Right now, for reasons I do not care to question, it is 46 degrees in Central Michigan.  I have accordingly turned off my heat, thrown open my windows, and read “In Just-” to round out the trifecta.  That makes for a respectable Saturday morning.

The day looks fairly promising altogether, truth be told.  I’ve nearly finished grading my first batch of essays for the semester, and the writing is mighty fine so far.  I’ve also got an essay on tap that I’ve looked forward to reading, one on a topic near and dear to my heart.  I’m terribly curious to see how the subject was treated, and the same holds true for the student-led class discussions we’ll kick off in the coming week.  On Monday we’ll dip into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my survey of British literature, and the week’s work in my Stephen King seminar involves both ethical questions (the breadbox in my wheelhouse) and a breather day as we slide from Night Shift into Different Seasons.  After that we’ve got Cycle of the Werewolf, and after that, spring break.  This semester is blazing by.

It might just be the springtime friskiness talking, but I’m also preparing for a major sea change in my writing life.  Although I’ll undoubtedly continue my obsessive habit of jotting down short story ideas on the 418 yellow pads that litter my office and my apartment, the coming year will properly be devoted to verse and scholarship.  I’ve got one long-gestating article (the inescapable Charlotte Smith piece) I’ll need to finish off, and I’ve also been encouraged to submit to a new collection–encouragement that happened to coincide with the rediscovery of some perfectly suitable notes on Defoe.  Those two pieces and some summer work with peeps in CMU’s Honors and McNair Scholars programs should fill up my daylight hours pretty well, daily trips to the gym notwithstanding. 

All carnival-quality antics aside, my nights will be devoted to finishing the manuscript of a full-blown poetry collection.  To turn the existential screws I plan to apply for a summer grant that will cover the costs of production and contest submission, and in a self-reflexive way my readiness to do so would seem to confirm my readiness to round out the collection itself.  I likes my reasoning like I likes my cookies:  soft and vaguely circular.

And with that, I’m off.  I have a longer post on the writing life a-brewing in my skull, but I’ll save it for a more wintry day.

Those of you who know me well may need to sit down and brace yourselves for the news I am about to relate:  I, William H. Wandless, am using my oven.  I should probably add “for baking,” since one never knows what mischief I’ll get into if left unattended.

I know full well that most humans use their ovens with some regularity.  I, however, am not most humans.  At least one meal per day comes from my blender, and the other 3-4 meals are likely to originate from my microwave or my refrigerator with no intervening cookery.  I am neither proud nor ashamed of my culinary habits, although I realize that the gourmets of my acquaintance shudder at my means of subsistence.  Eating, like many matters in my wiggedy world, is conducted with efficiency, not style.

For a variety of reasons, however, I am trying to eat fresher foods with greater regularity, to turn over some new leaves and eat them.  So right now I am cooking lemon butter tilapia and will add a salad of baby romaine and grape tomatoes with raspberry vinaigrette on the side.  It’s not haute cuisine, to be sure, but it’s more haute than usual.

For the sake of synergy I’m trying a comparable experiment with my verse, making a little extra time for preliminary meandering and working to preserve the original language that occurs to me as much as possible.  If it comes to me fresh and ready I look upon it with some suspicion, and I’m far more comfortable smoothing out iambs and blending impressions and memories than working with raw ingredients.   Even so, the first couple of experiments I’ve conducted strike me as promising:  the form seems more organic (as a seventeen-line quasi-sonnet would seem to suggest), and the process of composition–of fitting that original language into a network of rhythms and meanings–has been challenging and rewarding.  I’ve filed away the new material, and when I look at it in a week or three I hope I’ll have a better sense of the virtues of what I’ve cooked up.

For many folks cooking becomes therapeutic, but I’m too teleological to go quite that far.  I’m still more concerned with the product than the process, but if I can refine the process in a way that is healthy for me and opens up a new array of tastes and flavors, I reckon I’d be a fool not to try.

