My real work

March 24, 1997

The daily grind goes on.

Monday morning rising to face one more week of deadlines.

I always have too much to do and make more promises than I can keep – a story for this cause or that, each a brutal battle from notes to finished copy that I always cringe over.

I keep looking for a formula that will make life easier, knowing I’ll never find one.

All this, of course, comes in the middle of what I like to think of as my “serious work,” those passages of purple prose which will put me in a literature book someday, guarantee me a place among the greats (how many other fools have thoughts like this, like the man at the poetry reading Saturday who ranted on about those writers who influence him, name dropping so heavily he could have served a biography for a text on western literature.

A large part of literary success is self-promotion, such as what happened with Whitman when he wrote reviews of his own book and gave himself high praise.

I am poor at self-promotion, and wish talented amounted for me, and hard work, and some aspect of self-belief. All writers, artists, musicians must believe they are destined for something, or they fail.

But some of us deceive ourselves, relying too much upon the world somehow discovering us.

I did well enough at the open reading this weekend, and more or less discovered a fact that I already knew, that people won’t tolerate long pieces, regardless of the quality. They like beginnings and endings, and would avoid the middles if possible, especial if those middles seem to go on and one.

Even poetry as been pockmarked by the punchy, sliced up images of post-MTV, and in poetry as in my old adage (to whom I can not give credit): keep it short stupid.

The problem is I don’t operate well in the realm of the ultra-short, where every word need be a pearl, where every image as sharp as a diamond. My work plods along in an emotional accumulation, where poetry demands lightning strikes. But I do have a few short pieces, and I’ll see where that gets me. Perhaps I can seduce some sucker into giving me a feature, where I can do what the hell I want.