Tag Archives: writing process

Rediscovering the original wound

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"Old House on the Rocks" by David Jewell.

“What you wanted, you still want.” ~ Robert Bly

1. Wound

I’ve been blessed during the last couple of months with another very fruitful phase of deep and intense creativity, soon to end when I return to the world of “real” work, i.e., work that is “real” in the sense that it’s perceived by others as having financial value. I love doing my creative work and know that it has tremendous value, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into any sort of income, at least not so far.

It is, as always, terribly difficult for me to accept the hard reality that the work I love so much, that moves me so deeply and comes so naturally to me, doesn’t provide me with any material support. I know that there are many other writers, artists, guides, healers, and teachers out there (some of whom, quite frankly, have less to offer than I do) who are successfully supporting themselves doing their work. I don’t know why I’m not one of them, and it eats at me all the time.

The work I do, my real work, is a birthright once lost that I’ve fought long and hard to reclaim for about a quarter century now, nearly half my life. The battle has not been without its rewards, but I’ve also made some unexpected discoveries that have left me with painful questions I can’t answer, as expressed in the poem below.

original wound

many years ago
I heard a man say
	your gift to the world
	is in your wound
I found this idea very appealing
I ran with it
and I've been running with it
ever since.

in the last twenty-five years
I've discovered many gifts
	most long forgotten
	or never known to me at all
in many wounds.

many of the wounds had been
	forgotten as well
or not so much forgotten as buried
	deep in my dreams
beneath my skin
	in muscle and bone
under a series of identities
	I'd been forced to assume
	throughout my life
in order to survive.

so what I was told
	was not wrong
there truly is treasure to be found
	under the scars
but I've also learned something else.

my gifts
much like my wounds
are for the most part
unseen and unwanted by the world.

needed they may be
wanted they are not.

I wasn't prepared for such a discovery
and I also wasn't prepared for the fact
that the land of wounds seems to stretch out
into infinity
in every direction.

every wound I tend and heal
seems to be an entry point into several more
they cover one another like bandages
they're nested inside one another like
	a set of chinese boxes
	each of which contains
	another set of chinese boxes
and every wound I tend and heal
yields yet more gifts
that the world does not want.

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

if I could talk to the man who sent me
down this path twenty-five years ago
I'd love to ask him
	how am I to live
	and what am I to do
	with so many gifts
	the world does not want.

2. Reflection

I sat with this poem for several days after writing it. One of the core themes, that “the world” does not want my gifts, felt a little off to me. I know of many people who value my work and there are probably many others who do so of whom I’m unaware, so it struck me as an overstatement of the facts to say that “the world” does not want my gifts. And yet it still felt true to me at some fundamental level.

In terms of dollars and cents, I could still make the argument that a world that associates no financial value with my work doesn’t want it, and I think that was a lot of what was motivating what I was feeling when I wrote the poem, at least on the surface. But as I sat with what I’d written, I was reminded of something I’d heard someone (I can’t recall who) say years ago: When we speak in absolutes (always, never, etc.) about things that are upsetting us, there’s a good possibility that we’re actually expressing the pain of a wound that goes all the way back to childhood, when we were so very little, our needs were so very big, and everything that affected us deeply felt so very absolute.

I was then reminded of the following comments made by Robert Bly to Bill Moyers during the excellent but now largely forgotten documentary A Gathering of Men, first televised over twenty years ago:

Alice Miller says a wonderful thing. She says, “When you were young you needed something you did not receive. And you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame, mourning. And she says another thing that’s so wonderful. She says, “You know, when you came into the world, you brought this fantastic thing with you, coming from centuries, and eons, and you brought this amazing energy in from animal life, reptile life, other planets, everything. And this incredible energy you brought in … your parents didn’t want it. They wanted a nice boy. They wanted a nice girl.”

You couldn’t believe it. That’s your first rejection. It’s pre-verbal. That’s why encounter groups won’t get to that. That’s your first rejection. It’s profound. They didn’t want the energy you brought. They wanted a nice boy or a nice girl.

So when you’re small, you realize you can’t fight against that stuff your parents want … so you make up a kind of a false personality … You invent a false personality, and you survive.

And then Alice Miller says, “Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

I’ve watched A Gathering of Men many, many times over the years. Bly’s comments above, while they’ve always made complete sense to me, have never resonated more strongly with me than they do now, and I believe that’s the core truth I express near the end of my poem:

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

“The world”, especially when we are very young children, is home and family, and we construct our internal model of the world, the one we will carry forward into adulthood, accordingly. A large chunk of that model is developed in response to interactions with our parents. My mother wanted me to be someone else and did her best to make me into what she needed until I was no longer young enough, malleable enough, and helpless enough to be controlled and manipulated. My father didn’t want me at all and did his best to destroy and, ultimately, to eliminate me. I formed my identity living in the shadow of two giants too blinded by their own damage and their own unmet needs to see who I was. I wanted to fix both of them, even if it meant sacrificing and forgetting myself, and I tried for many years. Tried, failed, and lost myself in the process.

That was the world, as I experienced it, not only from the moment I was born, but from the moment I was conceived. That was, and is, my original wound: I was not wanted as I was, what I had to offer had no value, and I had to make myself into what “the world” wanted me to be in order to survive.

