, Linda, Professor Nick and Ned. Those people seeking “of esteem” over the blinding bling downstairs, the people who make due with imaginary butter on their enchanting parsnips.

Fictions

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking  surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

The Labor Poets

After my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, my grandfather came to live with us for a while in St. Louis. And when my grandfather found out I was writing poems, (I was in college at the time), he told me to read the labor poets.

I had no idea who these labor poets were. They certainly weren’t in the Norton Anthology I had from school.

My grandfather said I should look them up at the Public Library. He told me to go to the reference desk and say, “Show me the labor poets!”

I wasn’t about to do this for two reasons: for one I was too shy to demand anything from reference librarians, (ok, not entirely true if it was an old Cher magazine I wanted from an archive), but also I wasn’t reading any other poets at the time. I was just a newb writing to find my own voice.

I should take a moment here to elaborate about my grandfather. I usually talk about my grandparents on my father’s side­ because their history is very mythological and romantic. But my grandparents on my mother’s side are none the less interesting (or mythological for that matter).

Some would call my grandfather an anglophile.

Now I live with a Francophile. So I know what this is. Monsieur Big Bang’s high-school friends still lament about trying to have a conversation with him back in the 1980s. Listening to him was like, “France, France, France, Proust. France, France, France, Proust.”

Monsieur Big Bang himself will tell you he was very much like the Italian-obsessed kid in the movie Breaking Away, a working-class kid enamored with another romantic culture. And just like that kid in the movie who had his own reality-check during the bike-race scene when the Italians cruelly sabotaged his bike, Monsieur Big Bang spent a good deal of time in France finding out the French are assholes too, just like everybody else.

But I don’t feel anglophile is quite the right word for what my grandfather was. Somehow the word anglophile suggests a range in an obsession. And as I’ve mentioned in my other blog, my grandfather had only a small set of topics he would discuss at any time:

  • What English people ate or did not eat. This suspiciously coincided exactly with what my grandfather ate and did not eat, like tomatoes. He said an Englishman would never eat a tomato. (We’ll come back to that.)
  • The superiority of British shipping history. I spent many, many hours with this man and I only had to hear the words “Sir Frances” or “Sir Walter” and I would gently float off to my happy place, which in college was thinking all the time about boys.
  • America was a completely corrupt country and soon our hard-fought-for unions would be weakened and demolished. This was in the 1980s during Reaganomics. Looking back today, I can see he was right about this, but at the time it really rankled me and my mother to hear it.
  • The last thing was The Ludlow Massacre. I heard about this tragedy all the time. “Remember The Ludlow Massacre.” It was his Alamo. When I happened to come upon a highway sign for the massacre site in Southern Colorado about ten years ago, I turned off immediately to visit the place (every American should). I had heard about it so many times in my childhood, the actual location always seemed more fantastical to me than real. It was like coming upon the exit sign to Narnia.

These topics all come together for my grandfather in his family’s Colorado pioneer history. Although my grandfather spent only a total of two weeks in the country of England during his entire lifetime (see below), his adored parents were both from Cornwall, both from coal mining families who immigrated separately to America, and both his mother and father were heavily invested in the American labor movement as it was happening at turn-of-the-century coal sites in Colorado.

My grandfather could determine a stranger’s political party in five minutes. And he could be incredibly difficult if he didn’t like you (say you belonged to the wrong one). He could also  exhaust people with his small list of discussion topics.

In fact, my grandfather talked about England so much that when my grandmother, (a Germanic woman from a big family farm in Iowa), was offered a two-week trip to England during the family’s roots tour of 1977, she declined. She opted instead to “take care of Dave and the kids in Missouri.”

She chose Missouri over England! (I can’t even.)

She said she felt like she had already been there.

After my mother, Aunt Merle and grandfather returned from that same trip, my mother told me, “Mary I saw tomatoes everywhere.” I was like how would we know? How would we even know?

