When I have dreams about poetry, about BEING a poet, they are never good ones. While I once embraced all the work of writing and getting one's work out there, engaging in communities that were new to me, and embracing opportunities (or trying to), I have a hard time finding a path back to the excitement of my late 20s, even though what I am writing, the meat and potatoes of it, feels stronger than ever. And that may, in fact, be the rub. When I was a baby poet and gained any sort of ground, I was simply so grateful to be invited to tables and conversations. By this far down the road, nothing is new, not even me or my work. And while it's probably better than I was, the shine has long worn off. I've seen too much of the ugly underside of po-biz, the patterns and backscratching that calls itself community but disappears once the deal is settled and the ink is dry. Have seen authors behave terribly to each other. Have confirmed that what I thought was an uphill path is probably blocked and bottlenecked and maybe isn't even a path at all but a roughly wrought patch of mud we mistook for a path.
So the poems still come, and when they do, they do not usually disappoint, but the why becomes foggy and too obscured. I will wake up and vow to become a different kind of writer altogether--a screenwriter penning horror movies, my other great love, or a novelist, making real the stories that exist nowhere but my head. I say I will write memoir or design books. Film criticism or play scripts. Anything but this medium I chose wholeheartedly when I was 24 and that has guided the course of my creative life. It's like soul mate you know is going to be a nightmare down the road, that its attentions are fickle and filled with emotional booby traps. You know it would burn you to the ground before you stop it.
And yet, there are days when you get a crumb. A glimmer in mostly sand. Yesterday, it was an acceptance from a round of summer submissions--a journal I'd been in before but a favorite. There are several still lingering but the writing gods and odds dictate they will likely be rejections if those responses come back at all. I knew going in, even when I was 19 and shuttling off work, that rejection was part of the game. But somehow I suspected things would get easier, not harder down the line. It's only gotten harder, and as time goes on, even with a steady little diet of successes, the monster called hunger is at the door.
Many writers do a good job of separating the creative process from audience and engagement entirely. This has never been my way. And perhaps that is the problem. I do not know a way out any more than I know a way in.