Quietly, while no one was looking, I’ve slipped back into poetry mode.  Shutter your windows and lock up your ampersands; everything that I can reach belongs to me.

A bit of a polyglottal thought today, as I was originally going to make a post o’er at my genre blog; Myspace is suffering from one of it’s intermittent half-hacks this morning, however, so I thought I’d make a premature attempt to tackle one of my Great Themes.  Then I got some fruit juice in my system and thought better of it.  In its place, some jotted thoughts on reading.

First, the perils of the Wiki.  I know many folks consult the English job search wiki, and it is without question a formidable resource in the arsenal of the job seeker.  I only became apprised of its location about three weeks ago myself, however, and I’m glad that I’m a latecomer to the game.  Even as a sideline reader I find myself unduly fascinated–not only by the maddening vagaries of the academic job market but also by the collective sensibilities of the job seekers.  Were I to return to the search, I don’t know that I could responsibly manage the impulse to monitor.  The wiki seems to superadd a layer of knowing communal anxiety to what is already an excruciating process; knowledge, as it turns out, isn’t always power.  Nor is it half the battle, no matter what G.I. Joe might think.

As way leads on to way, I got to thinking about the act of critical reading more generally.  I’ve mentioned here before that I anticipate the completion of a volume of poetry in the next year or so, and I had the good fortune to sit down with our two resident poets, Jeffrey Bean and Robert Fanning, and grill them for insights.  They were kind enough to make time and offer me their sense of the process, and I go into the next stretch armed with a better sense of ends and objectives.  Because I process information oddly, however, I also hatched a new imperative that will apply to all my writing, at least for the time being.  I think I need to free my readers and release them back into the wild.

Don’t get me wrong:  I have five kindly readers, the kindliest on earth.  Part of the reason I send them my work is that it gives me pleasure to do so; the feedback has become something of a secondary effect, incidental to my attempt to do my readers proud, to let them see the finest manufactures of my mixed-up mind.   Only recently, however, have I come to recognize more fully the odd obligations that responsive reading entails.  When push comes to shove, I’d rather not subject my readers to them.

I don’t think I’ll elaborate, as it’s a newish thought I’d like to let stew in my cranial crock pot for a spell.  I will, however, own up to a neediness I need to overcome, though I think such meta-needery is part and parcel of the act of writing in isolation.  Since my writing was a private act for such a long time, the desire to be read and heard is new to me.  Given my proclivity for self-possession, I have a tough time making sense of that desire.  Writing with a sense of readerly needs is central to my practice, but my needs as an author (with all the wiggedy connotations of the term that I have yet to accept) are newish variables in my little equation.  They are something like an alien presence, and I’ve seen enough movies to know that I ought to dissect them and steal their technology.  I am nothing if not a product of the times.

In any case, I ought to be writing, so write I shall.  What I’ll do with that writing, however, is anybody’s guess.

In an effort to be at least somewhat responsible I took my car to the shop today to make sure it’s braced for a Michigan winter.  Should you ever find yourself in need of repairs in Mount Pleasant, by the bye, I heartily recommend Larry’s Automotive.  Stop in and tell Larry the bald man sentcha, then watch as he furtively presses the emergency call button beneath the counter.

Because I am terribly irresponsible, alas (I should be reading job applications; I should be rereading The Faerie Queene), I brought copies of Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew and Mark Halliday’s Selfwolf with me.  I’ll be teaching the former next semester, so I wanted to taste-test a few selections I don’t quite remember, and the latter I checked out purely to satisfy a curiosity.  Entertainment Weekly recently praised Halliday’s latest volume, so I decided I’d see what the populist buzz was about.

As it turns out, I was none too keen on Selfwolf.  There were some snazzy passages, to be sure, and there is unquestionably a distinctive voice, albeit one I am poorly tuned to.  Texturally speaking, however, there are several poems that involve a slipperiness I couldn’t quite manage.  The reading process was something akin to trying to spear a single elbow in a pot of boiling macaroni to test for tenderness:  it takes a jab or three to land the bite you’d like.  EW praised his new collection for its accessibility, and the blurb at the back of the elder volume did the same.  Nevertheless, while there were several good reads that struck responsive chords in me, quite a few (due to elliptical tactics and felt absences) never hit home.  That happened more often than not.