Now I’m about to do it again.

3. Process

I’m good for about ten hours of productive work on an average day, assuming I’m feeling well. I need about eight hours of sleep nightly. That leaves six hours for everything else: self-care, social activities, exercising, shopping, preparing and eating meals, etc. And down time.

Down time, doing nothing in all its forms (resting, daydreaming, allowing my thoughts to wander, etc.), is incredibly important for me, and not only because it’s the source of so much of my creative insight. It’s also vital, as I am a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), to my health and well-being. Additional down time is necessary for HSPs because of the high amount of information we perceive and receive, and the depth and thoroughness with which we need to process it. Without at least two to three hours of down time every day, my edges begin to fray and I can lose my center pretty quickly.

Any so-called “9 to 5″ job I get is going to consume my ten productive hours a day (at least) leaving me with nothing for my deep creative work, my real work, the work that gives my life meaning and keeps me alive: the work of my soul. Even worse, it’ll consume my mornings, which are the keystone of my entire process.

For almost eight months now, I’ve been off the chain. A lot of people might assume that not having a job would equate to not working. Not so. I’ve been working about ten hours a day most days, sometimes more. No one has been making me do it. It’s natural. I wake up every morning with ideas. The process begins while I’m sleeping, in my dreams. My most productive hours, as a writer, generally come before noon. What happens in the morning determines the creative course of my day, and it happens every day, of its own accord, provided that I’m available to it.

There’s a wonderful sequence in the movie Pollock (one of my absolute favorite films). It begins with painter Jackson Pollock waking up in the morning. He dresses and stumbles half-asleep into the kitchen, where his wife hands him a cup of coffee as he lights his first cigarette of the day. She helps him put on his heavy coat, hat, and scarf and sends him off with a wordless pat. He steps outside into a cold winter day and trudges the short path through the snow to his studio in the barn. Once inside, he stokes the wood stove, gets a fire going, and starts his work for the day, which will last into the evening.

It’s clear from the presentation of this sequence in the film that this is his daily pattern, and I resonate with it so strongly because it is, in my own way, my daily pattern as well, that is, when financial circumstances allow it. I’ve often wondered how Jackson Pollock would’ve tolerated losing his mornings five days a week in exchange for sitting in a cubicle somewhere. My guess is: not well.

Doing creative work, in the way I do it, requires a certain amount of open time and space. In a lot of ways, I’m a channeler. Most of what I write (and all of what I draw) comes to me without any specific conscious intention. I never “try” to write a poem or an essay about anything. Words and ideas simply start coming. Sometimes, as in the case of most of my poetry, the bulk of the thing comes to me quickly and it’s all I can do to keep up. Essays can take a bit longer to germinate, beginning with a general idea or feeling that then develops in the background of my mind over a period of days, weeks, or even months until suddenly, one day, it’s time to write.

Whatever the case, whether it’s a poem that started as I was waking up or an essay that’s been incubating for a couple of weeks, when it’s time to write, I have to be there for it because, if I’m not, that transient energy that’s attempting to coalesce into something more solid will be lost, and lost forever.

I never know where a poem or an essay is going when it begins, and I never know how long it’s going to take for the process to complete itself. My most recently finished poem (“shelter”) began when the first several lines came to me completely unplanned (as usual) as I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store. I was supposed to be on my way to be drug tested for my upcoming job, but took the time to follow the thread those first lines offered as far as I could before hitting the road. After a short drive, I sat outside in the parking lot of the drug testing facility and worked on the poem until the place was about to close, at which point I set down my pen and pad and went in.

By then, the poem was nearly complete, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the ending. The last three lines finally came to me (again, unexpectedly) about half a mile into my evening walk. I didn’t have anything with me to write them down, so I had to repeat them to myself for a mile like an ad hoc mantra so I wouldn’t forget them before I made it home. I continued to poke at what I’d written for several hours though the evening until I felt satisfied, more or less. I never know if anything’s really done until I’ve slept on it.

All in all, from the moment the first couple of lines came to me until I felt comfortable enough with what I had to call the poem done, the process took about five hours. Five hours. Nineteen lines. Ninety-five words (including the one-word title, which also had to be dug out of the word stream). That’s what I mean when I say open time and space is required to do this work. If I’m unable to give those five hours to that poem when I did, there is no poem, period.

4. Survival

I start the new job in a couple of days, and I can already feel my creative engines shutting down. The same part of me that generates all the ideas and insights also knows when the required window of open time and space is closing. Shutting the process down, as bad as it feels (and it feels like death itself), is a necessary and largely involuntary form of protection for me. Not being able to roll out of bed, trudge out to my workshop, fire up the stove, and get to my work every morning means that insights and ideas, if they come, will have no opportunity for development, realization, and expression.

Imagine that if every time you started having sex you were forced to stop before you were finished. Imagine having that experience every morning, day after day, week after week. Before long you wouldn’t even want to start having sex, or even want to feel sexual at all, but that underlying, undeniable life energy would still be there in you nonetheless, looking for a way out, and you’d feel it. That’s how I’m going to be feeling when the circumstances of making a living force my most vital energies underground once again.

