First, some help for my obsessive friends:  as far as I can tell, Showtime’s I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single partakes of typical reality teevee devices.  Some viewers have noted that the central figure (an actor/writer/director named Eric Schaeffer) has re-enacted scenes from a book on relationships he wrote back in the day, which punctures the illusions of the format; more have noted that Schaeffer can be kind of a prat.  That’s about all the help I can give you, as I couldn’t be bothered to watch any episode after the first.  I wish Mr. Schaeffer the best of luck, and I wish readers whose choice of search terms somehow led them here happier hunting.  This is not the clearinghouse for all things Schaeffer, no matter what Google might tell you.

As for the person who arrived here by searching for “naughty narwhal”?  I do not know where to begin to help you.

Today, however, I wish to tell you about the clever-clever, which is sorta naughty in its own right.

Many moons ago, during my first semester at Emory University, I took a course on contemporary Irish poetry.  In that class, I was introduced to a critical distinction by one of my new companeros, a British fellow named Gavin.  Gavin distinguished one kind of poetry, verse possessed of a certain imagistic depth and complexity, from another variety associated primarily with tricksy wordplay.  He called the latter the “clever-clever,” which in some forms seems rather shallow:  once the reader figures out the games the writer is playing, the heavy lifting of interpretation is done.

I know of course that not all tricksy verse belongs to the clever-clever category.  I mention the concept today only because mine sometimes does.  The clever-clever represents a tendency I’m eternally trying to fight.

The piece I’m working on currently is a challenging one, as I’m negotiating two constraints:  I’m trying not to settle on a first-person perspective (not because of my usual paranoia, but because I feel in this case it would be uninteresting), and I’m also trying to pay homage to a viewpoint very foreign to me.  Like most hommes d’un certain age, my past is checkered with colorful personalities, and I’m trying to capture a semi-classic image:  that of a feller who sold off all his belongings and took to the road in search of…something.  I can only achieve so much psychological penetration, so I’ve been circling around the image, coming up with connections and associations I might used to convey my external impressions.  When I started committing words to paper, however, the clever-clever happened.

I’ve got a few strong details to work with.  He had issues with addiction, and his penchant for roaming arose in his effort to combat them; he often described himself as a new kind of addict, which is a vein I’ve already mined in the poem.  His last days with his peeps also involved some nice images–a  going-away party he never showed up for, the gentle rejection of the presents his friends gave him–and I think I’ve recaptured those details interesting ways.   When it comes to describing the man himself, however, the clever-clever rears its ugly head.

To wit:  for reasons unknown, the word that most strongly attaches to him in my mind is peregrine (which probably tells you something about how my brain works from the get-go).  My first effort to realize an image in the poem in reference to that word came out thusly:

Whatever whims whistled his peregrine soul 

were pitched to no will but his own.

It’s not a terrible sequence, but it’s sure not a good one.  The word overwrought comes to mind.  The real tragedy, however, is that this is the first raw thought that occurred to me.  I didn’t have to torture the lines to work out the assonance, the alliteration, or the jaunty allusion to falconry (which we know all the kids are into these days); that’s just how it formed in my head. 

You may be encouraged to know that I’ve gone in a different direction, but I find that my writing involves an ongoing battle with language shenanigans.  It took me an hour just to work around the verb “pitch” because I loved the semantics so well, and I spent two days last week working out a transition that hinged on the word “purchase” (as acquisition, as grip), even though I finally threw it out because the implications of that grip were too strong for my needs.  I find that my mind, left unattended, is always prepared to hammer out ornate phrasings and figures.  Half of my time is spent deciding if they work in the service of the image or idea.

When I’m lucky, they do:  a few pieces I’ve been fortunate enough to publish depend on my facility with wordplay, and sometimes those phrasings turn out quite lovely.  More often than not, alas, the clever-clever serves as a kind of default mode, a self-indulgent hiccup that helps me overcome the empty page.

As it turns out, overcoming the filled page, when it’s beset by the clever-clever, can be just as challenging.

On Thursday night I had the misfortune of catching Showtime’s I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single.  It held promise for about sixteen seconds.  First, they offer a shot of the singleton’s father, who suggests that the off-camera singleton really doesn’t want to know what dear ol’ dad thinks re: the subject implied by the show’s title.  The next shot features a really lovely woman with a sly, knowing smile who happens to be the singleton’s dominatrix (well, one of at least two).  Then, alas, the singleton begins his 29 minutes of zany on-camera antics, at which point I could hear Bill Paxton screaming in my head “Game over, man!  Game over!”  My friend, you may well be the only one who can’t believe you’re still single.

