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

I was talking with another poet today, and he is finding himself a little bit stifled with his work at the moment.  We talked about a lot of different aspects to this issue, some that were very particular to his work and practice, and some things that were more generalized, but there was one idea we discussed that I think might be interesting to explore.  One of the issues that came up, and it is something that is familiar to most any artist, I think, was the desire to create something that is meaningful or good or whatever you want to call it.  While that is the goal, it can be a bit daunting to focus on that.  It can become perfectionistic, can lead to not writing from fear of failing to meet the standard, or just being too self-conscious to write without the type of constant second guessing that all but guarantees the resulting work to be trash.  As a suggestion for dealing with this, I talked about the idea of writing bad poems intentionally.  I feel like this could be a valuable exercise, not only in the way it pushes against any preciousness with the work.  As well, I expect it would teach a good deal about what makes a poem bad, in recognize those mistakes, and in various subtleties that might not be obvious otherwise.  I also tend to imagine that after doing this for a time, one would actually start writing good poems within the parameters that had been determined for bad poems.  Maybe that is not what would occur, and instead one just gets really good at writing bad poetry.  In any event, I feel like this is an exercise worth playing with for myself.