The Morning Report: How It Works

I get quite a few questions from readers about my writing. Generally, these questions fall into four broad categories. They concern why I use a blog, my method, my style, my honesty and the problem of hurting or offending people. Let me briefly speak to each of these.

I use a blog for self-publication because it allows me to publish and rewrite at my own convenience without the delays and politics inherent in traditional publishing venues. There are almost no markets for poetry these days. Those that remain are small and self-referential. You are put in the awkward position of trying to guess what will please the editor rather than what pleases you. You send a poem to a publisher and it takes months to hear back. If it is published, you can bet the magazine or website doesn't have many more readers than this blog. Moreover, you lose control of the poem. You can no longer re-write it; it becomes frozen in form. Thus, the only reason to publish in traditional venues is the ego boost of seeing your name in print. I've done that before and am over it. Now I am more interested in the writing itself. Blogging allows me to focus on the writing while avoiding the bullshit.

My method is harder to describe. I don't honestly know where this stuff comes from. It just shows up in my head. I have to polish it and craft it, but usually things come to me in whole first drafts. I get up early, drink a lot of coffee, smoke some cigarettes and wait to see what happens. 95% of my writing is done before noon. After that, the fickle muse goes off to bestow her favors on someone else. One morning last week I was driving into Cookeville to run some errands when the first draft of the poem "What the Earth Means," began to take shape in my head. I pulled off into the parking lot of the Smyrna Church of Christ and wrote it down on the back of an envelope. On the drive back, two more poems began to manifest themselves. Again, how this happens is a mystery to me. I just go with the proverbial flow.

Style is more concrete. Some of it comes from forty years of reading poetry. The poets who have most influenced me are Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison and certain Japanese and Chinese poets. Anyone who knows these writers will easily see their hands in my work. Other non-poets, Edward Abbey for instance, inform it as well. I like short, epigrammatic poems written in a personal voice. Our age has a short attention span; the long poem is dead. As for the voice, you can never remove the poet's consciousness from the poem, so why not include it, acknowledge it, and use it as a tool? For better or worse, that's what I do.

A young friend recently commented that she admired the honesty in my writing. I replied that it is easy to be honest when you are old, alone and have little to lose. That is true, but not complete. Honesty is affected by age and experience. When you are looking at sixty, time presses and what you are afraid to say now might not get said. But honesty is also necessary. Self-censorship is the death of poetry. If you dance around a subject, you might as well abandon it. Everything must be on the table: ex-wives, lovers, friends, children, failures, disasters, despair, even madness. Any hesitation or embarrassment I feel tells me that I am on the right track. My maxim is: be honest or be silent.

This leads me to the question of offending or harming others. In the first place, this is poetry, not reportage. Nothing I write is ever written with the intent of hurting anyone. Of course, my intent and what actually happens sometimes diverge. That is because what I write is my version of experience. It is experience filtered through my imagination. My ex-wife, former lovers, my kids, my friends, they would all - necessarily - have their own, probably quite different, versions of incidents I make use of. We all tell ourselves our own stories about the events in our lives. I am only telling my version; their versions belong to them. I am not telling the truth; I am creating my own imaginative version of the truth. A good example is the short piece, "The Girl Who Knocked." I knew it might offend, but it wanted to be written. I counted on the people I thought it might offend, including the girl herself, recognizing that it was partly autobiographical, partly fiction and being able to tell the difference. I'm happy to say that they did. Sometimes that may not be the case. I may, inadvertently, cause hurt. If so, I can only repeat what I've explained above and say again that I do not use poetry as a weapon. It is inescapable that if you know a writer, you might find yourself in something he writes and not like it. If that bothers you, try to avoid knowing writers.

I don't enjoy explaining my poetry. I really do hold the old Modernist view that the poem must speak for itself. It works for you or it doesn't. If it requires explanation, it probably isn't successful. But these peripheral questions do arise and people keep asking, so this is my early morning attempt to provide some honest answers. I hope they suffice. Now for more coffee and cigarettes and - hopefully - some real writing.
- mce