The defect of the premise, or so it seems to me, is that the subject is constantly performing.  One expects high levels of pretense in all such faux teevee, but this guy is transparently staging events and hamming it up even in ostensibly “real” situations.  He is keenly, constantly aware of the camera, and he very much wants to convey a particular impression (my best guess:  “Hi!  I’m something of a jackass!”).  Seriocomically, the surrounding cast becomes sympathetic as a result:  I really felt bad for his assistant (Em), his cameraman (Stas), his producer, and his first date, because they were clearly nothing more than springboards for his chimpery.  (The best part of the show is when the feller cedes the stage during interviews .)  He makes it very clear that they are simply fodder for his drama; one gathers immediately that he believes he is still single because he has not yet found someone who can embrace his cloyingly self-centered personality, what he refers to as “the ineffable me.”

Hint to the host:  if you’re aspiring to ineffability, try leaving something unspoken.  That’s the proverbial pudding in the mix.

As most folks know, I am a single feller myself.  In contrast to the host of I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single, however, I brook few illusions about the myriad reasons behind my tragic bachelor status.  What concerns me today, however, is that quality of performativity, those tendencies that influence self-presentation.  When I blog, for example, I’m threading my way through any number of presentational constraints:  I attempt to write in such a way that I amuse the several readers I know by name, that I maintain a certain level of decorum for the sake of my employer, and that I reassure those who know me only from my verse that I take the work extremely seriously.  Back when I wrote an anonymous blog, I could expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; I avoided leading keywords, to be sure, but I otherwise wrote without reserve.  Here, however, I’m keenly, constantly aware of the watchful audience, and as a result I spend a great deal of time trying to make a clean (if not favorable) impression.  It’s actually rather hard work, and it takes much longer than I’d like.

My creative writing, when viewed in that light, tends to feel like a double-edged sword.  During the process of composition I’m utterly absorbed.  I spent half an hour consulting several dictionaries and thesauri yesterday, for example, to get a thorough understanding of dowsing…even though it turned out to be an image I really couldn’t use.  It was a  pleasurable, immersive diversion, and when I am chipping away at the text of a poem I seldom fret about anything else.

After the fact, however, I’m always concerned about what that poem reveals, what that poem tells the audience (if anything) about me.  I’m certainly not in the business of concealing myself, of throwing up barriers between me and the reader, but I would prefer to keep the focus squarely on the text, the poem in and of itself.  This source of anxiety at least has an origin (one of my earliest rejections included an admonition from an editor who dismissed events of my life as flights of fancy), though that doesn’t necessarily make it reasonable.  At bottom it’s just another aspect of creative work over which I have no control, and about which I am extremely ambivalent.  Some of the best poems in the world gorgeously evoke the writer’s life and perspective, but I suspect that I’m still a little reluctant to see my own experiences summarily rebuffed.

At the moment I’m working through some more personal poetry, but I typically attempt to view events through a collective or objective lens.  There’s a real pleasure in that approach–it allows me to render events with depth and density, letting affect attach to the language–but at some point I feel I need to start wielding that first-person perspective, come whatever may.

Today is a double-dutch bloggery day; some days it’s not worth fighting the impulse.  While I would like to profess inspiration, some effluence of esemplastic élan that drove me to the keyboard, I’m actually just clearing the docket for tomorrow, which I hope to commit wholly to finishing a story.  If I can muster a little diligence over the next few weeks I’ll finish the summer session with an empty desktop and the option of devoting myself to poetry (and my annual report) for about 75 days.   I haven’t quite overcome my obsessive need to fixate on the future, but at least I’m back in the current calendar year.

In the minor triumphs department, by the bye, a small success:  when I sat down with my checkbook to smear my outstanding credit card debt with a dollop of dollars (as I mentioned on Wednesday), I actually managed to go big when I pulled the trigger.  I know that’s no too momentous by human standards, but when you’ve spent two decades fretting about empty coffers with no fallback options to speak of, the sense of security that comes with a rainy day fund is hard to let go.  Even so, the prospect of being entirely debt-free (student loans notwithstanding) by the end of 2008 sounds mighty sweet to me.

