Reading “Fragment From Correspondence” (Howard Nemerov).
Writing a poem using my list of the ten most beautiful words (beautiful-sounding), and ten ugliest words (ugly-sounding). I’m not sure these are really my “top ten” of either category, but they’re the ones I thought of this afternoon while my students and I worked in our writers’ notebooks.
Ten Most Beautiful:
Lyrical, aesthetic, lilting, ephemera, antiquity, bellicose, cliche, octagon, cinema, jive
Ten Ugliest:
Couch, ant, piss, volume, fat, tame, floor, socket, art, national
The Poem:
Judy went to the cinema. The floor was smeared in spilt pop and dried butter-salt.
She was going because she was tired of witnessing cliche.
“Better to have artifice as an aesthetic than as a way of life,” she thought.
The lobby was a museum to ephemera: old movie posters hung like portraits in a gallery.
Garbo. Chaplin. Valentino.
“Why,” she wondered, “did the faded burgundy carpet stink of piss?”
This was an antique shop where the national past-time was embalmed.
Judy knew they wouldn’t ever screen a piece of art — only tame, fat celluloid.
Blockbusters sold tickets:
Like a wheel of cheddar, the red wax cracked open so we can watch the yellowed images crumble out.
It is tasty, though.
Fake butter doesn’t compare to real hot oil, but it has an addictive tang.
After finding a seat, the lights dim.
Not total darkness — the footlights live forever —
but enough to obscure Judy’s face, and her eye sockets deepen;
there is a glow within them as they reflect the half-images galloping across the screen.
“The volume is too loud,” she mutters as the bombs begin to drop.
The octagon pattern on the wall is the last thing she sees.
[Edit to add: There are lines in this poem that I like, but overall, this one is a bit of a mess. I posted it because I wanted to allow myself to have a failure, and to have it be “out there,” a.k.a. in public, so that I could get used to writing things that aren’t good. Maybe that’s stupid from a “career” standpoint, but from a creative standpoint, I think it’s important for me to get comfortable with failure. I know I have a huge problem with perfectionism, and because of my perfectionism, I’m paralyzed by fear. Any writer’s block I’ve ever had has been fear-based. The thoughts whisper through my head: “What if it’s bad? What if no one likes it? What if I suck?”
So posting this crappy poem is my way of saying, “It’s okay to suck.” I’m showing myself (and maybe others?) that bad art, bad poetry, bad writing is OKAY. And that’s why I needed to post it. I’ve written crappy stuff before in my notebooks, in Scrivener files that nobody ever sees, in old Word docs that I keep hidden. But to put the crappy stuff out there for others to read, that’s the scary thing. That’s the thing that often keeps me from trying anything new, or anything hard, or anything I don’t think I’m “good” at. Keeping my stuff hidden means that I’ve written a lot more than I’ve ever shared. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that I dwell on all those judgmental thoughts in my head. I’m constantly questioning whether something is good enough to share or good enough to publish. And it’s that questioning — that doubt — which inhibits me. Blocks me. Keeps me from writing.
But once I posted this poem, I was freed. I didn’t have to worry about bad. My bad poem was out in the world, and whether others though it was bad or good didn’t matter. The poem was gone: released. And I became free to write another one, and another one, and more things, and on and on, without having to worry if they would be bad or good, just that they would BE. Once I allowed myself to fail — and fail out in the open — it meant I was allowed to write without worrying. I posted the bad poem and lived.]
