Well, awake at least.  Check back with me later.

I’m already sugared and caffeinated, so you would think I might feel somewhat friskier.  About this time each year, however, the threshold of functional friskiness becomes harder to achieve.  Hundreds of exams and essays will do that.

The seriocomic aspect of my own end-o’-semester travails is that I quite like grading essays; I have never finished a batch of essays without learning something new.  Could I live without another “In this essay I will attempt to demonstrate that Beowulf is something like a hero” exercise?  You betcha.  For the most part, however, witnessing a fresh engagement with a text, wherever it might lead, is always interesting.

That being said, I have my limits.  At the end of each semester I think most profs reach a point of saturation and then supersaturation; I can only read so many essays in a row before my tolerance begins to diminish.  I might ambitiously grade ten, take a break, grade eight more, fix a meal, then grade six more.  That will get me through half a survey class.  The act of actual grading, however, only comes after my third reading (I use one reading to screen for outliers who approached the assignment in an unorthodox way, a second reading for appraising qualitative variations on similar themes), so you can probably imagine why I’m tapped out.  By the time I get down to blogging or other forms of recreation, I’m generally ready to be frivolous.

A kindly well-wisher has urged me to take my virtual presence somewhat more seriously, and at heart I agree with her.  When it comes time to approach the blog with due sobriety, however, I find myself drawing up short.  On any given day I am likely to a) offer carefully measured counsel on a few dozen student essays, b) agonize over a verb, adjective, allusion, or metrical hiccup in a poem, c) rearrange a sentence in a story a half dozen times to maximize its impact, d) hammer out the logic of an article or proposal with painstaking care, or e) compose e-mails that smack of para-legalese as I remind a student why I cannot accept a late exam or set out some kind of phrasally dense committee initiative.  Accordingly, when it comes time to blog every couple days I am seldom inclined to approach the mode with the gravity it probably deserves.  I read and write almost constantly, and even I deserve to blow off steam once in awhile.

In my case, said ventilation is something of a challenge.  I find research, teaching, and writing satisfying, if not pleasurable; I love my work, and when I’m in work mode, it engrosses me.  My primary avocation, as you may have guessed, is writing verse; my secondary diversion is writing fiction (and I rank them first and second here only to pander to my blog audience; it’s quite frankly a dead heat).  When I’m not chipping away at some writing project, I read for pleasure.  My genuine “recreation,” then, consists of letting my brain cool down by drooling in front of the teevee.

Do I have spare time?  Oodles, technically, but only because I’m a time-management ninja and can create hours out of the aether whenever I want.  When it comes to filling said time, however, one might rightly surmise that I lack imagination.   My default mode involves a fairly small constellation of activities, all of which directly or conceivably constitute work.

As we sidle toward semester’s end, I’m accordingly trying to unwind some of those bindings.  It’s a tricksy endeavor, if only because I don’t experience work as inhibition, as some obligation that prevents me from doing the things I really want to be doing.  I reckon it’s one of those tell-the-dancer-from-the-dance matters, one I’m not willing to fight.

O’er the break, however, I’ll see what I can do about realizing some of this “recreation” stuff.  If that leads to more sober, focused bloggification, so be it.

Today’s opening observation:  if you are going to sport the “No, I’m not on steroids…but thanks for asking!” t-shirt, you really ought to be a) freakishly ginormous, so much so that you blot out smaller suns, or b) comedically gangly.  If you’re just an average athletic feller, folks will think you’re a tad delusional.  Just FYI.

This morning strikes me as unusually cruel.  It’s gorgeous weather for sleeping, yet my obligations du jour include only low-wattage exercises in course preparation and bookkeeping that should take up the better part of the day.  Yesterday I was unusually industrious, plugging away at projects from about 9-6:00, and I feel as though I ought to be rewarded in some mattress-related fashion.  Alas, ’tis not to be.  And my reward for another day of diligence?  A set of exams to grade this evening.  I have no one but the world to blame.

In festive news, however, tomorrow we round the corner and start talking Wordsworth, which is like cognitive candy for me.  I got to sample a bit of Wordsworth this summer in a survey course, and I found myself hankering for more.  As usual, a bit of ebb and flow was involved:  my active appetite for Wordsworth was counterbalanced by a noticeable reduction in enthusiasm for Blake.  The latter William is still great fun, but I think some of the counter-hegemonic shine has worn off for me since first I read him.  We will call this the Tintern Abbey Effect.