In a related lame-to-you/exciting-for-me turn of events, I also found a magical sandwich shoppe.  When I began to approach the prospect of writing more seriously during my last summer in Auburn, I went to Panera every Friday evening with a volume of poetry and a notebook for a little self-inflicted quality time.  When it comes to writerly work I’m a bit of an introvert, but too much quiet finds me conjuring excuses to stray from the keyboard.  A little subdued bustle tends to be good for my antisocial soul, and I found that my trips to Panera (coupled with Auburn’s excellent holdings of contemporary poetry) routinely refreshed my perceptions.  We have a world class sandwich shoppe here in Mount Pleasant, Max and Emily’s, but when the university is in session it tends to be a little too hectic for my meditative mojo.  I went there today, however, and I recaptured a vibe that I didn’t realize I’d been missing so much.  My sedate summer session suddenly looks much more promising.

As you might expect, I’m dwelling on these none-too-momentous turns of events because I’m shirking work, which brings me to my somewhat topical material for the day. 

Right now I’m trying to whip a story, a bit called “The Third Mercy,” into shape.  I’ve had this piece on my desktop (or in my “On Deck Projects” folder) for a few months now, and I think it’s ripened long enough.  In defense of the dilatory method, various delays have rescued the story from a spectacularly lame title.  Much to my chagrin, however, that same slow progress has revealed a truth at once pleasing and problematic:  “The Third Mercy” is a prose poem.

Attentive readers may have noticed that my propensity for assonance and alliteration has become a little more rambunctious than usual.  I don’t like pointing fingers, but the story is clearly to blame. 

What I’m attempting is, in essence, the story of a people, and “The Third Mercy” moves all the way from a creation myth to the narrative present, to a pivotal moment in their history (yes, I’m cribbing from my Myspace blog; this is what happens when I double dip).  After an exploratory paragraph or two, as I attempted to pinpoint the tone I was going for, I realized that a tale of that nature would probably sound a lot like the product of oral tradition.  As a result, the piece has gone from being something of a narrative experiment (I wanted to try something a little less character-driven than usual to see what it would look like) to a full-blown exercise in rhythmic reading.  I’m writing the story as I would write verse, and that has made the process a lot more labor-intensive.

When I’m finished I hope the rhythm will occur as a subliminal effect, making the progress from passage to passage much more memorable.  I don’t wish to hammer the reader with iambs, but I’d like to give the piece a kind of bonfire unity, a structure that mirrors the mechanics of a live fireside telling.  It’s been an involving process, as I’ve had to reread and revise time and again to make sure I preserved both the narrative sense and the verve of the verse.  It’s a kind of challenge I enjoy, thought I’ll be awfully glad when I’m done.

Better still:  when I’m writing that annual report, explaining to my peers how I see the several facets of my work informing one another, I’m going to have a really vivid example to show them.

I thought I’d try to double dip on the postage for the week, as I’ll be out of town tomorrow and much of Saturday.  Wiggedy fact of the day:  I am less than a mile away from the town center of Mount Pleasant, yet if I request directions to Western Michigan University from my home address, Google Maps routes me through Lansing; if I don’t specify my point of origin, however, it routes me through Grand Rapids.  Aspiring mathematicians on the lookout for bitchin’ word problems, take note.

This week I’m caught between coping mechanisms.  Yesterday I received a rejection notice from Ploughshares, one of the finest poetry journals going, and today student evaluations for the Spring semester became available.  Let’s see what the distinguished character actors that live inside my head have to say about that.

The Ploughshares rejection is, of course, an utterly unsurprising eventuality, but while it remained a prospect in view it monopolized my attention and anxiety in much the same way a debtor might invest too much hope in a lottery ticket.  As I noted yesterday, I have 33 packets in circulation right now, but so long as the Ploughshares packet was still at large I fixated on it–the tree, in that respect, was much less daunting than the forest.  Kids into psychodynamics call such investment of mental energy cathexis, and that attachment to the idea of publication in Ploughshares is much like a power line and a plug, a plug that now has been yanked from the socket.  The result is a little bit of cognitive disequilibrium, a sense of being temporarily unmoored despite the fact that it took me all of ten minutes to get over the disappointment.  That disconnected energy doesn’t necessarily return to the sender, alas–it looks for a new outlet to plug into.  Since I know it’s a bad habit, one I’m trying to overcome, I’m attempting to redirect that juice towards projects in the offing, not prospects over which I have no control.  It’s a challenge, however, especially when my fiction and verse remain in the hands of those I hope will approve.  Wresting the serpentine power line away from such convenient outlets requires a determined effort, an exertion complicated by the desultory desire to plug in to other equally tantalizing, equally futile objects.

