A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Thirty

I need a recharge of some sort, right now, in order to get me writing more, again.  I've been at two poems for a long time, and I have been considering the idea for this book, but not in as serious and directed a way as I had hoped.  It is difficult to keep working when I am continuously getting rejections, but I do, I only wish I were not doing the minimum.  I am trying to remain hopeful, but I want to see my work reach an audience.  That is important to me, and is, in a way, the completion of the work itself.  I don't think of the poem as the object, the words, but as the interaction that it creates.  It is a communication that is carried in words, but the words are just a vehicle.  I don't think of the writing itself as being the most important part of the work, and unread work feels incomplete.  In part, that is the goal of this blog, and I appreciate the reality that I have people who do read these entries, though I know it is not a great many.  It means a huge amount to have work that is extant in the world.  But, it is only a small fraction of what I am writing, and the majority of my work is sitting on my computer, not having been seen by much of anyone.  The sense that I have no real chance to alter that, that I am not going to be able to find an outlet so my work can exist in the ongoing poetic conversation scares me, and I know I am limited by that feeling.  I also know that giving up on that possibility, as I have often contemplated, would be self-detrimental in other ways.  If I were to decide to turn my back on publishing and keep writing, I would feel like I was just sitting in the shed jerking off.  I am not meaning this to say that others who write with no ambitions for publishing are wrong, but that my own perspective is that writing without any aim at an audience is journaling to oneself, not communicating.  I don't write poems to myself, and I do not know any way to write them other than with an audience in mind, but I can't have an audience in mind, for myself, if I have no hopes of presenting the work to them.  I can write letters, or pieces to friends and family, but that is a hobby, at best, and feels ridiculous on the surface.  While I do write to people I know (and have written about them in my work), that is no substitute for writing, for me.  I could, of course, entirely neuter myself by suppressing my desire to write, but again, that is just not a thing I want to do.  I don't want to not write, and do not want to consider the kind of person that might make me into.  It is not good that I just keep winding up back here, at this same place, stuck considering it again and again, and it is draining me.  I need to recharge, as I said, and find a way of feeling that I am making real, meaningful progress.  It is not enough for me to keep writing each day, though I do it.  I know I must do the work, but I do not want to be told again that doing the work should be enough for me, either. or that I should just keep going, waiting for things to change.  Things are not changing, and I see nothing I can do to create a positive change, but I know I cannot accept the current situation.  I know, on some level, it must be to do with me, that I must have some form of agency, but I cannot see it and do not know what to do to figure it out.  It is not easy to imagine a way forward, even in terms of staying inspired to push the writing itself.  Their must be some choice that is not accepting failure and is not just continuing to fail.

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