Will today’s post be a paean to William Carlos Williams?  No, it will not be a paean to William Carlos Williams.  Deception helps my bide my time when I’m slouching on my Throne of Lies.

Today I’m tinkering with a new schedule, one which I hope will get the best writing out of me.  Said writing, however, does not necessarily include the blog(s), which I will tackle only once I’ve lost my morning momentum.  I’m much inclined to nap right now, but I’m forcing myself to jot down some thoughts.  See?  I can be quite thematic when I try.

The concept of the use of force also applies more generally to rhetoric, which is today’s minor fixation.  Michigan has recently been witness to a spate of political ads by Obama detractors, and to a man, woman, and lobbyist, they seem really, really obsessed with shoehorning in the opportunity to say “change we can believe in” (referring to McCain) or “can’t believe in” (referring to Obama) in some form or fashion.  This process strikes me as something akin to the promos used to shill cell phones to humans as the perfect Valentine’s Day/Mother’s Day/Arbor Day gift:  I suppose the writers should be commended for attempting to create the occasion, but even the most casual viewer can judge those gymnastics with nominal effort.  They could at least mix in an animated ocelot or something shiny to distract us.  Maybe just a shiny ocelot.

These remarks, however, are just a prelude to the poetic fixation du jour.  Call them post padding if you like; I will not say you are right, nor will I say you are wrong.

Every once in awhile I cross what seems like a significant threshold of technical development.  In addition to the quantum leap I must credit to the editor who told me my work was unreadable (there was a time in my life, alas, when I eschewed articles, prepositions, and conjunctions), I’ve also made a few recognizable strides of my own accord.  I have identified issues in person, line length, form, and other areas, and each recognition has yielded a minor revolution in my work.  What I’ve isolated in the past few days is the expression of a less conspicuous but more pernicious tendency:  I now can tell when I’m forcing the issue, trying to make a poem happen.

I make no claims to sprezzatura, but there are days when I make relatively steady progress.  I creep forward line by line, and occasionally I perceive unexpected connections between them that cause me to cruise through a stanza or two.  Sometimes, however–and this is especially true when I’m starting a new piece or building on a thematic impulse rather than an image–I simply commit pixels to the page whether they are (or I am) ready or not.  I confess that some of my early verse consists of nothing but these forced lines, which is why I’ve gone back and cannibalized those files rather than trying to recollect the original motive of the poem.  I might generate a few useful phrases along the way, but the attempt to leverage the language into some sensible vessel leaves the whole hopelessly compromised.

This is something like a negative gain, of course, at least insofar as I left today’s work behind after three satisfying lines and now find myself dwelling on the place where I left off, trying out new combinations in my head even as I type this sentence.  But I suspect that giving in to this awareness and turning to other work rather than persisting for the sake of misguided diligence is likely to yield better work in the long run.  Concession, in that sense, is the better part of valor.

I finished off my kwazy prose poem qua short story, so let’s see if I can’t be a little more plainspoken and succinct today.  I’m blogging on borrowed time, so my apologies in advance for typos, incoherence, and oblique critiques of Sarah Jessica Parker.

As a terrible starting point, a confession:  I watched an episode of the TMZ teevee show yesterday.  In my defense, I had just put the story to bed and was waiting for Bones to come on, but I could have just as easily watched Scrubs or The Family Guy.  Mea culpa, my friends, mea culpa. 

The idea of TMZ is tragic on any number of levels, but what really struck me about the tone and tenor of the show was the smug superiority of all those involved.  The behind-the-scenes shots, in which the staffers swap smirks as they describe their pathetic celebrity victims, is unironic human judgment at its ugliest.  There’s a sort of eerie disconnection:  these peeps will take the time to goad someone as outdated as Scary Spice (with innocent, “just-doing-my-job” questions, like asking her if Eddie Murphy has floated her money for child support) and then promptly yuck it up in the studio, mocking the somehow contemptible personalities they apparently found interesting enough to victimize in the first place.  That is an order of sublimated self-loathing I can’t quite wrap my head around.

Even so, that kind of disjunctive judgment can be tough to shake off.  We’re all entitled to our galvanic twitches of taste, even when our decisions involve the same kind of snarky, preemptive contempt.  I could launch into a litany of my own hasty cultural judgments, but I think the niftier trick is developing the ability to make unbiased, informed assessments of those objects that offend our aesthetics after that synapse has fired.  It took me about three minutes to realize I despised Seinfeld and Sex and the City, for example, but that kind of rudimentary formation says more about me than the shows themselves.  Since then I’ve seen enough of each production to develop a better sense of why I don’t enjoy those performances, but those refined, revised opinions are only expansions of the original.  Stepping back to give the object in question a genuinely fresh assessment is another function altogether, and it’s much more difficult to do.

