Let's start out by allowing that we wrote a very, very, very bad book. I collected what I had done for months and put it out on Lulu, and even before the proof showed up I knew I would kill it, deleting the book, burying it.
I am thinking about my creative work with absolute dread. I appear to have hit some kind of weird vortex of stupid - no imagination or spark or desire, at all. I blame Church. Ha! Well, Church is a factor in my life of which, purportedly, poetry is a part.
But how to write a poem when every week or two you stand in front of the Tabernacle and read to the congregation prophecies of the Old Testament, and Letters of the New? What am I supposed to write? It's not like I spend my time with the New Yorker or even Charles Olsen. The Apostle Paul! What can I add, or do, when I live day to day, hour by hour, in love with the word of God?
Well, the answer is that you write terrible poems for a while, and you publish them and regret it. Then, you somehow feel fine anyway and think, Let's just write and see what happens, and so you are free in a way that maybe would not have occurred otherwise, if you had not written such dreck.
Dreck. I love that word. I love failing then waking up to a narrative. Well, we'll see. Or I'll see. Cats. Tangerines. Bandoleers. Also, I am getting older. Is it obvious?
Thanks for reading.
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