My grandfather talked about England so much that I benefited in being the remaining person he took to dinner every Thursday night for years when everyone else in his life had dropped out. (Dropped out of the restaurant dinners, anyway. My mother still cooked him a big dinner every Sunday.) He insisted on eating at more expensive establishments after working until he was 80 as a machinist and a mechanic. He had a good social security check and had been frugal most of his life and he wanted to eat well. He usually wanted to visit the same fine establishments over and over, too, which also tired everyone out. I was the last man standing and his driver except for those times he wanted us to splurge with a cab.

I once took him to The St. Louis Bread Company, (a direct relative of Panera), so I could show him this fabulous new thing called a bread bowl. He was offended that I had to “truck our own food” to the table and refused to be impressed.

“But soup! In a bowl of bread!”

So we were back to the fancy Bristols and Spiros soon enough. I missed most of the Seinfeld, Mad About You and Cosby Show episodes during those Thursday-night years. It’s a gapping hole in my cultural literacy.

Anyway, all these years later I have discovered Cary Nelson who has recently created a critical space in the American poetry canon to rediscover these labor poets my grandfather was telling me about. Revolutionary Memory is a book about how these poets were lost from anthologies in the first place. Next Nelson edited two major anthologies which reinstated these lost poets, Anthology of Modern American Poetry and Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

As I’m finding these labor poets in those anthologies, I’m deciding I really like them and I’ve been tracking down books of their collected works (if available; they’re still pretty obscure). These poets are all very funny and they don’t write about politics or labor issues all the time. But when they do, it’s poignant and crafted. Some of my favorite poets so far:

What you tend to want from your dead relatives is context. And back when my grandfather was alive I was too young and badly-read to even know what questions to ask him. Did he read these poets himself? Where did he come upon them? Did he ever subscribe to the socialist periodical New Masses or The Masses where many of these poets were published? (My mother tells me just now that he did take a Labor newspaper). Did these poets come up in conversation at union halls or in machine shops? I have my grandfather’s scrapbook of union and political clippings and there’s not a single poem in it as I can recall. Did he collect any of these poems somewhere else?

One final story. I was living in Yonkers and my grandfather would very kindly send me fresh canned tuna from Winchester Bay in Oregon in cases of 24. About every six months when I ran out, he would send me more. I’ve never tasted a better canned tuna than the fresh tuna from Winchester Bay, Oregon. My grandfather and I weren’t able to dine out together anymore because I was at Sarah Lawrence in New York by then and he had moved back to the coast of Oregon.

We still kept our standing date every Thursday night, if just on the phone. One time it took over two weeks for his box of tuna cans to arrive and he was really angry at the Post Office. During one of our Thursday night calls he said, “the Pony Express could have delivered it faster!” I took his point but truthfully, the Pony Express would have taken months and probably Indians would have been enjoying the cans of tuna instead of me. He then said very seriously, “You know in England they send all their mail through pneumatic tubes.”

I thought this was just about the silliest thing he had ever said. And in the years following I told this story of the tuna to many, many people as an example of the kinds of unbelievable things my grandfather would say about England.

Fast forward years later I’m in Paris with Monsieur Big Bang and we’re visiting some museum there, (the sewers? the catacombs? the city museum?), and they start talking about how Paris was once fitted with pneumatic tubes everywhere for quickly sending around mail throughout the city. I turned to M.B.B and said, “Oh shit. He was right about pneumatic tubes in England!”

Goodwill

Goodwill. I’m not talking about a thrift score here.

I’m talking about the person-to-person kind. You know, bonhomie.

I’ve been around tribes of writers for many, many years now and  other artists for a time too. I’ve always dreamed of finding my tribe, my school, my group of likeminded thinkers…and mostly for the social aspect if I’m being honest about the fantasy. When I read stories about professors holding court at restaurants or drinking establishments surrounded by their students talking shop, talking about quality writers and writing, I always think mmm….that sounds so nice.

I do have friends that I collaborate with and friends who are writers, but I’ve never found that sympatico group of people who are working on the same things I’m working on. And as for the work itself, some writers enjoy the process (I know I do) and some writers find it difficult and painful. But aside from any enjoyment you might get just by doing it (brainstorming, assembling, editing, polishing), I contend writing isn’t really about the written result per se. It’s about communicating to other people, which is more social than solitary.

And the harder the thing is to communicate, the more words become a problem. Words and sentences don’t always convey. They manipulate everyone all the time. Words say things you don’t intend. They stick your foot in it.

