Recently in Generic Category

A friend had words with me on the weekend about being a bit quiet on my blog. She also pointed out how Silence Fiction Press only seems to have older works on it, which is true - the only updates there are tweaks and edits that I've been passing the lazier hours at work with. The year thus far has been... well... I don't know. January was a bit crazy, February was a mess, and I woke up one early March morning to a house strewn with balloons, half filled plastic cups, a large collection of beer cans and an unopened bottle of tequila that has been giving me looks ever since. Along with the associated hangover was the moment of reflection that having turned one number over on the life endurance scoreboard, I still have a habit of not learning from mistakes and, while being a pretty darn nice guy, I also have a nasty habit of being quite an accomplished asshole when I want to or tire of bullshit (as is February's case - wasn't a fun birthday evening).

The circumstances which made these reflections so pertinent is also the reason I haven't been posting or accomplishing anything creative. All my pen seems to want to create are monuments to self indulgence. Whilst trying to steer away from negative train wrecks of thought into a brighter, happier spring, my writing is being an outlet for all the bile I'm tiptoeing around. I don't really want to paste that up on my blog, so please excuse my reticence. Similarly with my creative efforts, I just can seem to get my head to A) find moments of beauty outside of my stewing mind and B) I can't seem to finish some things that I have. There's a few pieces that I just can't push past a first verse at all and I can't leave them as the single image that they are. I miss the feeling of knowing where an image is going - seeing and feeling what the poem is and using words like charcoal rubbings to reveal its shape on paper. I just can't seem to find the edges of what I'm doing. I've been trying to take the time just to read the work of others and hope that will inspire me to maybe break out of this. Until I can sufficiently repell my self from my writing, I don't know if I can see my work as being audience friendly. The more unpleasant aspects of life are valid topics of poetry, but first I need to put a bit of artistry into it. For now, here is one verse that I do enjoy, but I can't find the feeling I had when I started it. Soon, perhaps...

you
are a feat of repression
a jumblejangle of humours
a long time ago explosion
alone against the blackboard night
poorly wiped
of clouds and a city's gleaming
while faraway heliotropes
are waving their farewell
tiny purple pale
handkerchiefs.

I can't even finish the verse properly. bah.

I"m glad to have you behind me.
Sincerely,
Richard

Writing is one of the habits I've sustained the longest. The knack for stupid, irrelevant and lengthy comments probably outdistances it, but I'd like to de-prioritise that one for now. At least writing beats my smoking track record. I think I remember writing my first short story when i was 9 or 10 years old, then my first poem at 12. My parents may be able to share some earlier examples/anecdotes, but I prefer to leave them out of these discussions of ours.

Moving on, I pursued the usual early teen, bad (see "horrific') verse years, slowly starting to pay less attention to my angst and more to the images, the words. An early fixation on John Keats and Emily Dickinson may not have helped the self absorption, but later discovering e. e. cummings, Charles Bukowski and a Melbourne poet/artist/drummer by the name of Cameron Potts helped bookend what I thought I was doing. By around 15 or 16, I was sometimes writing pieces that weren't too painfully embarrassing to read later on. One thing that must be noted is that while I had a few poets for a base reference, plus my brother's Norton's Anthology of Poetry 3rd edition, the staple input of verse I received was from indie and alternate music; meter set to G C D.

I guess the pleasures of headphonic verse chorus verse were a contributing factor to my current amateurdom. Sure, I tried my hand at setting words to chords and note noodlings, but it never really worked out. I knew the ye olde minstrel had evolved into the 3 piece band. The sonnets, sestinas, epics, odes, et cetera were/are mostly unpalatable. The poet might write, but the audience is a Greek chorus singing "I don't get it". So the path I set out on was focussed on the Image, for poetry's sake, and Simplicity. No iambic pentagrameters, no clock gear rhymes. I've held cummings up as an major influence for experimenting with layout, but he had mastered forms before he went on breaking them, hence I'm not really of the same school. But that just leads me to the second factor of my amateurdom - laziness.

I've never had the motivation or self-discipline to sit down with the closed forms and make my own ideas work with them. I an play with words and layout, following what I think works, but I've never worked to make any "respectable" poetry. I'm disappointed in myself slightly, but I still love my amateur ways. My poetical laziness still requires a lot of effort and generates a lot of frustration. My ways have still failed me though. I still hear that chorus of "I don't get it" and I'm not a one man aesthetical movement. Like any human, I see and feel things in my own way, an like any human raised at the longer end of the Enlightenment's tooth, I record them believing in the uniqueness of the individual.