As a result, I would expect this to be my last blog post for a while. Maybe a long while. It’s hard to say. Sometimes my creative energy is powerful enough to push its way through constraining circumstances somehow, but if I’m not available to do something with it, I’ll only wind up frustrated and there’s a part of me that would rather feel nothing at all than feel that.

Money is an unfortunate necessity, and from that standpoint, I’m grateful to have this new job. Grateful, but not happy. It’s possible to feel one without feeling the other; gratitude and happiness are not the same thing. I’ll go forward, mindful of my original wound and its influence on how I see and experience “the world”, and I’ll try to keep Robert Bly’s comments paraphrasing Alice Miller in mind:

“Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

What I wanted, I still want. But once again, I’ll do what I have to do to survive, and I’ll forgive myself, as best I can, for doing it.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Caught between the road and the sky

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When we come to the place where the road and the sky collide
Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide
They told me I was going to have to work for a living
But all I want to do is ride …

~ “The Road and the Sky”, Jackson Browne

I was seventeen when I first heard the song that began with these lyrics, but I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was hearing. I was close, but one word made all the difference for me:

They told me I was going to have to work for a living
But all I want to do is write …

There was much I didn’t know, and had forgotten, about myself at age seventeen, but one thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to write. Another thing I knew for certain, given my broken blue collar family origins, was that I was going to have to work for a living. And I didn’t see how I’d ever be able to reconcile the two. I still can’t.

Now I find myself once again at “the place where the road and the sky collide,” the road being the very real earthbound necessities of working for a living and the sky being the equally real work of actualizing my creative and expressive aspirations as a writer.

These two realities have collided in my life many times before and I’ve made numerous attempts for nearly 25 years now to merge them into a single, unified path, but without success. The time I spend in the sky always comes at the price of far more time on the road. And now the road, the necessity to work for a living, is calling me back once more.

I don’t know how much writing I’ll be doing going forward. The road always takes a big toll on that part of my life. I could write something every day, given the opportunity, but my writing process is typically far more time and labor intensive, and far more dependent on relatively short-lived little windows of inspiration, than the average work week can accommodate.

I often think, sometimes quite seriously, about giving up the writing. The costs of keeping at it, both financial and personal, seem far too great for me to continue to bear at times, especially as the years pile on. Then I hear from someone like Steve Spitzer. Steve is a Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University and founder of the Jericho Circle Project, a non-profit organization that runs men’s support groups in correctional facilities in Massachusetts. Steve sent me a message last week to tell me that he’s been using my poem “little iron man” in his course at Suffolk University as well as in some of the Jericho Circle prison groups.

Or I see a comment here on the blog like this one, posted yesterday:

I can’t thank you enough for the joy I just felt reading your kind words :) I had fallen into a bad place again, and your encouragement and your writings have helped to remind me how to get out of that place. I really love how your writing gets behind my barriers and makes me ‘feel’. Words can’t describe how comforting it is to connect with someone who can relate to these emotions. Much love x

Or I get a phone call like the one I received recently from a young man in Florida who wanted to thank me personally for my first book, Iron Man Family Outing.

And then I think: How can I quit?

Those are just a few examples from recent experience right off the top of my head. There are many others, and probably still others of which I’m not even aware. This tells me that I’ve been right all along: that I really am on to something, that what I’ve been doing has value, and that people need it.

If I could only find some way to make a living doing this work, I’d never even think about quitting. Ever. I love it more than anything. But the road is what pays the bills, and now it’s time for me to come down out of the sky again.

On days like this, I am torn between the desire, the need, to keep moving forward with the work that moves me (and others) and the absolute necessity to provide for myself and for my well-being. This is the place where the road and the sky collide in my life, the place where I have spent so much of my adult life trapped, like some ancient cursed mythological figure, in tormented suspension between the one and the other.

20 in 2012

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What follows is a list of the twenty new poems I completed in 2012. Fifteen of these were new as in “written in full in 2012″ and the other five were started in a previous year (as far back as 2009), set aside and forgotten, and then rediscovered and completed this year.

Twenty poems doesn’t seem like much for a whole year. I’ve struggled with two extended periods of severe writer’s block since the beginning of 2012 (first from January into early June, then again from early September onward). For most of this year, writing anything at all has felt like trying to crush coal into diamonds in my bare hands, Superman style. I’d like to have written more poetry this year, if only because I don’t feel fully connected with myself when weeks and months pass without writing any. But given the circumstances, I’m happy with the quality of what I’ve written and feel fortunate to have produced as much as I did.

January:

March:

June:

July:

August:

September:

October:

November:

Twilight in present time

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My struggle with a prolonged and nasty writer’s block continues. At times like this, my mind swirls with doubts about who I am and what I’m doing. The hard realities imposed by living in a system that places very little value on what I do, on what I must do because it is who I am, are never far from my awareness and my experience. When my expressive energy is so horribly constrained, those realities feel even more amplified and oppressive in my consciousness. It’s one thing to make sacrifices for an active process; it’s quite another to make them for a process that is, based on all outward appearances, inert, at least temporarily.