The none-too-surprising news of the day is that I must find more time to write.  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out where the time has gone/is going, and I realized that part of the reason the hours seem to be slipping through my fingers nowadays is that, during my more productive patches of creative activity, I have skipped my trips to the gym.  I’m not willing to make that sacrifice right now (although a few sub-zero mornings might change my mind), so I’ve got to make the magic happen some other way.  In transparently related news I’ve been sleeping poorly for the past week or three, which doesn’t make the carving of the day any easier.  The stress I’m feeling is qualitatively different, to be sure, but I need to find a workaround in short order if I’m to meet the goals I set for myself this semester.

Until I find a fix, I’m afraid you’ll be subjected to more self-absorbed posts like this.

I have about 614 items on today’s agenda to attempt.  According to overnight polling, most Americans believe I’m going to fail spectacularly but look confident while doing so.

No, I’m not going to talk about politics or the VP debate.  Any scrum in which the bar is set so low–one debater just had to avoid looking like Caribou Barbie (an epithet too zesty to resist), the other a blue (state) meanie–isn’t worth dissecting.  I like achievable dreams as much as the next guy, but really.

Speaking of which, today I have an enviable yet indicative problem:  I’ve got the option to teach CMU’s “Studies in Authors” course in the spring, which is, by all rational reckonings of the matter, nifty.  However, I must decide in fairly short order which author or authors I would want to cover (the master syllabus indicates I can deal with up to three), and I’m at a loss.  While I would enjoy teaching an old skool triumvirate straight outta the 18th century–maybe Defoe, Richardson, Fielding; maybe Richardson, Fielding, Austen–I think most students would see the 1500-page unabridged Clarissa and sprint for the nearest emergency exit.  I could pander to popular tastes (read:  my own) and teach a Poe, Lovecraft, King sequence, but the fellow I’m stepping in for has a Poe course already scripted that he’d like to teach somewhere down the road.  By the same token, in recent years folks have already covered some territories I could potentially dabble in, so the field is narrower still.  Do I commit to the course and think up a battery after the fact?   Do I group together a few popular novelists (mebbe Austen-Radcliffe-Bronte)?  Do I dig in seriously to the work of a poet laureate or three?  Or do I simply keep my film and literature seminar, a class I’ve taught in the past and much of which is already scripted?  If you have any suggestions, please feel welcome to share.  I will spend much of my day asking WWFND?

This tells me, alas, that I am experiencing stress on some subliminal level, although technically I must suppose it’s not subliminal since I’m actually talking about it.  Being able to make that distinction is itself pretty stressful.  I cannot win this game.

Is the labor strife stressful?  You betcha.  Even though the faculty’s crisis team has managed matters expertly, and even though the faculty seems to have the student body and the Michigan Education Association behind it, I’m none too keen on that species of suspense.  The point of no return is about two weeks away, and it doesn’t look like either side is much inclined to tap the brakes.

Is work otherwise stressful?  Kindasorta.  Because we lost several faculty members last year, most of us have had to pick up a little slack in one area or another.  I’ve doubled up on my committee work, for example, and I find it more time-consuming than it needs to be.  The problems I’ve encountered are all eminently human problems:  I’ve asked members of one committee for feedback regarding a simple initiative and received none; I’ve written several resource people and waited days or weeks for their replies; I’ve asked faculty members to furnish information for our renovated website and only 20 of 60 have replied; I sent out a circular to folks on another committee and find myself on the verge of being installed as its chair.  I know full well that these matters are par for the course and that any frustration I experience is of my own manufacture.  Nevertheless, I’m going to spend a boatload of time this afternoon writing personal requests for website information and resenting the fact that I need to.   

