Publishing

Monthly Report: July Poems

July was an interesting month, if a bit too hot. But, I can smell August. It ain’t pretty. July has a favorite holiday of many, a few cool birthdays, and it is fittingly mid-summer. It has long days, the baseball all-star break, Wimbledon Tennis, chiggers, maybe mosquitoes, the end of the feverish NBA forever season, and other cool stuff.

While writing a poem each day was no more difficult in July than any of the previous six months, it has become something I just do each day. Yesterday’s one became three. I’ve written at all hours: very early mornings (middle of the night), mid-everything, noon, dinner time, evening, late at night, and just before midnight. I have a small cache of ideas, although prompts are plentiful, and I am seldom wanting.

I polish and post some daily ditties. Most are first drafts that get no additional attention for months, if ever. Concurrently, I’m trying to cull out poems for a potential book I may self-publish. I hope I have been sufficiently vague. I don’t know how to get from here to there. Killing darlings has been a difficult task. It may take months for me to crop out a worthy collection.

Thus, I plan to reduce semiweekly postings on Our Literary Journey to weekly, and the same for Dispassionate Doubt, which has been mostly one post a week anyway. But who knows?

I filled one notebook with poems from January 1st through July 11th and started a new one. Here are the titles of July Poems:

  1. July (the month)
  2. The Jaded Eye
  3. Shamed Pride
  4. Drinkable Wine
  5. Today’s Poem
  6. Petrichor
  7. Enthrall*
  8. The Sun
  9. Hold My Karma and Watch This
  10. The Last Page
  11. Free to Let Go
  12. Grimace*
  13. Five Year Plan
  14. Impassible Sad
  15. Were Gods Somewhere
  16. Sensuous Perception
  17. Narcissus at the Gym
  18. The Creators (moms)
  19. The Ring (the hand kind, not the doorbell)
  20. Layers of Identity*
  21. In the Poet’s Hand
  22. Hushed Me Plumb Up
  23. Unthinkable
  24. Press Pause
  25. Something is Dead
  26. Green River
  27. I Think it was a Saturday
  28. The Long Gray Mullet
  29. Edible Confession
  30. Dog Poop
  31. Time is Coming Over

(* were written from prompts. 7, 12, and 26 were posted.)

Look both ways as you traverse nature’s toilet.
Some poopers don’t have owners to clean up after them.
Mind the gaps or press pause.

View from the blogger batter’s box

In the past few weeks people have asked me what I do to keep busy. Some of them are also retired but have chosen different channels for their lives (social, travel, too much of nothing). Some of the younger people continue to work at paying jobs. Others don’t seem to have an answer. I usually respond that I write a lot. But here is the best answer, for now.

I usually spend my first few hours of my day on this computer. Today I’m writing this, but I have checked emails and have some WordPress items to check on later, which means blogs to read and comments to follow-up. On most days, I walk for an hour or two. I write every day, but the amount varies. I spend some time with social media or trying to figure things out (tech junk) or I do some form of research. I spend about 45 minutes a day in a swimming pool. Thirty minutes swimming laps and more time with running, stretching, or vigorously kicking. The round-trip pool events take more than an hour. With prep and recovery time, I devote at least four hours a day (most days) to physical activity and listening to music, which I do while walking.

Occasionally, I nap. I watch some television to have a reason to feel guilty about wasting my time. But even then, my writer’s mind is working (plot, character, conflict, acting). Football season is winding down, baseball on TV is boring, and if a new season of The Voice begins, I will watch that. I am active in two local writing groups (3 to 6 hours per week). I recently backed away from a third group for a short list of reasons.

I have three major goals to work toward this year. One is to write a poem each day. That is going well so far, and I still write essays, short fiction, and random things like this post.

Second, I hope to do two blog challenges in April (A to Z and NaPoWriMo) and I am preparing for them as best I can.

My third goal is to self-publish a book of some of my work by mid-summer, or at least be reviewing proofs by that time. I also have a memoir to clean up and finish. Sue recently published a book of her poetry, (click to link to Amazon) so I am motivated to follow.

I will continue my reading of other blogs and commenting. I want to make changes to my blog that require me to do some figuring out. I may change the theme (what it looks like) again soon. While I like the simplicity and ease of my blog page now, I feel the need to work it. I want something I can organize better by genre/type (poetry, essays, fiction, philosophy or whatever). I hope to solve that dilemma by March.

My point is that while I have been posting on Monday and Thursday, I will not keep that up. I’ll continue to read and comment on other blogs every day, and I will post to my blog occasionally. But, I will not be tied to anything that looks like a plan or schedule. I expect to overdose with two posts per day beginning April 1st. In May, I will downshift to a more normal pace after I determine my new normal. Until then, fewer posts and maybe a theme change.