To leave it at that, however, would belie the value of the volume to me.  While it might not have registered a measurable impact on my aesthetic Richter scale, Selfwolf was enormously generative for me at the ideational level.  I was at the garage for about two hours, and those hours yielded two solid pages of furious scribbling on my part.  What’s more, those phrases, lines, images, and themes I jotted down in my notebook probably constitute a different kind of verse for me, a more introspective variety.  I’ve had those impulses before, but they’ve been raw and underdeveloped, along the lines of “write about that thing I did that one time.”  The notions I had while reading Halliday, however, were much more fully-formed, fully-fleshed.  I could envision beginnings, middles, and endings; I could pin down the tonal qualities I’d need to achieve; I could map the twists and reversals that would need to occur to make each concept complete.  It looks like work of a different order, an order I wouldn’t have thought to think until Halliday thought to think it.

Let it be known that I am not especially British, so today’s title is really quite clean.  No bobbies were harmed in the composition of this post.  The cindies, however, did not fare so well.

We’ve just about wrapped the second week of classes here, and all seems to be going well.  My students are terribly sharp and, better still, they consistently question and challenge me in order to make better sense of the texts we’re working with.  They keep me on my toes, and in this, a short week that found me pretty tuckered out from submission overload, I think I needed that extra electroencephalic boost.  (Fun fact:  that’s a real word, though I thought I might be making it up.  Three cheers for Greek etymologies!)  We’re in the thick of Beowulf in one class, and today, assuming we can make sense of Burke, Barbauld, and Cowper, we’ll be off and running into Big Six territory in my Romanticism class.  A jaunty time will be had by all!  Periwigs all around!

As you can probably tell, I’m in the process of exhausting my supply of enthusiasm (read:  caffeine) so I can enjoy a sedate weekend.  We had a full Faculty Association meeting last night, one that centered on the ongoing negotiations for our new contract.  It was a surprising turnout (at least to me, who attends to such matters virtually more often than bodily), with approximately half of all our tenure-trackers accounted for, a number even more surprising when one accounts for the additional 10-20% that were teaching at the time.  The meeting left my mind humming and set me to tossing and turning at bedtime, but it looks like most of the faculty is on the same page and supports the position of the bargaining team.  I’m hoping for a speedy resolution, or at least one that doesn’t meaningfully impact my teaching time this semester, but this will be my first go-round in the negotiation process so I have no idea what might happen.  So long as we stand firm on our demand for marble busts of Pallas in every office, I’ll be happy.

Today I received a contributor’s copy of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, which is chock full o’ interesting material worth a look-see.  My contribution, “Polyphemus,” appears in a version I worked out in conjunction with the editor, Kristin Zimet, and the negotiated form does some fascinating work.  I’ll have to sit down with the original later this evening for the sake of comparison; I so seldom have the chance to look at my verse with borrowed eyes.

I did a little work on revisions this morning, though I know I’m in for a struggle.  The poems in this particular batch will prove slippery for both logistical and technical reasons.  One selection I would certainly include in the batch is under consideration; it has made it through an initial editorial trim-down and may make the final cut.  The other selections, however, including my first alternate, will probably require fairly extensive reimaginings.  I’m certainly up to it–in the set I just mailed out, I successfully tangled with perhaps my most problematic poem–but my viewpoint now is quite a bit different than it was way back when.  I’m both daunted and excited to see what insights a fresh look might produce.  This is how you might learn I’m something of a nerd.

That should just about do it for the time being.   Once the semester gets underway my mind tends to gravitate toward business, but you can be sure the usual miscellaneous metaphysics will crop up whenever I get the chance to catch my breath.