Is writing stressful?  Just a little, which is troubling because it’s my primary (read: only) source of stress relief.  Predictably, time management issues are involved:  today I’ll grade exams and do some needful reading for next week, but the time I would normally allot to writing will be invested in drudgery instead.  Worse still, I already know it won’t get better.  My major time commitment for the semester, work on a search committee for a new Early Modern Literature specialist, will begin in good earnest in a week or two–that is, of course, assuming I’m not walking picket lines around that time.  And any time I have to write the word “time” six times in a single paragraph (no, “times” doesn’t count) I know that leisure will be at a premium.  My plans to get six stories written this semester is beginning to look downright pollyannatastic.

The key to defeating stress, I know, is conceding that there’s not much I can do about these things.  If I were actually good at managing expectations, however, I would not have chosen a profession in which most of my work depends entirely on my own standards.

Yes, I realize full well that I’ve chosen a title that will somehow ensnare definition hunters despite the fact there are most assuredly millions of “due diligence” sites on the web.  Here’s to hoping Wikipedia stems the flow.

Today, alas, I find myself caught in a double trudge:  I am slogging through some projects for the semester, and I am also having second (and third, and fourth) thoughts about an impending visit to the doctor.  Color me unenthused.

The good news is that the schoolwork promises to be pleasant enough, though I am little inclined to do it at the moment.  I’m putting together a new course on Romantic poetry and prose, and there is far, far too much for me to choose from in terms of the reading list.  I’ve got the basic framework of the course down, including some snazzy new assignments that should give students quite a few options for self-determination, but I do not look forward to making cuts to the course calendar for the sake of time and accessibility (since students will be choosing to work on some authors and texts sight unseen).  I also have more than a week to complete it, which is causing me to drag my feet all the more.  This will not be the most action-packed day in recorded Wandlessian history.

On Tuesday I’ll head down to Alma, a mysterious city to the south, to meet with a surgeon for a consultation.  In abstract terms, if the initial diagnosis is right, I reckon I ought to be happy–a few hundred horrible things could be wrong with me, and I may have escaped with one of the easiest to remedy.  The catch, however, is that my research on the subject suggests that I may not even require surgery…but I know darned well the surgeon will recommend it.  It’s kinda hard to get a clean reading on the situation when the procedure in question is both corrective and preventive; even if I don’t actually need it, it wouldn’t hurt for him to do it.  My health has steadily improved since I reported the initial occurrence, and even an aggravating circumstance (which I’ve figured out and can readily avoid) didn’t lead to another round of the annoying symptoms.  I accordingly believe that mine is a manageable condition, though I’m obviously not in the best position to judge.  My decision-making is complicated by the knowledge that initial recovery will lay me up for a week and I won’t be able to exercise for a month or two.  These are not cheering eventualities, especially since postponement of the surgery (which is likely, given current conditions) probably means that I’ll spend the majority of Christmas break laid up.  Add to that bodies of research that indicate a wait-and-see outlook is perfectly acceptable–and that recurrence is still possible even after surgery–and you’ll probably see I’ve scratched a gully in my noggin by the end of the month.  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, after all.

The good (and let’s face it, surprising) news is that this latest instance of the RHRR (rabbit-hole research response) has not been nearly as debilitating as this post might make it seem.  I’m only preoccupied with thoughts of surgery at the moment because I received the paperwork I’ll need to fill out for the surgeon a short while ago; otherwise I’ve been functioning quite normally.  Well, normally for me.  Because of my habits of mind, I’m inclined to research–wrapping my head around a subject helps me understand and handle it–but I haven’t been fretting non-stop.  I actually finished a poem this morning, which required some rabbit-hole action of its own (and allowed me to dodge the syllabus issue rather handily).  With this, as with all things, the only thing I can really do is concede to the forces beyond my control.  I know full well, for example, that those horrible eventualities are not entirely off the table, and I also know that I might come home from Alma with a clean(ish) bill of health and no surgery on the horizon.  I would be foolish to forego the visit, but I would be wise to accept that there’s no knowing what might come after.  I’m sure I’ll have some anxious pangs when I’m at the office, but right now I’m relatively comfortable with circumstances as they stand.

Today the navel-gazery is pretty much literal.  Mine is a fascinating bellybutton.

Something appears to be wrong with my tummy, which in itself is not very interesting.  Odds are I’m dealing with a deep muscle pull, but all sorts of horrible things could be going on.  Horrible things go on in the tummy, which makes diagnosis an adventure.  Maybe my intestines are protruding through my abdominal wall; maybe my aorta has burst.  These things happen in the tummy, which can be the site of many horrible things.