This period of creative barrenness and loss of voice comes at a time when I’m feeling as if I’ve exhausted every idea I’ve ever had about how to live my life. It’s not as if I’ve never been in this place before. The difference now is time. Time, once a wild card in my life with its seemingly unlimited series of branches of infinite possibility, is now the trump in the deck, the card that will, soon enough, end the game. Time may heal, but it also kills, and I’m long past the point in my life where time is on my side.

There is a certain inevitable hopelessness that comes with the work I do as a writer, in the sense that there’s virtually no possibility I can ever support myself financially doing it, no matter how good I might be, how creative I am, or how hard I try. I still don’t want to believe this, but it’s getting harder and harder to deny it, and there are many times now, too many, when I fear I’ve doomed myself to a lonely, impoverished old age because I would not give up what I could not have.

I told someone recently, “I wouldn’t wish being a poet on my worst enemy,” and I wasn’t kidding. Not in this culture anyway. I’d have a better shot at making a living as a blacksmith or a barrel maker. The big money machine does not need truth, it doesn’t need feelings, and it most certainly does not need poetry or poets. My friend David Jewell likes to say, “Crime doesn’t pay and neither does poetry,” but criminals, by and large, make a far better living than poets, especially in the increasingly opportunistic, militaristic, authoritarian, predatory “might makes right” / “winner take all” system of lying, fear-making vulture capitalism that dominates our world today.

I’ve spent most of the last thirty years in unfulfilling jobs that pay the bills but use me up and I don’t know what to do about it. My first book is going out of print in about six months and I don’t know what to do about it. My second book remains unpublished after three years and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m going to be 55 in a little over a month, with no pension and no prospects for ever retiring, and I don’t know what to do about it. Lately I feel like I don’t know what to do about anything.

Robert Christgau once said, “Work too long toward a future that never arrives and you lose your hold on what comes naturally.” I wonder how much of this writer’s block I’m experiencing is due to my sinking, ever-deepening realization that my life is, in all likelihood, never going to be more than what it already is: that there is no key and no door, no path to transformation, and no breakthrough to be had, just more lousy soul-sucking jobs to pay the bills (if I’m lucky), and maybe (if I’m lucky) more writing and more poetry.

I’ve tried for years (oh, how I’ve tried) to convince myself that getting paid to sit in a cage all day doing high-end monkey work to keep the technoconsumer culture humming along on its hyper-accelerating path to oblivion ought to be good enough for me. But for whatever reason, for better or worse, doing meaningful work that moves me is not just important to me, but essential to my well-being. Some of this urgent necessity for purposeful work is an inherent aspect of who I am at my core. Some of it is, I’m sure, fueled by a deep need to prove my worth that’s rooted in growing up with a father whose approval I desperately wanted and needed, but never received. Some of it is cultural: men establish, assert, and maintain their identities and their value in my culture by way of their work.

And some, I suspect, is my lineage. My father, my grandfathers, all of my uncles, and all of their forefathers were working class men: farmers, factory workers, mechanics, welders, truck drivers, power linemen, canal workers. Builders, growers, makers, diggers, movers, and fixers. Hard work in the service of producing something tangible and useful was an intrinsic element of their nature, at one and inseparable from their character. It is part of my masculine heritage, one of the long strands of my family DNA.

I did my best to follow the masculine path of work in my family. I spent several years in blue collar jobs (restaurant, sawmill, construction, warehouse, factory) before graduating to a desk in a plastic box. Many of the jobs I took early on were physically demanding and quite dangerous, in part because I had so few choices and in part because I was determined to prove my manhood to myself, to my father, and to any number of other people who saw me as timid, weak, and lazy. Looking back, I can now see that this was an essential step in my rite of passage into manhood, a critically important experience I gave myself because I knew (consciously or not) that I had to have it.

The down side was that, in order to pursue that path, I turned away from other opportunities that would never come my way again. I was very damaged and very confused as a young man. There was virtually no one older in my life to whom I could turn for guidance and assistance, and I trusted no one but my peers, who were struggling in the dark just as I was. I made several critical life decisions early on, before I really knew who I was, that made my life harder then and continue to do so now. Lacking an accurate appreciation of both my capabilities and my options, and not knowing any better, I consistently aimed low. And I hit what I aimed for.

Lately I feel like I’ve spent most of my life blindfolded, and that I’ve finally begun to remove the blindfold just as the sun is setting, much as it’s sinking into the horizon outside my window right now. Better late than never, sure, but how late is too late? To what extent does a greater awareness of one’s capabilities compensate for a fading physicality, a merciless chronometer, and an ever-shortening runway? And how many cards are really left for me to play this late in the game?

Twilight is sometimes still and lovely, sometimes spooky and surreal, but today it feels like a big kick in the chest.

Lost my words

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At my last job, there was a fridge in the break room covered with those little word magnets known as poetry magnets. During my first couple of months, I’d wander in there most every day, usually late in the afternoon, and construct some little ad hoc one-line poems on the front of the fridge like:

Shadow language is black lake.

Seeing your forest may take years.

Look up: power of sky like symphony.

Recall each day as a life.

Leave in peace, as if about to whisper.

