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It occurs to me every once in a while, come March of next year, this blog will be 20 years old. But of course, before this, there was another blog. A messier and more rough space but also more social. A short-lived Xanga from 2003-2005, into which I pored not only longer writing and poem drafts, but also the sort of stuff now you would relegate to social media instead. Quizzes and surveys and twenty-question type posts. Reading announcements, rants, poem drafts, life miscellany. There was no such thing as "content," then in the way we know it now. It was more like a place you just gathered with people you knew from far flung locales. Some of the poets I got to know there became real life friends, and internet friends, many later authors I would publish or who would later publish me.
I'd kept journals, sometimes fairly detailed ones, since 1994. and before that, sparse diaries starting at age 15. I have them tucked away here in the apartment, along with pretty detailed scrapbooks of the age before the internet. While those are about documentation, the journals were where I thought things out, took notes on reading assignments, ranted and raved about everything as 20-year-olds often do. As the blog became the main place I was chronicling and communicating in the early aughts, those marbled Mead composition journals became more sporadic and then stopped entirely. This means that everything else was online, or at least once was. Xanga went caput a decade or more ago, but I still have the RSS feed files in my Dropbox should I ever need them.
Last night, I was thinking about Novembers past and all their pitfalls and was trying to remember what was happening in November of 2004, somehow impossibly two decades ago. I decided to scan through the most recent files and see if I could get a feel for that fall. Its tastes and textures. .One thing that stood out to me was disappointment over the 2004 election and Bush's re-election. Little did we know things would get ever so much worse.
Also, there was, at the forefront, my book fever struggles. At the time I had completed what I thought was book #1 in late 2003, but I was also going through a lot of evolution and learning new things as an MFA student. Just reading a lot more contemporary poets who were influencing me in various ways. I was coming into a fall where I felt like people were just beginning to notice my work, having won a fairly large contest in the spring and starting to do more and more readings. That initial book wound up being just half of the mss. that eventually got a publishing deal a year later. The work itself was rough, but getting better. I was working on the errata project for a hybrid class, which was changing my basic style in new ways. The version I turned in was a little corset book that you unbound to read it. A year later I also issued a chapbook version.
The book fever may seem, in hindsight that is 20/20, ridiculous--the poring over contests, the money and effort spent. I managed a couple of close calls and then found a publisher in a very old fashioned way. I queried, submitted, and they said yes. The result, the aptly named the fever almanac, was a beautiful book and a great start to my publishing career. Of course, all the handwringing about never finding it a home was bracketed by frustrations over suspect contest winners and bottlenecks. I was determined to self-publish if no one wanted my strange little book. Having both traditionally published and self-published these past two decades, its amusing to me that the latter is where I actually cast my lot these days, mostly due to control over when things are released and just making more income from my work than conventional royalties allow. I also just write A LOT, which means finding that many publishers would be more exhausting than just issuing my own titles as they are completed.
Overall, I was more trusting, more passionate, more enthusiastic in these entries, so they feel strange to have been typed out by my fingers all those years ago. Other highlights include local readings I almost forgot about entirely, that first crudely put together chap for the dgp series, editing wicked alice, and struggling through those first couple MFA semesters, the roughest ones by far that would get better as the next couple years progressed, though my experience and overall impression was already tainted.
My 30-year old self now seems almost as unreadable as my 20 year old self, despite many things being the same--same apartment, same neighborhood. While my style has probably changed a little, and my hair is longer than it was then, I'm pretty sure I have at least a couple blouses and cardigans that are that old in my closet. While I did a big living room rearrange circa 2010, most of the furniture I have is the same. In late 2004, I was still in the years of an open relationship that was far more cerebral than physical that would crash and burn a couple years later. This was after I'd already decided I didn't wanted the traditional marriage and family route, but a little before my years of debauchery and bad decisions.
The poems I was writing then were changing from the more straight laced work pre-MFA to something new--more prose and hybrid work, more surreal and material. The way I wrote poems changing itself, from more dogged plotting to a more collage approach that sustained me for a few years. In the next couple years, the poems that would become In the Bird Museum would start coming fast and furious. I was just starting my forays into collage and visual art as well, which would go on to endless inform my written work from then on.