What I find fascinating today, however, is that perceptual acuity that tends to accompany illness and disorder.  Whenever I get sick or feel unwell, I take inventory:  have I experienced the symptoms in question before?  in this combination?  to this degree?  If the answers are affirmative, such questions can allay anxieties.  When the responses are less certain, however, selective attention kicks in.  I could probably chronicle for you every sensation that tickled my torso today in minute detail:  the spasm that twitched through my lower back when I twisted out of bed, the rumble in my tummy when I finished up in the gym before eating breakfast, the number and strength of the vague throbbings that accompany the illness or injury that currently concerns me.  I’m dialed in to those sensations today, as I was yesterday and the day before.  I try to be a reasonable man when it comes to such matters, and nothing suggests that I am in desperate need of medical care.  My penchant for erring on the side of caution, however, compels me to keep tabs on my tummy, if only so I’ll have something to tell the EMTs when they wheel me to the hospital.

In good sooth, I do not enjoy this; I would make a pretty poor hypochondriac.  What really galls me, however, is that I normally cannot achieve this kind of acuity in my everyday outward observations.  Despite my habitual self-absorption, I recognize that most of the really interesting stuff goes on in the world outside.  People and objects fascinate me, and when I write I generally begin with a vivid image in my head, one fleshed out in as much detail as I can manage.  At the gym, for example, there are two exceedingly bendy women who do all sorts of exotic exercises I do not fully understand.  I try to watch them without being terribly intrusive or creepy, though I must admit that my interest in them as persons is limited.  I appreciate the complexity of their ritual movements–one’s uncanny ability to balance on the bosu ball, the other’s extensive stretching regimen (which seemingly cannot relieve a persistent crick in her neck)–and while I’m sure they’re both lovely people, the image is what freights my imagination and invites me to write.  Tellingly, my idea of their faces is not very precise, though I could probably identify one by the rondure of her shoulders and the other by the width of her hamstrings at the point of insertion.  Those images are sharp.  That depth of detail, however, is nothing compared to today’s fixation on my own addled abdomen.  It is only when my mind is dialed in to this compulsive attentiveness that I realize how shallow my perceptions generally are.

I’m currently working on something like a portrait poem, one that attempts to use the kind of information I customarily cull to build a bridge from observation to understanding.  With every line I write, however, I cannot help but feel I’m falling short of the image–not just its obvious contours, but its shadows, its depths, its textures.  I don’t even want to think about the other sensory registers; the visual cues alone seem unbelievably shallow.  I think I can find a way to pay homage to my subject, after a fashion, but today I’m keenly aware of what that portrait must be missing. 

I’m philosophical enough to believe that the attempt itself is worthwhile, that if I were to find some reason to write about the women from the gym (for example), I could do so creditably, in a way that does them honor.  At times, however, I feel less like a painter than a caricature artist, hoping that a few prominent contours will be enough to suggest all that I fall short of.

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.

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.

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.

I am, by all accounts, a terrible person.  My most recent insidious activity has involved irresponsibly larding my posts with tantalizing keywords, none of which will lead the searcher to the thing he seeks.  I entangled a surfer questing for Keats yesterday, and over the weekend another looking for pictures of Diane Lane (I will not explain what kind of pictures per the keywords suggested; suffice it to say that screencaps from Must Love Dogs were not the objects sought).  Today, of course, I’m trolling for folks with a hankering for Heaney’s “Postscript.”  They totally have it coming.

Ah, I wish I were so concerted in my iniquity, but such bait-and-switchery is purely incidental, featuring roughly the same level of premeditation required for me to turn a bushel of white t-shirts pink by washing them with the maroon sweatshirt I’ve worn and washed a half dozen times already.  My days just tend to shake out like that, and a little dose of poetry cheers me up.  Life has been trending downward lately, at least when it comes to the material matters of my days and ways.  While I wake up excited to go to the gym and eager to teach in the afternoon, I’ve been spending more time brooding than usual, especially during the evening hours.  I’m long overdue for a good brood, to be sure, and I’ve certainly got time for a lazy wallow in the coming weeks, but I mislike these little episodes of mine when I cannot pinpoint the source or motive.  Then I wind up mucking around in my mind, which is what you get today.

