At A Loss

Then it rained
my hair wet
streams pulled it
over my forehead
I gushed with thoughts
I could not keep
soon I was up to my ankles
in loss

2011 © Michael A. Wells

Confession Tuesday - Weighty Edition

Dear Reader:

To the confessional...  It's been one week of hot-air in Washington, D.C. since my last confession. <sigh>

A confession that I have tonight is one I'd like to just be a secret.  I started a diet on Sunday and I'd just as soon it not be historically recorded on the Internet, but alas I some notion that as I confess it here it establishes some accountability. With that in mind I will swallow my pride and confess that yes, I am intentionally attempting to lose weight - reduce body mass, take up less space, etc, etc. My first weigh in was on Sunday. I stopped by the Y and weighed in again this afternoon. Result - 3.1 lbs lost.  So what did I do?  I went to lunch with out office to celebrate birthdays this month. We went to Winslow's BBQ.

Now you are no doubt thinking.... hum I'll bet he could put the 3 lbs right back on in a place like that. I was a relatively good boy... I skipped any fries opting instead for the BBQ beans and the Smokey Sandwich I ditched the bun on eating only the meat. My drink... ice tea.  Taking everything into consideration I didn't do bed for the day.  I'll try and remember to weigh in next Tuesday as an additional measure of accountability.

Where has July gone? I confess the summer feels like greased pig slipping through my arms. As we are nearly to August that leaves like two months of baseball left for the regular season. Football will soon be encroaching into it. Oh how I hate that!

In the poetry department I confess that I've been hanging onto drafts a lot longer - tweeking - tinkering - turning them around and standing them on end. I confess I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. Yes, we can close the book on a poem and send it out in the world too early.  Sometimes I thing we can tinker too much as well. I think time helps just to allow for perspective shifts, changes can be made without wearing the words on the page out. I confess I am not likely to change how I approach this anytime soon.

That's a wrap for this today... have a great week and see you again on Tuesday!

Do no wrong

Writing away - in free write while listening to my playlist. No care given to what comes out - it's choppy and all over the map and that's cool because I will come back to it on another day and mine for gold. For now it's words - phrases and that is  all that matters. I can do no wrong.

Rainy Sunday Morning

Opening the front door this morning I stepped into the heavy smell of rain. The sidewalks still dark gray from the wetness. Sun straining through the moving cloud cover. There is nothing in this picture to suggest  however, the oppressive heat will be moving on.

For a Sunday morning I already feel good about the weekend in terms of
writing. Yesterday I pushed throw a new poem draft and tinkered in rewrite with some other material.  In terms of recent weekends I've felt better in terms of creative mind. I've been able to unencumber it from a lot of recent baggage that has cluttered it.

Constantly Comparing Yourself To Other Artists

Before I delve into this, let me reference a post on The Book of Kells where Kelli Agodon shares a list of How to Feel Miserable as an Artist (Or What Not to Do).  There are 10 entries to this list and two that especially jump out at me are numbers 1 & 8.  I'm thinking I will over the next couple of weeks post a response to all of these but for today. Number 1 it is!

When I was reading the list and saw the very first item I thought, Don't we all? Is there anyone who doesn’t compare yourself to other artists? Do I see any hands? I didn't think so. I think I do it in so many ways.... so and so just won the Best Darned Chapbooks Award this side of the Mississippi Award and what have I won lately. Suzy-Q has 7 poems in No-Tell Motel this month or Sam has poems in three journals in a month.... what have I got **heavy sigh**

The inclination is to use others as a yard stick to decide how you measure up. Right now if I list my top 10 favorite poets and you ask me to write next to their name when I think I might measure up to each of them beside their name I can tell you the answer in each case is going to be the same. Never!

The odds are each of them probably can make a similar list and likely answer it the same. In art especially, I'm pretty sure that we do the yard-stick test with others and it is a failing proposition.