It was fun and it gave me a way to connect with my deeper, truer self and my identity as a writer and a creative person, an identity that was being crushed out of me rapidly by the severe demands of the job. That fridge with the little word magnets was a lifeline for me, a lifeline to myself and to who I really was in an environment that required me to disown myself to survive.

One night, after I’d been on the job seven or eight weeks, I had the following dream:

I walk into the break room at work and see that all of the words I’ve arranged on the fridge, all of my words, are gone. I’m horrified. I’ve lost my words.

Every so often, I have a terse, tight, concise little dream that tells me precisely what I need to know in a completely unambiguous way. This was one of those dreams. I knew exactly what it meant and what it said about what the job was doing to me, and it scared the hell out of me. Twenty years ago, I would’ve walked away immediately from any job that was sufficiently toxic to who I am to provoke a dream like that one. But this wasn’t twenty years ago, and I stayed.

Now the job has ended, as they all do eventually, and I’m still waiting for my lost words to come back to me. The last new poem I wrote (“time is burning me down”) came to me a little over five weeks ago, on the Monday immediately after the job ended. I haven’t written a line, a phrase, not a word of poetry since then. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

I’ve always been at the mercy of forces beyond myself (my conscious self) when it comes to writing poetry. It’s essentially an autonomous process, one that I don’t initiate or control, at least not consciously. Once it begins, I have some choices, but that’s more a matter of facilitation than of willing or deciding something into existence. Conversely, if I try to write a poem, the result is inevitably a disastrous, frustrating waste of time.

Every poem that comes through me feels, at some level, like a matter of life and death, and at some level, it is. It’s a matter of life and death for a very fleeting state of mind, body, heart, soul, word, image, and energy that is trying to coalesce itself into something more permanent. It’s a moment trying to give birth to itself in form, and if it fails to do so, it’s gone forever.

Every poem I write also feels like it might be my last. I never know if there will be another, so when something comes, I give it everything I’ve got. When nothing comes for a while, I begin to wonder if maybe the last poem I wrote really was the last one. Maybe there’s nothing left for me to say. Maybe I’ve said enough. Or maybe I’ve simply run out of ways to say it.

The whole process is a mystery. The only time I ever feel like I understand it at all is when something is coming through me. It’s kind of merciless in that way, to live in the service of something so fickle, so mercurial, and so demanding. Most of the poems I’ve written have come fairly quickly, but that doesn’t account for the amount of time and space I have to make for them to come, and all the time (like now) when nothing comes. It doesn’t account for all of the time alone, waiting waiting waiting, in the dark, in silence, with no assurance of anything, for a feeling, an impression, a surge of life energy to form itself into a previously unheard, unspoken stream of words.

When that stream stops, I am lost. This is the double bind of it all. As demanding and unpredictable as the process is, as much as it takes from me, I need it. I need it even when what comes out of me sounds dark and hopeless. Being able to express my hopelessness gives me hope. Being able to express my darkness generates light.

And now … nothing comes. I’ve lost my words and I don’t know what to do about it. Classic cosmic joke, right? I finally have some time and space, a little oasis between the horrible jobs that drain me and interrupt my creative flow, and nothing comes. I have ideas but they go nowhere. I have feelings but have no words for them. I’ve been burning for months now to write about some very specific things, just waiting for the time and space to do it, but I wind up writing this instead, because this is what comes when nothing comes.

Even writing this post has been insanely difficult. The first version, posted three days ago and removed several hours later, was a half-baked, ill-focused, rambling wreck. It’s not just poetry I’m having trouble writing. It’s everything.

In an audio interview recorded in 2000, the late musician Warren Zevon said, “I can’t write more songs than I get ideas for, so it doesn’t do any good to have better work habits.” It’s true. No matter how much I might want to, I can’t force writing out of myself any more than a farmer can make rain come down on his fields by staring at the sky.

In the same interview, Zevon also said, “But you just keep doing it if you’re a writer. Even if you try not to, you’ll keep doing it.” Also true. I couldn’t stop writing if I wanted to. I just have to wait this out. I’ve gone as long as sixteen years before without writing a poem. Twice. I doubt it’ll be that long this time, but it’s not my call.

Maybe some time spent staring at the sky while waiting for my lost words to return wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

Being what I’m not

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I don’t feel very strong these days and I’m having a hard time convincing myself that I actually know who I am and what I’m doing. A few months ago, I wrote:

Every day I’m getting better and better at being what I’m not.

And so I am. The current corporate gig, like every one before it, forces me to abandon the best parts of who I am on a daily basis, to substitute someone else’s agenda for my own. Over time, I become what I must become in order to function in an environment that is hostile to my soul and my psyche. I repress what I know, what I feel, and who I am. Anyone who does that over a long enough period of time becomes someone else. It’s inevitable. People often tell me “you are not your job” but we are what we spend most of our time doing. It forms us like a mold and fires us like a kiln.

I’ve barely written anything for months now. I still get ideas, but I don’t have blocks of open time and space that are sufficient to develop anything to completion. Two weeks ago, three new poems suddenly popped out, my first since this one written in January at the end of my first week on the current job. The new poems came on the heels of an epic meltdown during which I shouted obscenities into the sky until my voice was almost gone. I was hoarse for close to a week afterward. I nearly lost one voice but regained another, at least for a few days.

