The students are back. Everything is more crowded. I bought a new piece of original art, and I’m temporarily filled with moments of Sunday determination – the elation and motivation of which soon will pass. None of those things are related, it’s just part of the weather report, an indication of my current atmospheres…. oh, and some thunderstorms have rolled in.
Last week, I noticed the increase in traffic and the uptick in the number of young people once again blowing through red lights. I used to think the insurance agencies unfairly targeted people under the age of 25 with higher rates. After two years of living in a college town, I don’t think they target them enough. And yes, I too was an obnoxious student wrapped up in my own world… but that was over twenty years ago: fewer students had cars, nobody had cell phones, and social media with it’s look at me/influencer culture didn’t exist. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pause briefly to yell at some kids and tell them to get off my lawn.
Earlier in the week I read a short article highlighting the art of Graham Francoise’s “Morning Coffee Paintings.” I liked what I saw – a type of sad and surreal whimsy. Most of his paintings sell within a day or two of him posting them online. I watched and waited till I saw one that “spoke to me.” I bought “Meet in the Middle” – it should arrive this week or next.
I’ve written a few more poems (yesterday and today) and I continue to think about this process of writing, editing, and publishing. This morning (part of my Sunday determination), I sat down with every intention of finding a few journals where I might send some work… This plays out like home repairs. Well, before I can start, I need to buy supplies, and then probably clean this, and that also needs to be fixed – I might as well wait until next weekend. With submitting, it’s finding some journals, checking their guidelines, and then editing and selecting poems. The order in which I try to do those things doesn’t seem to matter, I always get stuck at the editing and selecting part and then tell myself, it’s really not that big of a deal… maybe some other time. It’s now well into the afternoon, I’ve made a few revisions and no submissions and I’m thinking I should vacuum and shower.
As part of my re-education as a writer, I’ve been spending a lot more time on twitter following and reading other poets. I still don’t tweet much (last tweet might have been in 2017), but I sometimes reply to other people. Much like this blog, I can’t decide how publicly I wish to be or interact. I see a number of people doing something called #WritersLift in which they all follow each other and promote each other and boost their number of followers by the dozens or hundreds. I have no interest in gaining followers for the sake of gaining followers – much like I don’t really write for the sake of being published. All of that said, I see value in being able to communicate with a supportive and/or like-minded community. I’ve already been introduced (in the “made aware of” sense) to several new poets and lots of new poems. The former editor in me, the one who started a literary journal all those years ago, loves this discovery process and likes the idea of spreading other people’s work far and wide (and then I remember that I have 58 followers and probably need to do a #WritersLift to accomplish the far and wide part). Here’s a poem that I read today that is the type of thing I feel everyone should know about (I shared it to my FB page where I have more connections). It’s by Jeannine Hall Gailey:
What’s held me back from diving deeper into the twitterverse of poetry and journals and follows and likes is that I don’t need to spend more time on social media – at least not at the expense of writing. I know myself too well and know that I am as prone as the rest of human kind to have that all-too-human condition of wanting to be liked or deemed clever or smart or kind. I know that once I post or share, I’ll check incessantly to see if it’s gotten traction… we all do this. It’s why social media works as well as it does (from a business model perspective). Engagement is addictive, and it might be best not to play with temptation. I doubt that Stephen Dunn or Vonnegut or very many of the writers I enjoy would have spent much time on twitter. They would write and maybe be content to let the rest sort itself out.
However (because my mind ping-pongs back and forth between pros and cons), in the plus column, I also came across a tweet today honoring poets who died to young. The tweet shared a poem from Brett Foster who died in 2015. Born in 1973, he was a year older than me. I knew Brett briefly. He worked with me on the Harold Bloom books that I edited. Brett and I would talk on occasion. He was smart and kind and earnest. We never met in person, at least I don’t think we did. I left the business before that could happen. I’m ashamed to admit that I had forgotten about Brett and the phone calls we would have about literature and poetry. They weren’t many, but they were good. This too is the benefit of the much maligned (and often rightfully so) social media. Hearing Brett’s name and seeing his work reminded me of the world I once inhabited and the people who make it special – a world I’m slowly emerging back into – poem by poem, tweet by tweet, unpredictably and fickle like storms and sun dancing on an August afternoon.