To wit:  the notice that our Student Opinion Survey (SOS) scores were available arrived at 8:08 AM, and despite the fact that my own scores have not yet been updated, I have checked back three times in the intervening 90 minutes.  Last week I attended a meeting that clarified the uses of SOS scores in personnel decisions, and I also received some mixed reviews on Ratemyprofessors.com, which may or may not be indicative of broader patterns of sentiment.  I tried new things in the classroom this semester, and I am of course terribly curious to see what my students thought.  Even though I know that the scores were logged weeks ago, and even though I know those scores cannot adequately represent the time, energy, and effort I devoted to preparation this spring, I’m still deeply invested in those outcomes.  My cathectic plug is flickering its prongs at that outlet, pretty much oblivious to my efforts to reel in the cord.

Perhaps a couple days away from home will help me shake the budding fixation, though the mindless cleaning and sorting I’ve got planned for the day isn’t likely to do me any favors.  Without something equally compelling to distract it, the brain tends to resort to those old, familar places.  It doesn’t take long for the grooves of obsession to wear deep and smooth.

Ah, the magic that is finals week.  Shellshocked students shambling from classroom to classroom, barely able to manage a sweatsuit and bedhead ensemble, running around campus brandishing flash drives like Olympians.  How I envy them.

Me, I’m tweaking my mental machinery, getting ready to switch gears once the semester ends.  I’ll be teaching the second half of the British literature survey during the first summer session, which should be pretty therapeutic, but by mid-June I’ll be knee-deep in the great summery nothing.  This will be a good thing and a bad thing, as always.

The end of the semester tends to favor autonomic response.  I’ve become quite good at handling all the fastballs, curveballs, and knuckleballs that come my way, if only because I consistently and mechanically default to rule and precedent, even the ones I’ve made up myself.  To earn five points on the semester, for example, I asked students who did not plan to revise their final essays to send me an e-mail informing me of that fact.  Nothing too schmancy or demanding about it–just a bit of documentation for me to file away.  A few did not, however, so I deducted the points.  Once upon a time I agonized about such procedures, but that’s no longer true.  I simply view the decision as a promise kept.

I become sharper and more efficient as the end draws near, less inclined to muddy the waters, less inclined to dwell over any business but the business of today.  It’s like Rent, but less pretentiously bohemian.

When it comes to my writing, however, I enjoy a good mess:  the more orderly the performance of my normative forebrain, the more chaotic my unmonitored thought becomes.  I’ve been plotting a short story that I plan to submit to the Potter’s Field 3 horror anthology, for instance, but while I’ve been hammering out that deliberate script I’ve left the rest of my gray matter unattended.  As you might expect, it’s been filling the shopping cart of my mind with boxes of Count Chocula, Lunchables, and Peek Freans–anything colorful and enticing it can reach.  Those who know me well (a population I’m making up for the sake of illustration, and to save me from taking the shopping cart figure any further) know that I normally keep a notepad or two handy to jot down story prompts and lines of poetry that occur to me.  At present, however, my apartment looks like I’m auditioning for the sequel to The Number 23, give or take the saxophone.  I expect Virginia Madsen to show up any second.  I hope she notices how I’ve color-schemed my post-it notes; I put a lot of work into that.

The trick, of course, is turning the corner that will take me from imaginative generativity to careful craftsmanship, from Rampant Avenue to Persnickety Place.  Part of the reason I write is that it’s an integrative, immersive process–it requires the best of all my faculties, and it involves a concerted effort steeped in immediacy.  I can’t get away with tabling anything; I have to give myself entirely over to the act.  For a personality like mine that’s not always easy, and the writing I produce when I pull this trick off sometimes seems a little alien to me.  My orderly forebrain always has some clean-up work to do after the fact, but there’s a special satisfaction that comes with a spattered smock and arms inked to the elbows.

In the short term, I have a few days of high functionality to look forward to.  I have an e-mail in my box this morning in which a student begins by noting that my summer course is technically an on-campus offering, and I already know just how to respond.  While I’m typing that formal letter I fully expect an undercurrent of immoderate thought, a glut of ideas and impressions that will call for frantic jottings after the fact.

If I manage to get them all down, the summery nothing won’t seem quite so daunting as it does right now.