Really, I'm not kidding. I was about to give up in sheer frustration. Hours spent this morning re-reading chapters in Hugo's Triggering Town, free-writing who the Fog and Wonder Woman Pez might really be, looking for inspiration in my original list of objects, ransacking a list of "what I love" poetry prompts originally scripted in Allegra Wong's Writers Block class a year back. But I sneezed and wrote that into the poem and then let myself riff, a scene in a diner, it could be anywhere except that it was a meeting between a dead person and the person left behind and, over their otherworldly meal, they eavesdrop and observe and the narrator tries to make sense of the depth and breadth of her loss. I pushed through to some other side and then got brave enough or exhausted enough with the whole damn process to put the revision out there and lo and behold, the teacher says it's a keeper, better than to be hoped for in a typical second draft.
I couldn't have done it without his advice about seeking the deeper, underlying subject. When will this become second nature, when will I be able to conjure up such analysis on my own? I feel like I'm stuck in the role of student, forever in need of a wise person mentor. Practice does make for perfect, well not, perfect but at least perfecting my sense and my ear. So that's my work for this first day of December, 50 years after Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. I guess I'm slowly learning, it's all in the view out the window, the list from a year before, the carefully scripted sneeze.
Must be the new 50-year-old me. But the past three days, I've been a frenzy of deciding to just do it and put some of these poems and prose poems I've been working on for the past half year now! out there. Entered four contests: Meridian at University of Viriginia, Crazyhorse at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Georgetown Review at Georgetown College in Kentucky (who knew?) and Chelsea, a magazine in NYC. Don't you just love the way those fees wrack up? Quite the cash cow income stream for these small college and university presses. I also sent submission off to two more mags, ones recommended by the teacher in the on-line poetry class--Poet Lore and Southeast Review. And the Greensboro Review since I recently got a rejection note from them with a personal noteo saying they'd like to see more of my work. Those are the ones you are supposed to follow up on, right? I also figured I could do a blind submission to The Grove Review up in Portland just because I've subscribed, seen the locals they are publishing so why the hell not bring my name and work to their attention.
No belaboring, no fretting, no perfectionistic freaking out. Just doing it. Maybe I've finally grown weary of thinking I'm not good enough. Maybe I finally realize there isn't enough time to think that way. Maybe I've seen enough of the stuff out there that sucks and if that's everyone's personal best, then hell, I am as ready as I'm ever going to be. Now to keep writing, keep amassing work that's good enough...one foot in front of the other, showing up every day at the keyboard, the page.