That’s what it took for the best and most essential part of me to focus and express itself in my current circumstances. It didn’t last long. Now that part of me has gone underground again, or I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I’ve forced it back down so I can “make a living” (as the expression goes) as one more anonymous drone in the omnipresent corporate culture that increasingly and systemically defines and dominates the life of the typical American worker.

There is no ebb and flow in corporate culture; there is only surge and consume. Corporate culture is inherently ruthless and mechanical. The only integrity that is recognized and valued is the integrity of the machine. Patience, compassion, generosity, and truthfulness are anathema to the corporate model, not virtues to be cultivated but liabilities to be eliminated. Those who ascend the corporate hierarchy must be willing to exploit and sacrifice anyone and everyone on the altar of ambition and self-interest. The entire corporate model is deeply flawed at its core. It’s a rotten system that requires the people who run it to act rotten.

Most employees in corporate culture (the ones who aren’t part of the elite circle at or near the top of the pyramid) are required to surrender their personal autonomy, individual authority, and inner knowing on a daily basis to keep their jobs. It’s no wonder that so many Americans spend their days feeling dazed, dumb, hungry, confused, passive, powerless, depressed, and desperate for escapism. People who’ve been forced to forego and forget their own power are going to feel that way.

I hate myself after work nearly every day. I hate myself for wasting yet another day of my precious life sitting in a cubicle grinding through one meaningless task after another. I hate myself for being too stupid, after more than twenty years of trying, to find another way. And then I spend the evening trying to recover so I can do it again the next day.

People are often mystified that I’m mostly unable to write under these conditions and they’re quick to offer advice. Get up an hour earlier. Write in the evening. Write on the weekends. Maybe some of those tactics work for others. They don’t work for me. My writing doesn’t come to me on command. It comes when it comes, and if I’m not available to it when it comes, it’s gone. I’ve written about this before (here, here, and here).

This idea that I can’t coerce what is an inherently organic, self-directed process with its own life and its own energy into a mechanical schedule by sheer force of will seems to be hard for a lot of folks to understand. Lately I’ve been likening my writing process to a wild animal or plant species that requires a minimum amount of territory to survive. It can only adapt to and tolerate a reduction in that territory up to a certain point, after which survival becomes impossible, not because it isn’t trying hard enough or isn’t sufficiently creative or committed or resilient, but because its very nature is incompatible with the constraints and impingements on its environment.

There’s still stuff I’m burning to write, but I know myself and I know my process. If I don’t have the time and the space to follow the direction I get from within to its natural conclusion, I needn’t bother. Some things take hours and some things take days. Whatever the time required, I have to give myself to what’s moving through me and immerse myself in it until it’s done with me. Anything less than that is pointless, and the results will be without integrity, quality, or value.

I’m only writing now because I woke up at 3:00 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. I certainly wouldn’t say this is my best work. I’m not even sure it’s worth reading. But I guess I needed to write it, and maybe now I can get an hour or two of sweet, blissful sleep before the next forgettable day begins.

Poem of the Issue – Austin Chronicle 02/03/12

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"absolute zero" by Rick Belden

My poem “absolute zero” is the featured “Poem of the Issue” in this week’s edition of The Austin Chronicle. This one has its origins in a journal entry from early 1989 which was forgotten and then rediscovered in October 2010 when I was working on the Iron Man Family Outtakes project. I can’t remember now in what state of completion this piece was when I found it, but I don’t think I had to do a whole lot of work to finish it.

I have extremely vivid memories of writing many of my poems: what was going on for me in that moment, the time, place, circumstances, etc. For others (like this one), I can’t recall much more than a general context and a time frame. Then there are those pieces, some of which are quite significant, for which I have no recollection whatsoever of the process of creation after some time has passed. Why I would remember writing some so well and others not at all has always been a mystery to me.

As I’ve been reading this one right now, it seems to me that it started with me feeling like I was too blocked to write anything (first two lines), which is kind of ironic in retrospect. I toss off a few lines in a journal, forget about them, and 22 years later I have a published poem. What a crazy, mysterious, unpredictable process this is.

Book review: “Zen in the Art of Photography”

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Zen in the Art of Photography, by psychotherapist and photographer Robert Leverant, is a gracefully tight articulation of philosophy and process that reads like poetry. This little book is beautiful in both appearance and content. It even feels good in my hands. I’m neither a photographer nor an expert on Zen, but I enjoyed this book nonetheless, and I think that says something about the universal truths contained within.

Many of the insights offered about the process of creating a photograph echoed my own experience as a writer and poet. Leverant speaks of photography as “an art of waiting” and “an art of listening.” If the photographer listens well enough, if he has developed sufficient discipline, the photo takes itself. I’ve often told others that I feel as if my poems write themselves, but this only happens when I’m able to give them the time and space they need to emerge.

The processes and philosophy in this book may be specific to photography, but I believe that anyone engaged in creative activity who reads it can gain some valuable insights into the value of waiting, listening, and allowing art, whatever the chosen medium, to find its own path.

