So, it turns out that opening a coffee shop is not the best plan for "the writing life." I have been too busy to take a deep breath, much less blog. My hiatus has been sponsored also by our caretaking of Olive, a neighbor's black lab. Between getting Viv off to school in the morning, shop-related errands, walking the dog, actual work-related chores, and work itself, not much time to give the lazy thoughts room to grow and breed creative and/or critical expression..
Not surprising that the muse has seen fit to take an extended vacation therefore. Can't complain. We had a great run the last five years. I just printed out a MS of poems written (or significantly re-written) over that span and the number is a little more than one hundred and sixty. So, six months of nada doesn't seem terribly tragic.
The spell was broken recently, but I learned and then was soon reminded by a good poet friend that many magazines consider posting one's work on one's (or someone else's) blog to be a "publication" and violation of their first rights if the accept the same for print. Uh, okay. Can't we all just relax a bit? How many people do the editors of these magazines think actually read my blog? Do they really think that the potential for buying TINY LITERARY MAGAZINE by the five or six people who sometimes read what I've written here will be compromised by me posting a draft of poem which I will later submit for publication to TINY LITERARY MAGAZINE?
Perhaps I don't take all this seriously enough. I am guessing that I don't. It's a kind of heresy, I suppose. The same nonchalant whimsy often infects my poetry. I'll betcha it happens frequently that that the "lack of seriousness" of my work poisons its official reception. My work does not generally exhibit either the post-adolescent angst/drama of the average MFA-type poet nor the self-important terror-filled rejection of "sentiment" by the teachers/publishers of most contemporary American poetry.
Is my work too playful, both in form and content? Hmmm. There is certainly a genuine darkness in a lot of my work, but hopefully it is not a contrived seriousness; rather an organic appreciation of the transitory fickle absurd nature of the subject. For example, the new poem takes place during a walk along a cemetary retaining wall. The rhetorical shift in the poem comes when the dog who is being walked stops to sniff a crack in the wall and the poem wonders whether the ground where the dead people are buried smells different. Playful in one sense, I suppose.
