It’s 8 o’clock on Saturday morning, and I’ve been up since 5:30. I have no explanation, I just thought you ought to know.
Mine is a fairly regimented life. On some days said regimen feels like the ol’ mind-forg’d manacles, but most of the time it seems like the only reasonable means of maintaining an equitable level of self-discipline. When I’m on “vacation,” as I was last week, I tend to loll and languish, and I become so indolent I can’t even shop or breakfast effectively. If I didn’t enforce some habits of consistent scheduling (the kinds that oblige me to be conscious at 8:20 on a Saturday with nary a cartoon in sight), I would probably loll and languish longer, and not just for the sake of alliteration.
This pattern of habits has some fairly unfortunate consequences. For example, my recreation period begins at 7:30 every evening (earlier if it feels like my retinae are turning into slurry as a result of staring at a monitor all day). “Recreation” usually involves gaping at the teevee for a few hours, which is fine when I can catch replays of The Daily Show but less fine when TDS is on hiatus. If forced to rely on HBO and its interminable replays of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, I would probably go mad(der). Every now and again I’m lucky, and I’ll actually catch something interesting during those hours (last night, for example, I caught The Ten; I should mention that I heart Gretchen Mol), but if I’m unlucky…well, some kinds of vegetation just ain’t pretty. I’m talking to you, artichoke.
This regimental tendency can really become a problem, however, when it turns to verse. Often when I write the concept I have in mind lends itself readily to formal expression; I have sonnet-sized ideas with some regularity, and I recognize them as such. While I’ve become much more comfortable and confident with my practice of craft–and therefore with the prospect of playing with the net lowered, if not entirely lost, as Frost might say–I sometimes develop ideas that I don’t quite know how to express. The Very Important Poem I mentioned the other day is a case in point.
The impulse of the poem is by no means simple: I’m using Pope’s method from An Essay on Man, trying to circumscribe something that strikes me as essentially ineffable, and as a result I have to find a variety of ways of saying something that, by my provisional definition, cannot ever be directly said. As a result, I’ve had about four false starts in the past week, most of which involved an attempt to impose formal order on content that’s sprawling in my head. In addition to corraling the content, fencing off the pasture to some reasonable extent, I’m also not sure stylistically where I need to go. The transitional, gap-spanning approach I discussed last time around strikes me as inauthentic, both in terms of the subject and in terms of my own aesthetic bent. While I feel I’m fairly fluent in a variety of styles and move pretty smoothly between imagistic and impressionistic modes, language play, and rhythmic experimentation, nothing about the concept of the poem dictates a direction. I’ve accordingly got a file full of clever lines, even though those lines seem more like pieces that belong to several distinctly different puzzles.
I’ve got plenty of time to hammer it out, to wait for some revelation that will set it straight, but the regimen demands that I fill up my writing time lest I fall into a chasm of bad habits. I suppose I’m going to work on revisions of some early efforts that strike me as salvageable, but it’s going to be hard to concede to the regimen when the regimen itself sometimes occurs as part of the problem.
