I have many questions for the blog oracle, and that is the first one- shall we be a locus of some kind of NaPoWriMo activity? Of course, the daily almanac is in favor of all things daily, especially those that encourage productive artisting, but this particular subscriber also has some mixed feelings. To start with, the blog record will attest that I'm never that great on the daily tip, so I'm bound to embarrass myself if I throw down the gauntlet that says: YOU SHALL ALL BLOG ONE POEM A DAY. Also, being now a subscriber to the
buffalo poetics list, I am beginning to get weary about the sheer amount of poetry being written, especially the amount of
good poetry being written- because no one will every catch up to reading it all. If even five people across the country NaPoWriMo it up, I will personally only be able to read about 20% of that output with any care. I'm not sure that's an argument against joining, because it doesn't say anything about the benefits to ones praxis, but it is troubling me. I'm going to sleep on it, but as a way of hedgeing bets, here's a poem written today (which, disappointingly, has absolutely nothing to do with April Fool's Day):
An office tower, composite of panels
each joining a corner. There is no
shape of such a building, but
rather only cells of shapes
reiterating
Since I have to go back to thinking about being a builder, and since I'm editing a journal on poetics of the architectonic, I'm going to write on building all month. Which brings me to question number two. And this is a real question, as in, if anyone's reading, you could even comment or something, and that would solve my dilemma. I said a post or two ago that adjuncting turned out to be a pretty good gig for a poet- not overly time-consuming (except for weeks when papers come in), and intellectually stimulating and even connected to other writing. Now that's over, and won't start up again unless and until I do a round of applications for the Fall. Thus, I have at least five months to devise other employ, which was going to be construction, i.e. was going to be signing on with my father's masonry company again. Trouble is, dads company is slow in terms of laborers, but want a young manager. A manager, however, would have to sign on for quite a while. One option even includes doing two years in Hawai'i putting tile in beach condos (ugghh!).Even more trouble is, managers make more money, in exchange for more headaches but less labor, and that would certainly be good now that every other piece of mail I get asks me for money I don't have.
But, then the question, the one which defines precisely how bourgeois this entire dilemma is: what about my art? Can I still write the critique of late capitalism in poetic form after a 12-hour day of demanding production deadlines out of wage slaves? Can I continue to write the critique of late capitalism in poetic form if I actively choose to remain a wage slave (and work 8-hour days) for just that purpose?
The other, other option is to wait for a project to start that involves restoring/recreating a 14th century monastery somewhere in the wine country (not exactly sure how this history works out, but I'll get that straight later). This is the middle ground between maintaining identity as worker-bee (and not manager-bee) but also being on an upward path, instead of the lateral drift I've so carefully managed for so long. Sorry to drop into all this minutae of my life, but this is a lot of what I started this blog for, to try to sort out just exactly what it means, on a day to day basis, to hold a commitment to making art in the course of everything else I'm doing. One of the things it may very well mean is remaining poor, which I can accept, but if I'm doing that on purpose, in the face of other alternatives, I kind of have to really think it's for a sound reason.