And so, this is where it has brought me; the blogging of an amateur while he's still a young man (did I mention the hairs I'm starting to find on my black clothes? Eeeek!) All I can add about my creative work is a quote whose origin I can't reference due to a rather large distance between me and my bookshelf (see: moving continents). It was from an anthology of Western haiku, and while pertaining to haiku, I believe it may serve as a key to my efforts or, in fact, poetry in general, that a poem is "an open door which appears to be closed". For me, all the rhythms, rhymes, offsides and technical fouls are secondary to the Image - just try walking in.

n.b. tis not a cry for validation, just a statement of perceived fact. jaa, mata.

Anyone who has visited my blog before may notice a wee addition... I actually managed to insert a Links bit into the sidebar without breaking it! Having been so inept and befuddled by all this coding/tagging/css stuff before, I'm quite chuffed. Yes, yes, Mr Pittman, its been a long time coming. Hopefully more aesthetic touches will be incoming once i nick the code from some other sites.

One other mention is the first link in my shiny new bit. I was greatly disheartened to realise that I'm now past that arbitrarily devised age for what constitutes a "young writer" in Australia. Therefore, there go a lot of options for getting off my rather lazy writer's posterior and trying to accomplish something with my work. One major fear is that I'm really just an amateur. I'm guessing thats more of a reality though. My vector is, however, I decided that all i could do instead of hording files that just get deleted when a hard drive crashes or having very nicely re-written final drafts in my notebooks, i might go ahead and set up an online collection. Now, I don't mean to slight the fantabulous Concrete Journals, Mr Pittman for his generosity or the other gifted writers around journals.concrete.org.au. I didn't feel right aobut clogging my blog with old pieces and I don't have the know how to separate my categories and pages and all that other movable type, blog stuff right. I so I started up Silence Fiction Press. I'm really sorry. Still, even that was a challenge to organise. Still, it's there. New works still come here first, old stuff and edits go there.

I hope I can be forgiven for my ineptitude and cheap ways around it.

I make the short stories long...

Every day i take a bus from work down to the flatlands to do what little shopping i need to the furnish my hermitage. Various public transport routes converge on the Apia retail/residential after-school panic: elementary to senior high school students terrify the stuttering traffic, senior citizens brave the clanging train crossing... it's a mayhem only rivaled by the flash mobs of the weekend Last Trains.

Anyway, I gather my shopping bags of vices to hide from the "HARRO"s and "BAI BAI RICHARDO"s of my students, then hit the foot of the Hill. I hate this hill. Not that it's really hate inspiring; just that it's there every time I'm footsore, bag be-laden or plain drunk.

Every time.

So ten to fifteen minutes everyday uphill to my eyrie, with the constant increases in gradient grinding my knee joints away. some days I just cant be arsed. in fact, most days, by the time I'm half way up, I can't be arsed. The ipod just doesn't cut the whole "this is borderline exercise" simulation.

ok, the scene is set.

c:\> quit metaphor.exe
..
c:\>msobfuscator.exe
.
excuted

The simple matter is is that I knew the aforementioned Sunday morning wasn't going to come. By Wednesday night I had figured this out. Why? Because I went looking for something that wasn't going to be there. Now you're thinking "a can opener.... no, no... a comb,,,, no, hang on, a stapler", but its something a little more personal than that. It was a moment went I expected to find something, well, in realm of few people knowing, and it wasn't there. it was never going to be where I was looking and will never be again.

I not going to be magically happy when I wake up this morning (or more likely, this afternoon). A long lost friend recently said that I need to stop fussing about ingredients and just put what I need to in to the oven and let it bake. (obfuscator.exe is chewing up all available RAM). One thing wasn't there when I went looking for it, and I woke up, still at the foot of the hill. No matter how much of a familiar or unfamiliar bitch it is, that hill is going to be there for a long geological time. Everything is not ok ,but thats ok.

Let's start stepping.

edited to correct some horrible typing, et cetera. Everyone who is going to read it already has tho... :-(

its not really funny to think:

no matter how you feel that "this week" is going to blow in a different direction to the previous ones, that evenings are planned, that futures are being sketched, that somehow you're going to wake up on sunday morning thinking "shit, that week went fast" because so much has happened and you may realise that you are starting to get on that new vector you've been plotting for awhile now...

a day still rolls along at its same pace. subjective time only catches up after the fact. a monday still feels like a monday. you still have to go to bed eventually, no matter how tired you dont feel, because there is work, a 5000 word assignment, an 8:00 class or just an overdue bill to be paid before you cant have that morning shower until the red tape of disconnection gets scribbled through (choose your own adventure).

i've never thought about the sunday morning before, but i've been crossing so many digits recently that i can now scare my students with mobius joints. i've always been focused on tomorrow morning, that i can maybe wake up and maybe, after the first hour of trying to untangle synapses, i'm going to be productive, entertaining, charismatic, or just smile. i want more from my life. hell, i might actually start 5 year plans like my dad always wanted me to. baby steps first though... a satisfied sunday morning

just give it to me now.

please.
i take a bus screaming with teenagers in the morning.
i have to teach in the first period.
please