Looking both ways, learn from the past (yours and that of others)
and plan your future.
Either mind gaps with awareness or fill them with purpose.
You decide.

Quoting Pat Conroy

I’ve been reading more Pat Conroy. I continue to be impressed with his ability to tell the story and to talk about his life and the lives of others entwined with his. Mostly, I treasure and envy his awesome craft of writing, his vocabulary, and how smooth it flows as I read. I have no right to judge the writing of anyone, much less a man with such a gift.

What I feel as I read his words is not so much judging (as in “love it”). It is about me and my experiences, feelings, and thoughts about a man who was born less than one year before I was; who grew up when I did, but under very different circumstances, and who seems to have lived a life that I oddly, but resonantly, relate to in many twisted and indirect ways. Autobiographical fiction; strangely, I get it.

Except for graphics, the following quotes taken from his writings are my notes. Any error is mine. This was me stopping the flow of my reading to write down Pat’s words. Cuz, picture it, me saying “wow” while reading and then grabbing my notebook.

I have been using Public Library e-books lately, so I cannot highlight as with paper books or on my Kindle app. Yet, writing them down in my notebook may be better for increased mental indelibility and the likelihood of my sharing.

I grouped these by category and added my comments. I realize that context is lost by such grab-and-go’s, but I like them. The photos and memes are not my work, except to click “copy as.”

About writing, reading, and writers

“Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks.” (Agree. I do. I must.)

“…nothing is more natural in his (Tolstoy) world than the mysterious and necessary attraction of men and women…their attraction for each other and impending marriage seems part of the design of the Universe, as right as the stars that make up the belt of Orion.” (Pat read War and Peace three times.)

“Teach me how to die.” (This is one of those phrases when I think, “I wonder what he meant?” Context!)

“I want to always be writing the book I was born to write.” (Exactly.)

“But I’m speaking of all the yesterdays that will not come again.” (Old guys say cool shit like that.)

“…that I get to live in the Old New York Book Shop on the night of a book party.” (This was Pat’s idea of heaven after he died. That book store is no longer there, but it was a big deal to him. Do you have a place like that? A memory so profound and pleasurable that it would do for a permanent state in an afterlife?)

“Nothing is more difficult to overcome than a childhood of privilege….” (Or abusive parents.)

“My childhood taught me everything I needed to know about the dangers of love….” (I intend to use this when I write more on the paradox of love.)

“We got some things right.” (About writing, the publishing writing world, and himself.)

Regarding Norman Berg, Pat’s friend and book rep., “He was a hard man who dismissed fools without conscience or regret…. He was an easy man to dismiss, and a hard one to love.”

“Know everything. Feel everything. That’s your job as a writer.” (Said Norman Berg to Pat, quoted by Pat.)

“The tribe is contentious, the breed dangerous.” (Regards writers and why he claimed to have few friends among them. Pat Conroy had many friends, and many of them were writers. I don’t really know enough writers to have an opinion, but the ones I know, while seemingly neither contentious or dangerous; most are unapologetically opinionated. Norm Berg’s job description?)

“The world of writers was a snake hole, a circle of hell – a rat’s nest and a whirlpool and a dilemma – not just a world.” (Pat was opinionated. I wonder how he felt about French writers? See is time in Paris, below.)

Pat’s youth and college days

“Two pillars of authority, patriarchal influences shaped my childhood. Dad and the Catholic Church. Punishment of anarchy. Contempt for anyone different.” (Mine, too.)

“There was an amazingly limitless capacity for ruthlessness at the heart of the family of man.” (Regards all of life, but learned from the plebe system. This is from The Lords of Discipline.)

“What will this make of me? A man, or a monster?” (Regards surviving his freshman year in college)

“A prize that exacted an awesome tithe of spirit from those who loved it.” (The Lords of Discipline)

“It was sublimation and surrender to the efficacy of denial.” (Pat had something specific in mind, but I can apply this to so many times in my life.)

“The history we are born into always seems natural when we are young, but it seems misshapen and grotesque as the winter years come upon us.” (I have had similar thoughts, but my experiences were a little less profound.)

New words for me

Three of many words I learned and liked reading Conroy: décolletage, oleaginous, and unctuous. (I am smiling and could go on and on and…)

His time in Paris

“Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers.”

“France is the only country in the world where friendliness is one of the seven deadly sins.”

(To be fair, Pat loved his time in France and cherished the memories. But why deny the French acting so “frenchly”?)

 

In our reading life, we must look both ways.
In writing, mind the damn gaps.