I’ll keep this brief today, as I’m dog-tired and need to conserve enough energy to rant and rail against Thomas Gray à la Samuel Johnson.  I had a mighty fine long weekend (not so much festive as productive), but it squeezed a lot of juice out of the bouncing bald man.

September 1st marks the start of submission season, at least insofar as many university-affiliated presses (or presses staffed by folks with academic day jobs) open their inboxes at the end of the summer siesta, and I wanted to start the wheels turning and develop a plan for getting my work out into circulation.  The whole “develop a plan” notion, however, went the way of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey, and I instead launched into full-blown poem preparation.  I spent most of the day Friday searching for new places I might send my work and almost all of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday revising (oh! the revising), sifting, sorting, printing, and packaging.   Quite frankly I had hoped to finish scarcely a third of the work I actually completed, and as a result I’m terribly pleased with myself.  Keep your fingers crossed:  about 60% of the poetry submissions I intend to send out this fall hit the mailwaves at about noon today.  I have so much adhesive from “Forever” stamps on my fingers right now that I could probably hang from the ceiling.

Two surprises from this batch.  First, trial and error seems to have taught me ways to overcome the worst of my obsessive-compulsive tics.  If I had more energy I would detail the process, but suffice it to say that I have somehow engineered a system in which complex redundancy protects me from all the usual anxious errors:  using the wrong address or salutation, neglecting important formatting requirements, forgetting to enclose a SASE, and the like.  I still probably check and recheck my work more than most folks, but I’ve managed to turn what was once an ordeal into a process–no small feat in my book.

Moreover, I’ve discovered that music aids and abets my handling of the rudiments of submission.  This is not true of most of my endeavors, but the kind of rhythmic, ritualistic, systematic effort involved in culling and preparing my best work for a number of journals flows more smoothly with a submission soundtrack playing in the background.  All the small yet crucial details seemed a bit more intuitive and effortless for reasons I won’t analyze overmuch, but I found it enormously satisfying to seal each envelope with a higher degree of confidence than usual.  At the very least, if I made dozens of unconscionable gaffes they went down much more smoothly. 

Frankly, I’ll take my smoothlies in any flavor I can get.

One of the (many) reasons I am not an avid politico is that political inclination, for the most part, seems to involve willful benightedness:  folks pick their preferred Kool-Aid and drink it down, purposely ignoring all the other flavors that might be out there.  As reinforcement of my earlier post on WordPress “news,” one item on today’s front page links to a Champion of Truth and Justice who wrote to the Obama campaign looking for references that support the Senator’s early August tire gauge claims and then parenthetically gloats and crows throughout the form letter he received in response.  It  would just be the standard exercise in political snark…except the references in question are readily available, a number of prominent Republicans have openly advocated the same measure, and the McCain campaign has conceded the fact (although, to its credit, it tries to pretend that Obama’s entire energy position centers on proper tire inflation).  It doesn’t help that this news item is about ten days old, either.  All that matters is that our Champion is terribly pleased with himself, as he must have deliberately gone out of his way to avoid stumbling across any news items that might have run counter to his beliefs.  Then again, if he’s reading WordPress “news,” we can’t really fault him for the omission.

My grudge against the Democrats is of an older vintage, as I recall with great clarity one of MTV’s broadcasts from the DNC.  Reporters (or whatever one calls a telegenic personality who can read a cue card) milled through the crowd and asked the requisite softball political questions, and it became patently clear that each respondent had a single pet issue–any other portion of the platform was incidental so long as the candidate openly addressed the desired issue in a sufficiently vehement manner.  The environmentalists had no time for the health care enthusiasts; the health care enthusiasts had no interest in the gay rights advocates; the gay rights advocates had no stake in the environment.  These folks were not just opposed to conservative perspectives, they were also unwilling to allow that any other concerns might deserve to be prioritized above their own.  When the reporters tried to get their opinions on other liberal issues, the respondents simply batted them away or (more often) contended that the other issue was simply a corollary to their own.  They couldn’t see the merits in any other positions, no matter how narrowly defined their pet perspective might be.

