I am on my lap top every day. I don’t write creatively every day, but I write something almost every day. I have 1,500 poems tucked away in numbered folders and dozens of short stories, a handful of which have been published…mostly because I traded them for nothing but contributors copies. It doesn’t matter to me. I am going to write today and tomorrow no matter if I make some honorarium or not for it.
But the problem is just the way I see it, turning back on myself too often, alone, working in offices, seeing the slush pile at amazon.com grow higher and higher. Going back to Morrison and Tolstoy and Winterson and Foster Wallace and Faulkner and asking in my heart what it is I must do to access the parts of me that are fearless and wild, and then corral them into something resembling a novel. Linear or nonlinear, a part of the story is told through the structure. The structure must have its own logic. That’s where I get sweaty.
But, despite this, I believe I have the potential to be a good writer. I need only a few things, really:
I need to not have a TV.
I need to have limited access to internet.
I need books that are real books.
I need to believe, even amid absurdity, even the many days when I hate this thing I am writing, that it is imperative. Even the days I tell myself this is the best I have done so far and is still so lacking, I need encouragement from others who know what it means to struggle in this way. I have a couple friends who understand this need.
I write alone and do my best thinking alone. At the same time, I like having a sense of camaraderie, of setting, even if there is little communication, I like just knowing that the people around me are on similar treks. That’s why I like to do some of my work in cafes.
Ultimately, though, I do my best writing after midnight, when I have exhausted the easy excuses and noises and need to see if out in all the chaos, some words are emerging.
Listen to this podcast excerpt from Jeff Gomez’s book Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age.
He is arguing that what is truly in
danger is not books, but reading.
What do you think?
Here is a rather notorious moment of Bukowski’s, ranting against contemporary poetry as such. For some reason, this piece always moves me, and I find myself agreeing with him. Thoughts?
[...] Think [...]