The likeliest candidates for this vague malaise are the ol’ mind-forg’d manacles, which in this case take the form of the self-discipline I’m attempting to enforce as I try to achieve my summer session goals.  Folks who know me well might be kind enough to say that I get a little bit inflexible when I have an object in view, but even recognizing the tendency seldom liberates me from it.  I’ve got the fiction wheels turning, and I’m doubly motivated to polish that one last story off:  it would set the pace for the summer, and it would meet a real deadline that’s drawing nigh(ish).  Sticking to that plan, however, involves quashing the impulse to return to verse a bit sooner than anticipated.  It also involves stomping down the dim awareness that I might actually need a vacation of some kind.  It has, after all, been awhile.

To pilfer Heaney’s metaphor, however, I’m beginning to suspect that what I really need is to devote myself to a long, concerted effort.  Because I’ve been dividing my energies among a variety of projects, I haven’t been able to muster the kind of force needed to really move me/make me move.  I don’t know if I can technically catch my own heart off guard–it keeps close track of me and reads my blog daily–but I think I need a little single-minded focus on a major project to blow it open.  I want to see what I can achieve if I point all my energies in one direction for a change.  That’s the only idea that gets me riled up at the moment.

In any case, that’s something I’ll have the chance to dwell on for the next few days as class wraps up.  If I’m still feeling broody then, I might commission a ship and go after a white whale.

Today’s post could go many ways.  Let us consider the options.

At first I planned to gloat about my radiant awesome, since I currently am among the select few humans with a copy of Emma Bolden’s The Mariner’s Wife.  Empirically speaking, that makes me just slightly cooler than you are.  Nothing personal.  You can of course remedy this imbalance by visiting here and securing your own copy.  Until you do, however, I’m probably just going to pretend that I don’t know you. 

Then, alas, I spent this morning re-enacting scenes from Must Love Dogs with the butcher at my local grocery store.  You see, they now sell schnitzy angus burgers mixed or rubbed with stuff (portobello and gouda, chili and garlic, and the like), and they have a special section of single servings set aside for tragic bachelors like me.  I kept waiting for Diane Lane to come up, throw a big bag of kibble in my wagon, and plant a big smooch on me, but she never did.  I s’pose that’s because I didn’t have a wagon.  I don’t have a dog, either.  Next time I’ll plan ahead.

It occurred to me, however, that I should probably talk about poetry, as I am currently entering a phase of some urgency.  By the time you read this, in fact, chances are good that my head will have popped.  I am, you see, ripe for writing.

While I promised myself that I would work exclusively on fiction until the end of the summer session, I don’t know that I can hold out two weeks longer.  In theory I have at least two stories left to write–one a submission for an anthology, one for a special Halloween issue–and while I won’t finish both in time, I should be able to manage a polished draft of one.  The writing process has slowed, however, because my mind is clamoring with lines and ideas for the volume that is rapidly crystallizing therein. 

I’ve been reading The Mariner’s Wife and John Hollander’s Powers of Thirteen to satiate the impulse, but I’m still hankering to return to verse in a hurry.  I remember at one point in time I used to boast about my ability to multitask, to write all kinds of work simultaneously, but during the past year I’ve developed a kind of immersive sensibility that makes those daily shifts problematic.  Writing poetry in particular has become a one-way ticket, as I compulsively reread every line with every word or phrase I add to recapture the requisite rhythm and refine the movements already in motion.  Working through a short story/prose poem recently taught me that applying the same technique to fiction can be excruciating and arduous.  In sum I probably devote the same amount of attention and effort to a story, but I’m at my best when I can get the gist of the narrative down straight away and then flesh it out over a series of elaborative drafts.  I’d hate to see what would happen if I turned the painstaking approach toward my annual report or my upcoming article.  I would finish somewhere around Christmas 2010.

At bottom, of course, I’m terribly happy to feel as though I’ve got new things to say and the wherewithal to say them.  I just hope I can hold the impulse at bay long enough to keep that promise I made to myself when I felt like I was seeing things more clearly than usual.