I have my own political blind spots, of course, though I have a general sense of where my vision is not so clear.  When I find them, I try to keep my mouth shut until I’ve learned enough to speak responsibly (assuming I get that far; the mouth-shutting tactic usually serves me well).  It is, I admit, difficult work, because there are things in this world–even (especially) things about ourselves–that we don’t want to see, hear, or believe.  It’s certainly more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist than to accept that they’re flickering at the margins of our vision.

Oddly, poetry seems to be one of those blind spot objects for me.  I never feel I’m seeing things quite clearly enough, and the best impressions and impulses–the ones I tend to build poems around–are the products of glances and glimpses, moments when I catch some fleeting image before it darts beyond my vision.  When I was typing the Kool-Aid line above, for example, I got that gnawing feeling that I’d just missed something important, as though I’d clicked by exactly what I wanted to see when scanning through the channels.  It took me a couple of minutes of retracing my mental steps to coax the notion back into focus, and doing so bought me a critical image, one that has set off a chain reaction in my head.  In about five minutes I’m going to be sprawled on my bed, staring at the ceiling, seeing what else the image attracts.  There’s a brand new poem in it, one I didn’t have when I started typing this post.

I get the feeling sometimes when I read certain poets that they don’t have these blind spots, that all the images and impressions they need just drowse on some enormous cognitive palette, waiting for the brush to come.   When that thought gets to me, I like to imagine that such a gift makes them incapable of cooking, or balancing their checkbooks, or programming their VCRs. 

Mine, alas, is a bitter Kool-Aid.  Unsweetened lemonade, probably.

I am in the midst of compiling my annual report for CMU, which is both a treat and a trial.  While I’m never thrilled about the prospect of sifting through a mountain of paperwork to document all the mischief I’ve been up to, I do enjoy the process of looking back over my efforts and reflecting on my practice.  As it turns out, I picked the right line of work.

Unfortunately, the process of assembling the report also tends to fuel my penchant for delinquency, and lately I’ve been hunting down accounts of the creative process, writers reflecting on the motives and methods that inform and shape their writing.  I would be hard pressed to describe my own (I reckon I’ve logged about 50 posts and haven’t come close), and many poets offer really elegant–if idiosyncratic–accounts of where their words come from and what they do when they get there.  In the course of my reading, however, one unusual throughline has emerged:  poets seem to be committed Luddites more often than not.  I may or may not be surprised by this finding; I’m still rattling it around my skull.

Many writers describe in loving detail the pens they use; the kinds of paper, notebooks, folders, and even correction fluid they prefer; and the staging of the writing moment itself, including warm-up exercises, prefatory meditations, and preliminary reading.  I’m a creature of habit, to be sure, but my own process isn’t quite so ritualistic.  (I’m usually scrambling to catch up with the writing impulse, which explains why I jogged from my car to the check-in desk at the gym this morning so I could borrow a pen to record a thought before I lost it.)  I just click open whatever file currently haunts my desktop and see what happens.

Still, I can’t imagine a writerly world without the option of instant reference and emendation.  I know most writers have to concede to tech at some point, if only to access virtual library listings or finalize drafts for submission, but if I’m writing, I’m wired (give or take the jottings I log in bedside notebooks in the wee hours).  I don’t use many of the tools built in to Microsoft Word, but I need to compare lines side by side, and I need to preserve the ones I reject in case I decide to cannibalize the thought or the language.  My work also tends to be left-aligned, and I can’t imagine how folks experiment with form without killing off a hundred pen-and-paper pages.  (Okay, I can imagine it, but crikey.)

