A lot of water under the bridge

So... a lot has happened in the last five years...

(Right?)

I'm not proposing to recap the last half-decade in detail. Especially not 2020, the year whose name is written on the walls of Hell. But I've been through a lot of growth as a poet, much of it linked to the events of the world, and it seems useful to take at least partial stock right now.

2016 and 2015 were my least productive years of poetry ever, since I begin writing in 2005. I wrote about 32 poems in each of those years. I know this because I keep my poems in folders by year, so all I have to do is see how many files are in each folder. There's occasional duplication, and once in a while I find a poem that I wrote and posted but never saved as a file - so the numbers aren't exact. But it's clear that those years are my low-water mark for productivity.

There are reasons: I was serving as president of OPA, which was a big draw on my time and energy (I finally stepped down in the fall of 2017). There was all kinds of bad stuff going on at work, which I won't go into now. But mainly, I had fallen away from the habit of writing. This is an observation I've made before, but it bears repeating: The more you write, the easier it is to write.

2016 of course ended with the election that brought us an unspeakable presidency from which we're just now emerging. Like a lot of people, I spent the last couple months of that year in a state of stunned depression, which was not conducive to writing. But 2017 kicked me into high gear. I felt the urgency to write: to respond, to resist. I turned out a lot of poems that year, and frankly a lot of them weren't great: sincere and passionate, but not great poems.

Interestingly, I wrote a lot of formal poems over the years between 2017 and 2020. Partly, it was because the exercise of form was a good way back into the habit of writing (it's how I got myself started writing poetry in the first place, and it worked just as well for a re-start). But it also had to do with the nature of protest writing. I'm always tempted to rant, and turn poems into laundry lists of everything bad that's happened in the last Twitter cycle. The discipline of form helped me stay on task with what this poem is about, and was a useful frame for emotions that threatened to overwhelm sense.

Meanwhile, my father passed away in 2018 and my mother in 2019. I spent most of the rest of 2019 writing the series of poems that are now published in my chapbook The Day of My First Driving Lesson.

Then came 2020. In March, my workplace closed down and I went to working from home (where I still am). This gave me a lot of free time, although I was working the same number of hours (or more - for the first couple of months, we all pulled a lot of extra time reinventing our jobs). My daily commute amounted to almost two hours that I now could spend writing. And the urgency was redoubled: I understood that I was living through a historical event, and that any record, no matter how incomplete, fragmentary, and personal it might be, was of value. So I started my plague journal, which is still ongoing.

Again, a lot of not so great poems. The value in them (if any) is in the immediacy.

And then came May, and George Floyd's death, and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that swept the world and lasted the rest of the year here in Portland. Yes, I was out there when I could manage it. And through it all, I wrote and wrote and wrote. It felt like life and death: it literally felt to me like if I stopped writing, I'd be dead.

Sometimes I wonder how any of us survived.

In November, when things had calmed down some (relelntless rain will actually do that!) I got a copy of Diane Lockward's book The Practicing Poet. Since we weren't going anywhere for Thanksgiving, I took myself on a little writing retreat, just me and the book. It really took my writing to a new level. The passion and the urgency are all still there, but the craft has firmed up under it. I aspire to, and sometimes actually reach, an effect that a friend once described as "elegant rage."

I should also mention that between the last few months of 2019 and (coming soon) the first half of 2021, I submitted, got acceptance for, and saw publication of two chapbooks and a full-lengh collection - Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions, which will be coming out from Fernwood Press within the next few months. By poetry standards, that's phenomenal success! (And a pretty big ego-stroke). More importantly, I've received so much kind and generous input from friends and fellow-poets.

So my goal right now is to try to write about two poems per week for the rest of 2021. I feel like I can sustain both the craft and the urgency at that pace. By the end of 2021, if Allah wills, I should be ready to start assembling another manuscript and line-editing the poems that will go into it: primarily, poems from 2017 and later. I have some thoughts about organization, which may or may not survive first contact with the actual body of poems.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside