showing up

An artist whose studio vlogs I follow wrote the above words on her studio wall as a daily reminder to keep working and good things will come from it. Poets often have a false reputation of flitting about in the countryside in long dresses waiting for the muse to find them, but all that flitting probably doesn't lead to many words on the page.  For the normal. non-poets of the world, sometimes the work of the poet is this ethereal, un-pinnable thing that happens when we are moved to genius. Films where the poet leaps out of bed in the middle of the night to write a sonnet. The drunken scrawl after a night of indulgence. Coleridge's opium dreams.  And yet I imagine our lives are still different from novelists. I was watching the rather brilliant movie about Shirley Jackson that captured what it's like to live in the in-between world--the real one and the dream world of a story or a book, and I imagine poets sometimes spend time here as well. Where something we see sets the film that runs in our heads that spills onto the page. Almost like a hallucination.  If you didn't know we were writers, you'd think us addicts or delusional (and maybe this is what makes writers often all of these things on sad occasion. (Luckily, I'm a more social drunk & cannot form a sentence under the influence, and weed mostly makes me amorous and sleepy. Outside of coffee, tea,  and chocolate, my writing vices are minor.)

I talk often of the importance of showing up. Years ago, I always felt like I was never writing enough.  I had ideas--lists of plans and projects--but things would happen in fits and starts.  I wouldn't write for months and then spend an entire weekend on something. You would think genius was at play, but it was more deadlines and desperation.  Sometimes panic. The work was okay--publishable, sometimes enjoyable--but it felt elusive most of the time. Like a million grad school essays penned the night before, capable of genius, but we would never know. Before Trump ruined the phrase, I said often--about everything--"It is what it is." There is a lot of fear in working slower. In overshooting, in being ambitious. More opportunity to fail--or maybe more to fail with the excuse that it was the best you could do in such limited time.  But I suppose it's all limited time.

And maybe that, in hindsight, was exactly what made me start, and mostly sustain, daily writing. in 2018.  My mother had died and I felt like I'd been bitch slapped by carpe diem. .  I'm not sure some of my projects would have developed as they have had I had to write them in one weekend. There's less room for experimentation and less time for things to develop and be fleshed out. My overlook project is the perfect example.  Had I decided to write a series about my favorite horror movie in a weekend, it would be a very different series than the one that developed through and beyond several months of lockdown in the middle of a pandemic (I started in April and finished in August.)I can't say I was writing daily in all that, but it was regular enough, esp. once I was working again and had a sense of routine. 

I do take breaks of course--between projects (sometimes mid project if I am stuck, which is where I am right now.). rest is important, but it's also tempting to get too comfortable. It helps to be able to switch gears between genres or art forms. I didn't make much visual art in the pandemic year outside of bits here and there, but realized I did make a lot of video poems that use the same skill sets and impulses, so that was something. Maybe just leaving the conduit running and the doors open, even if the world felt chaotic and scary, which is a hard place to make art in. But maybe exactly the place you should.