Though it’s slow going, that’s the approach I’m trying to take with my own reading habits.  When I visit the library to sample poetry I usually engage in speed-leafing:  I’ll flip through a few pages of a volume and decide if I want to take it home.  I can determine pretty quickly if the verse is my kinda stuff, though I realize such snap judgments can be ultimately stultifying.  I might reject a book out of hand because I read a few bland lines on a theme that doesn’t immediately interest me, but that’s roughly equivalent to cruising by an island because I don’t like the dock.  I’m compelling myself to give every book a longer look, though my habits draw me to old, familiar haunts.  I won’t be waxing avant garde anytime soon, but I want to give each text a fair shake, to see how it works on its own terms.

Today, however, I get a little Keats.  That’s a haunt worth having. 

If I came across Crunching Crisis in the cereal aisle I would buy two boxes.  Today, however, the seemingly delicious term represents an especially dire kind of math.

First, some sobering news for the poets.  Given the nature of my professional obligations, I can only manage a half-time commitment to verse, a half-time commitment to fiction, a half-time commitment to scholarship, and a half-time commitment to teaching, and a half-time commitment to university service.  (I told you the math would be dire.)  I managed only six sets of simultaneous submissions this academic year, which involved many 9×12 envelopes, several toner cartridges, a prodigious quantity of Southworth Premium Weight Business Paper, and enough postage that two of the tellers at the local P.O. know me by name.  (They call me Eudora.)  Nevertheless, as I gathered up those receipts related to my professional development this year (even after discarding a few of uncertain relevance), I realized I spent $340.88 sending my work out into the world. 

Was it worth it?  Goodness, yes.  That would be true had I only homed a single poem.  From my part-time perspective, however, I can’t even begin to imagine the plight of the pros, whose investment in cash, time, energy, ink, and imagination must exceed the GNP of small island nations. 

Today, alas, rather than praising these people, I must taunt them with the nature of my “crisis”:  I have more professional development money to spend than ways left to spend it.  Even after knocking off that $340.88, even after knocking off the $119.62 I spent on DVDs for class, and even after knocking off the odds and ends of professional memberships, subscriptions, and the like, I still have a daunting amount of money left to spend, money that will vanish into the aether if I don’t spend it. 

This, I fear, may be the worst cry for help ever.

Because I did not travel this year my professional development funds covered my entire wish list of 18th-century and theory texts; I added the latest editions of the Directory of Poetry Publishers, Poet’s Market, and Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market to my tab…and I’m still deeply in the black.  I may be approaching the idea of “professional development” a little rigorously, but a lifetime of frugality prevents me from adopting a shopping spree mentality.  Come what may, however, I will not let the aether win without a good scrum. 

Were you in my giant pontoon shoes, what indispensable resources would you advise a writer to buy?

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.

Today I shall laze.  Were I more ambitious, I would attempt to lase, which would turn this post into an homage to Real Genius.  Alas, I lack the gumption.

Wednesday the end of the semester begins in good earnest:  I will collect about 75 essays, conference with my intermediate composition students, and start assembling final exams.  Anything I accomplish today will accordingly be icing on the cake, since the script for the last seminar sessions has already been written, albeit in marzipan.

I have a single Saturday goal:  to find a birthday present for the magnificent Kristin.  Today marks the one-month anniversary of her birthday, and thus the grace period for belated gifteration will come to an end in accordance with Bald Man Law.  I have been shopping intermittently since February, but I have found nothing suitably scintillating.  I hate being so lame, but I am even more averse to compromising my standards of gifteration.  Quandary, thy name is quandary. 

As you can probably tell, this is a filler post in anticipation of the hiatus that will surely attend my descent into the grading bunker.  A few rejections trickled in this week (most from September submissions, happily, which should allow me to close that chapter pretty soon), and I revised and sent out a new story, but otherwise my time has been devoted to prepping students for finals and final essays. 

As it turns out, it’s tough to work on a poetry blog when I’m concentrating on my teaching, a critical project, and short fiction.  Even so, soldier on I shall; in the absence of inspiration, diligence will often do.