What’s more important to me, however, is the ease of access, the referential immediacy that allows me to pin down or flesh out thoughts on the fly.  When I was working on a poem about Decatur Cemetery, I could call up images of the site itself; when I needed to identify a flowering shrub that I saw on a tour of plantations near Colonial Williamsburg, I could fumble through keywords until I hit the mark; heck, when I couldn’t recall the maiden name of a woman I hadn’t seen in a decade, I just hunted down her e-mail address and asked her.  I know that most of this information is available to the diligent researcher in the physical world, and I freely confess that sometimes I have to wade through a lot of dreck to get the stuff I need.  Still, I’m old enough to remember flipping through alphabetized index cards in long drawers in the library and sifting through the stacks for hours just to get within striking distance of the info I needed.  The internet has spoiled me so that a fifteen-minute search to find and cross-reference a needful bit of data now seems like a shameful waste of time.

At some point, when time doesn’t seem quite so pressing to me, I might see what my writing looks like when I work the old skool mojo.  Right now, however, I shudder to think where I’d be without the sweet, sweet internet.

Let me begin by confessing that I am inexplicably exhausted, inexplicably because a) the most strenuous thing I’ve attempted today is brunch, and b) I have 3-6 shots of espresso circulating in my system (I have sown discord among the baristas).  I would not attempt to operate heavy machinery right now, nor would I strike bargains with Heather Langenkamp.  Mine is an ethical exhaustion.

Since my synapses are firing erratically at best, I thought I would wrangle with a subject that’s been around since Plutarch:  the antagonistic relationship between Apollonian and Dionysian natures.  I would not expect this to go especially well.

On principle, I’m not a fan of dichotomies, not even the fluid varieties.  Moreover, as I understand it, the Dionysian principle already has duality mixed into the batter.  Trying to figure out what the proper complement to a concept that already has a complement might be really hurts my head, as does the attendant syntax.  It’s a little more M.C. Escher than I need it to be.  Moreover, the Greeks did not view Apollo and Dionysus as oppositional terms, and the Greeks generally knew what they were doing.  When in doubt, I concede to their authority, if not to their salads.

I realize full well that the separation of the two can be quite handy:  if Apollo represents reason, order, and self-restraint and Dionysus represents passion, chaos, and abandon, we can do some festive critical work.  The more we elaborate the dichotomy, however, the muddier the water becomes, and to fix it too firmly obliges us to neglect a number of myths, origin stories, and overlapping functions.  For my purposes today, I’m also interested in the conventional alignment of poetry with Apollo (unless you create further functional subdivisions, as some folks do, Nietzsche included).  Viewed in that light, poetry is all about symmetry, harmony, and discipline.  Nowadays, that reckoning only gets you so far.

Nevertheless, I am going to get all Stephen King for a moment (fun fact:  Stephen King and Iggy Pop are cited in Wikipedia’s notes on the Apollonian/Dionysian divide!):  someone else has been finishing my poems, Secret Window style (which is odd, as I live on the second story).  It is not John Turturro, although that would be awesome.

Four of the past five pieces have not gone as planned, not even remotely.  As you know, I am hesitant to speak organically of verse, to address anything other than the elements of craft over which the writer exerts visible control.  I would be fibbing, however, if I said that these deviations from my original schemes arose from conscious, deliberate calculation.  In fact, some of these shifts have effectively ruined the conscious, deliberate calculation I brought to the table.  The writing itself has been both frustrating and illuminating:  when an unscripted shift occurs, I always consider it carefully; if it’s good–if it does innovative, meaningful work for the poem–I invariably keep it, even if doing so fouls my forward progress toward the scripted goal.

I’m willing to concede that I write with contending impulses; because I am young in writerly years, I want to keep all channels open until a mature aesthetic decision teaches me to close some off.  The collision of orderly craft and insurgent imperatives, however–the Apollonian and Dionysian, if you feel like getting thematic–changes the terms of aesthetic evaluation.  I wind up with two scales in which the work must be weighed, two ways in which I might find it worthwhile.  There’s no clear relationship between the two standards (I would like to say I hammer Dionysian content until it takes on Apollonian shape, but that would be untrue), and the tension between them is fairly unnerving.

The ugly part–and this may just be the espresso talking–is that I’m starting to like it.

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.