Any one of the ten items on the list is probably not a healthy activity but when we start collecting 3 or four or more of these faults, I'm pretty sure that a frustrated if not miserable artist begins to emerge.

When someone I know has a new book come out I try to make a conscious effort to congratulate them. First of all being supportive of your peers is a good thing. But if we don't look at these achievements of others in a positive light I thing the opposite begins to creep in and take over our psyche. We start to feel short changed and even jealous. I have several friends who have new books that have recently come out or are due out in a matter of weeks. It becomes so easy to allow their successes to place you and an important manuscript project you are working on into a "woe is me mode" and then you start to think about it and you say as rationalization, "ah yes, but I'm not that good and I never will be."

I know if you are a writer you have doubted yourself. And probably by comparison to some other writer. So share your secrets... when you realized that you've slipped on this slippery slope how do you get yourself back on your two feet?

Thoughts on the Fall of Borders

News that Borders is closing down is no surprise to me.  Anyone who follows the bookseller's industry could have suspected it even long before they began shedding stores a while back in order to try and stop the bleeding. The fact that Borders has not had a profitable year since 2006 is probably due to a variety of factors including but not limited to the current economic climate, a business model that was well behind the e-book curve and competitors that were successfully bleeding their profit share. 

If I'm not surprised I can still be sad. My family and I enjoyed occasional trips to Borders - usually to check out their bargain book tables. I've done a reading or two at Borders in Northland. I'm sad too for the some 12,000 employees that will be without a job as a result.

Some people will argue that this is a sign of the demise of traditional books in our culture. For many who like browsing in a bookstore to ordering online this may have a silver lining. It could be that the loss of Borders may leave a small opening for smaller independent neighborhood bookstores.

I don't deny that I have also been a frequent Amazon customer. They are relatively fast in shipping to me.  Barnes & Nobel and Borders generally don't have new poetry releases when I want them.B & N has had a dwindling inventory altogether.  What I did like about Borders is they did have some more specialty type  titles the B & N ever did.

If the price of shares in Amazon.com is any indication of their health, they are doing quite well. I'm sure their decision and marketing of the Kindle has been a part of their success.  I remain more interested in traditional books. For now, they still meet that need.

Confession Tuesday - #poetparty edition

Dear Reader: It's been one anxiety ridden doctor's check-up, 3/4 of a lawn mowed, a visit from one of my out of town children and one more #poetparty since my last confession.

Sunday I actually made it on time to #poetparty (on Twitter) for what I confess is probably the first time. So that may well taint my representative view of what #poetparty offers, but one thing it usually delivers to me is frustration.

I love the concept of #poetparty (which aside from an occasional virtual piece of cake or glass of wine) isn't really much of a party. What I like about it is that it is a co-mingling of poets from anywhere a poet wants to come from, all assembled in bombarding tweets into smart phones, onto laptops and desktop computers all over the United States if not the world.

Collin Kelley and Deborah Ager of 32 Poems co-host the event. They have effectively drawn together a wide range of poets with various levels of proficiency in the art. I must confess however that I am relatively inept at staying up with the tweets. Yes, I confess that I am guilty of coming late and even at times leaving early, but it is frustrating to me because it seems that so much (or at least to me) is lost by the format. For example there have been Internet meeting rooms/chat rooms etc available for years now and it seems to me they would be so much easier to keep up with. Plush there is that darned hashtag(#). It is sometimes hard to remember that if you don't have the #poetparty in your tweet it just goes out there into twitterland and is lost from the actual party.

If you haven't been to one of these, there are usually a series of questions along a topic line and people respond individually and then there is often some give and take in the conversation. I admit it is a little easier to follow on a computer then on the twitter application on my blackberry. But even within a twitter application like Tweet Deck on my laptop it is no picnic.

So even though Twitter is the newer medium, it seems to me that something as "old School" as an online meeting room might be less confusing. At least to this old poet.

There you have it... I confess I'm inept at something. Shocker!  ;)

Hope everyone has a great week. Stay out of the heat and be safe!