Poetry on video: “present time”

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Today’s poem on video, “present time”, was written back in late November and recorded in early February, both of which feel like a lifetime ago as I’m writing today.

I suppose it’s appropriate that I post this video today as this is my last day of “strange freedom”, as I put it a little over nine months ago, before starting a new job tomorrow. I’d love to say I’m excited about it, but I’m not. Relieved that I’m not going to go completely broke, yes. Grateful that I have a way to support myself when so many do not, yes. Happy that I’m going to survive, yes. Excited, no.

These last nine months have been a wonderfully productive time for me. I’ve grown by leaps and bounds. It was absolutely necessary that I take this time with myself, for myself and my own work, and I have no doubt about that. Even so, it’s been a huge drain financially to go without an income for nine months. And once again I have failed, for whatever reason, to translate my most heartfelt passion into livelihood.

I still believe there is a need for what I have to offer. My life would actually be a lot easier if I didn’t believe it. But need and demand are not the same thing. There may be a need. I may be right about that. However, there doesn’t seem to be much of a demand. Or perhaps I just haven’t figured out how to deliver what I have to offer to those who would find it valuable. Or maybe I haven’t fully defined it yet.

When I left my last job nine months ago, in all the uncertainty I felt about what my future might hold, I was sure of one thing: by the time I either found another job or ran out of money, my second book would be out. But Scapegoat’s Cross remains as it has been ever since September 2009, a completed manuscript with no artwork and no path to publication. This is one of the most difficult realities I have to accept as I prepare to move back into cubicleland.

A couple of years ago, I wrote:

Writing, for me, has always had the qualities of a trance, a charm, a spell. It requires a suspension of disbelief on my part: the suspension of my disbelief in myself. It requires me to believe that what I have to say, and how I’m going to say it, will be meaningful and interesting to others. This is a fragile state, magical and mysterious, that can last for moments or months, in which every word matters and every thought or feeling might last forever, if only I’m quick enough to catch it.

At some point, the trance always ends; the charm fades; the spell is broken. My words, thoughts, and feelings seem ordinary again, and there’s nothing left to write.

I feel like that wonderful trance I’ve been in since Iron Man Family Outing began to resurrect itself in September 2007 may be coming to its end, not because I have nothing left to say or nothing left to give, but because the material realities of my life are beginning, once again, to overwhelm my inner vision. I’m simply not going to have the time, the energy, and the opportunity for writing, and for the deep self-work that is the foundation of the writing, and I know it.

Furthermore, I seem to have maxed out all of the channels I’ve been using to draw new folks to my work. Readership for Iron Man Family Outing seems to have peaked and, as I said previously, Scapegoat’s Cross is still dead in the water. The outer side of my work seems to have stagnated and now I can feel the inner side beginning to shut down as well.

Musician Joe Strummer once said, “Songs don’t tend to come to you if there’s no outlet for them.” This has certainly been true in my experience. When I feel I don’t have an appropriate outlet for my work, my creative flow just stops dead. Maybe that’s not happening now, but it sure feels that way to me.

In any case, today is my last day of freedom, freedom that no longer feels strange, but natural. Tomorrow will be different.

If, as I suspect, my well is running dry, I may not post again for a while. In the event that I’m correct about that, I’d like to leave everyone with these three thoughts:

  • Men are hungry for ways to access their emotions safely. No man wants to open up and be shamed or scared into shutting back down again.
  • Poetry is both undervalued and underutilized as a means to move into the heart of our experience, especially for men.
  • The other men I’ve met (and I met some amazing men at Mike Lew’s male survivors workshop yesterday) who are working to recover from childhood abuse are some of the bravest men on the planet.

I hope I’ve done something to bring the truth of these three statements home to some other people. Men need understanding and encouragement if they are to do better. They need to be seen as they truly are. We all need that. We all deserve it.

I still believe there is a different life, a better life, a wholly and completely natural and heartfelt life that serves my needs as it serves the needs of others, waiting inside me to be lived. But I won’t be living it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. Perhaps that life is still out there somewhere in my future, but now there is only now.

Outtakes and updates

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A couple of weeks ago, I completed my work on the Iron Man Family Outing outtakes project, specifically the third and final group of poems (“inside / outside”). I feel confident now in saying that there is no more unpublished material from that period, at least none that’s worth publishing. That’s the end of it.

I’ve also decided that it’s time to wind down my efforts to promote Iron Man Family Outing. As I wrote in a previous post, “Twenty years is a long time to stick with anything.” I decided three years ago that I was going to do whatever it took to get the unused copies of the book out to people who would find it personally meaningful, and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of it. Most of those copies are out there in the world now. Based on some of the feedback I’ve received over the last three years, quite a few of them have done or are still doing some good.

The amount of time and effort I’ve put into Iron Man Family Outing over the past 38 months has been staggering and would probably shock me if I’d actually kept track of it. I have kept track of the amount of money I’ve spent and it’s been substantial. Shipping free books all over the United States and internationally has not been cheap. I have a deep commitment to the work I do, but I also have to acknowledge that there are some very real limits to how much of myself I can give to an extremely demanding form of work that provides me with no material support whatsoever. My friend David Jewell likes to say, “Crime doesn’t pay and neither does poetry,” but personally I think that most criminals make a much better living than most poets do.