But you keep going, because what else is there but speaking and writing?

Once you’re dead, the written words will be left behind like an empty vessel. Others might enjoy them but that’s none of your concern anymore. The writing may live or not live. You most definitely will not live.

So if you were the last man on earth, would you bother? Once the people you’re communicating with are gone, would you bother? No, I don’t think it’s the writing itself, deep down, that fulfills what we desire.

As Al Pacino says in Author! Author!, “We’re people, Gloria! We’re people!” People who need people.

One of my biggest pet peeves lately is the envy writers and artists feel toward one another, especially friend-to-friend envy.

This is exhibited in many ways: friends consistently not reading or attending to their friends artworks, friends not providing words of encouragement when milestones are reached (like publications or good reviews), friends being inexplicably suddenly attentive when bad milestones are hit (failures, bad reviews). “Sorry to hear about your bad review. You must feel terrible.” It’s easy to say a real friend wouldn’t do that, but sometimes otherwise-very-good friends do things like this.

And full disclosure I used to be one of those people. Not the schadenfreude kind, but I did find it hard to drum up genuine enthusiasm for a friend or acquaintance’s success.  And I think it’s a naturally competitive emotional response to be envious.

I think it serves you not a whit, but it’s a natural, normal response.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious effort to approach other people’s poetry pieces with an open and impartial mind. My friend Christopher was a good mentor in this. No matter how he may have historically and dramatically disliked something, (recently he declared to me on the phone, “no woman can pull of bangs!”), he will approach a new thing with an open mind, lacking any of his prior prejudices. He will say things like “I usually don’t like this but you have to give so-and-so credit. That was amazing. They really did that well.” It’s always a generous, fair-minded response.

It was in that spirit that I tried to dump my own prejudices and walk forward in literature without the baggage of envy. And this was initially a challenge when reading the work of someone I knew. In the back of my chest there was that pang of envy every time. Why didn’t I do this? I could do this. My friend is moving forward and I’m falling behind. The crazy thing is I didn’t usually care about falling behind. I’ve been behind from the get-go; I’m usually the dumbest person in the room and I’m comfortable with this.

But envy is a feeling your ego creates, something deep-seated. And your ego has its own agenda.

The thing is there is a trick to escaping this. I actually learned it from a therapist I had many years ago, the same one I quit over the Linda Ronstadt song. Although she gave me the terrible advise to consider ‘no good’ any boy who was disinterested in me (which was certainly not healthy or logical), she also gave me a piece of very good advice that changed my then-young life.

I was a senior in high school at the time and she told me to keep a daily list of everything good that happened to me and another list of everything bad that happened. She insisted that over time the bad list would become shorter and the good list would become longer, like magic.

And it worked. (In reality, it was a trick of attention and where you put it.)

Turns out, in the the case of envy, the fake-it-til-you-make-it method does, in fact, work. First you drum up some half-baked enthusiasm for your successful friend and it’s like endorphins kick in or something. It feels good to be happy for someone. Before you know it, you’re feeling real genuine enthusiasm for them and their projects. Magic!

You’ll soon notice envy fading away completely and you’re a much happier creative person in the world.

This is different than toxic positivity. Negative emotions are normal. And there’s plenty time to still feel shitty about strangers and their successes. Just don’t let yourself feel envy over your friends.

But then sometimes I wonder if maybe all friends aren’t created equal. Maybe good artist friends aren’t good generic friends. Cézanne was frustrated with Zola and Zola was frustrated with Cézanne. Maybe the friend who would bail you out of jail isn’t the same kind of friend who will happily deconstruct your latest opus.

I have to say, my best readers have been complete strangers. Hell, I think my only readers have been complete strangers, aside from my mother. (Thanks Mom!)

But the thing is some of those stranger readers have gone on to become very good friends. And we talk about more than writing or Cher. We talk about our struggles in life as well.

So I don’t know the answer to this yet but I think the world has become so hyper-competitive and self-serving and hyper-sensitive as to our own standing, we’ve lost too much goodwill. And trust me, goodwill  feels so much more pleasant than envy.

🤗

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