A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Seventy-Six

Sometimes it is about keeping going.  I wrote a whole bunch of stuff tonight, four or five poems, and I honestly just knew they were really me working through stuff in a way that wasn't particularly useful or interesting, and which might be the basis for something later on, but I wasn't doing real work.  I kept going, though, because those exercises matter, and because I wanted to feel that I was able to get through some of what I was thinking about.  In a way, it was a sort of purge for me, if that makes sense.  Though the work that results might not be entirely useful at this moment, or I don't think it is, it is still helpful for me to use my work as a practice for working through this stuff.]

Now, I want to be clear, I am not writing these as exercises or journals, but am fully invested, at the time, in communicating something about my own experience, it is only later that I look back and determine the work isn't ready at this point.  I do it with a focus on creating something that is a genuine communication of an experience, and it may be that I am actually closer to the mark than I think, but I don't really feel like sharing a lot of this generally, at present, because it is too personal and raw, in a way.  As well, some of it is just silly.  One piece I wrote tonight had to do with imagining the ideal home office that I would want, in a general sense, at least.  It was largely self indulgent, but I thought it might turn at some point in a different direction, and it did, in a way, but not enough that I feel it is really working at present.  However, I was open to exploring the concept in a way that would let me find that new perspective on the idea, and communicating through this something that is more than just my own machinations.  That I do not feel I succeeded is not the same as my having written this purely as a journaling exercise.  That is not to know the practice of keeping a private diary, but is instead about recognizing that the work is outward facing first, and not inward facing in general, even when it meditates on my own life experiences.

What is really interesting, though, is that despite my having been okay with and committed to that kind of writing, what eventually showed up is very interesting to me.  It is a poem that, I think, has a lot of subtle and strange qualities to it, though it may need to be flushed out a bit as a piece.  It was the first of the pieces tonight that worked out, but it also began with considering some of the same issues that had been addressed in the other works, yet from a farther away vantage and with a different subjective focus, even if the point was, for me, connected to that same issue generally.  By keeping going and writing those poems that didn't work, I worked to the point that something had to happen and it did.  I mean by this that either I was going to keep writing crap or I was going to discover something, and as soon as the part of me that is in control of that realized it was needed and that I wouldn't give up, it showed up and I did work I am really proud of.