This brings me to the subject and the status of my second, still unpublished book, Scapegoat’s Cross, which has been essentially dead in the water for over a year now since I completed the final manuscript in September 2009. I’ve had no success finding an artist to work with me on illustrations and graphic design, which is something I know I can’t do on my own. I don’t have a publisher either, and don’t even have any leads on getting one. I’ve known all along that the chances of finding someone who’d publish the book were slim, and I’ve been willing for some time now to publish it myself and give the work away (again) for the sake of getting it out there, but without the artwork I can’t even do that.

Lately I’ve been wondering if maybe I shouldn’t publish it at all. Maybe all the blocks and difficulties I’ve encountered since completing the manuscript (breaking my wrist and shoulder, leaving my job and losing my income, being unable to find an artist) are signs that I shouldn’t go forward with it, that I’m not meant to do that. I just don’t know anymore.

I had similar struggles and doubts during the process that ultimately led to the publication of Iron Man Family Outing, so I know that none of this sturm und drang necessarily means that Scapegoat’s Cross shouldn’t or won’t see the light of day. But I also know that there are certain doors that have to open in order for me to move forward with it, and they’re just not opening.

Doubts and concerns notwithstanding, I was very naive and idealistic when I was working to get Iron Man Family Outing published. I didn’t realize what the experience was going to cost me personally or understand the seismic effect it was going to have on my life and my relationships, and I certainly didn’t anticipate that I was committing myself to a project that would consume a twenty-year chunk of my life. I’m not saying that I regret doing it. I don’t. I honestly can’t imagine myself having gone any other way. Telling the truth, in the way I told it, was a matter of life and death for me. But I know now that there’s a price to be paid for taking that path, and I wonder if I’m up to it a second time.

Perhaps more than anything, I wonder if there’s really any substantial interest in what I have to say. As was the case with Iron Man Family Outing, the work I’ve done with Scapegoat’s Cross doesn’t seem to fit with anything else I see anywhere. It’s out of step with a good deal of what I see going on these days in the arena of what is commonly characterized as men’s work (too much of which seems, to my eyes, obsessed with a bizarrely adolescent fixation on getting chicks and getting laid, as if that’s the highest life purpose to which a man can aspire). Nor is Scapegoat’s Cross like anything I’ve seen in the adult survivor literature or the self-help / personal growth genre, and I’ve learned the hard way over the years that the work I’m doing is seen as some sort of strange, illegitimate aberration (at best) in the MFA-strangled universe of contemporary American poetry.

It’s been said that Iron Man Family Outing was ahead of its time, and there might be something to that. It’s certainly been far better received in the last three years than it was when it was published in 1990, although there are still some rather high-profile gatekeepers of the men’s movement (whatever that term even means now) on the web who continue to exclude it from their lists of books for men and poetry for men, and not for any lack of effort on my part to make them aware of it. I guess, for these guys anyway, if it ain’t Bly, it don’t fly.

Maybe Scapegoat’s Cross is ahead of its time as well. I don’t know. I’m too close to it to say. But it sure is stuck, and it’s been that way for over a year, and I wonder if maybe that’s telling me something.

The larger question for me at this point is whether I should continue the work I’ve been doing as a writer at all. I often feel like I’m doing a ton of work in the dark here, the majority of which seems to go largely unseen by anyone but me. Maybe I’m not very good at promoting myself. Hell, I know I’m not. I don’t even like doing it, and my explorative forays into utilizing social media have been, quite frankly, a bust so far. On the other hand, maybe the work I’m doing is simply so far out on the edge that there’s not much interest to be had, whether I’m good at promoting it or not. Again, I’m too close to the situation to know.

What I do know is that one of the best aspects of the work I’ve done over the last three years has been making new friends and allies all around the world who are actively committed to helping men grow and heal. Becoming acquainted with these men and women has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement for me. There’s a lot of great work being done behind the scenes with and for men, and I’m honored to have been a part of it in whatever way I could.

Nevertheless, I feel like I’m at a sort of crossroads here. With my efforts on behalf of Iron Man Family Outing winding down and with Scapegoat’s Cross in hibernation or stasis or permanent sleep, whatever it is, I’m asking myself some serious questions about my next step, which has to include some way to make a living. Unfortunately, I only know one way to do that, and the prospect of committing myself to it yet again makes my guts shrivel and shrink. What do you do when doing what you love pays you nothing, and doing what pays you breaks you down?

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing for public consumption here on the blog in the near future. To be completely honest, I’ve been disappointed in the lack of response to what I think have been several pretty good posts published in the last month or so (here, here, here, and here), and another piece I submitted to one of the big men’s websites a couple of months ago has apparently been rejected. I say “apparently” because their stated editorial review period expired weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to the status of my submission since then.

I have one other post nearly completed, and I’ll probably publish it here in the next week or so, along with the one mentioned above that’s been in limbo for the last couple of months. After that … I dunno. Yet to be determined. Maybe it’ll be easier for me to think clearly if I stop banging my head against walls for a while. Or maybe I just can’t help myself, and the banging will continue.