Pamphlet!: Back on the Bullshit
If you speak your truth into poetry, what does it do for your happiness?
(or, How I am managing a Period of High Stress with MORE WRITING)
My mate Victoria (Substack blog here) sent this into my inbox this morning. It is a reminder of holiday season, of what happened with kids during the summer, what other people would look forward to and I’d dread. I am a terrible traveler, the worst, and even when I got to places there was the feeling of being an unexploded bomb. I would keep myself busy and distracted for good reason.
My other mate Jen will often praise an ability to just keep working and churning out stuff, I sense without a proper sense that this always has a cost. Being able to switch off has always been supremely hard. It will be close to impossible until the Art Trail book is at least in a complete draft form. A REALLY important project is approaching a crucial hurdle today. There’s a fucktonne out for submission.
When I ask myself why this happens, the answer is always the same.
I am a Poetic Shark: if I stop moving there’s a real belief the poetry will die completely. This is not true, obviously, but in recent months (and this is a very new development) the moment there is an attempt to try and turn that bit of the brain off, it quite forcefully resists. A lot of this is wrapped around how I‘m now tapping into the ‘create on demand’ part of my subconscious for other tasks.
It has resulted in requiring new distractions: the house, for instance, is INSANELY tidy for the first time in forever. There is a tight rein on my gaming interests. Exercise is becoming the only way to work my brain to actual exhaustion. All of this is an indication of massive, positive improvement across a range of disciplines, allowing me to move past my explosive phase, knowing it is now receding.
So, why have I got THREE pamphlet ideas on the go right now?
The smart woman would go back to the absolute mountain of work already written and do something with that, except none of that is now coming out of a brain which, it must be said, is not producing poetry in the same way it was last year. A lot of the work, like it or not, is a reaction to stimulus, to circumstances, as means of dealing with the fucking ridiculousness of reality in the last ten years.
Forest Management has changed all that. Written on holiday, with my husband recovering from both cancer surgery and chemo, it forced me out of response into reflection mode. The space in which I react within was fundamentally altered. Then, there was the fight to take it back from a publisher who simply did not see its true value as a healing tool. They only considered it work.
This is where the point of my poetry has begun to sublimate.
This year, poetry has become the job: not ALL of it, but some aspects are now required on demand. Others are part of a long-term coping strategy (as we have discussed previously, and which I realise has probably lost me a couple of subscribers by doing so). Then there is the vital, third part, which are the ideas that make me want to drop everything and just write because I fucking can.
One of these stopped me in my tracks this morning during my exercise class, and the half a poem that has granted me will probably end up as the best thing I write all week, quite apart from the Art Trail gubbins. It’s not a contest winning poem, or a sub-worthy poem, it just says something out loud I’ve only ever kept inside since I was a kid. Sometimes you say the quiet bit out loud to alter the world.
Occasionally your satisfaction requires validation with a finished concept.
Once upon a time it was essential to feel alive online, to be seen to exist, that the success was coming. Now, it is no longer a requirement and this is the biggest indicator that is needed of how existence, at least here, is not going to go bang any time soon. Instead, we will work on three different ideas away from the actual work and know none of them really need to be finished.
They simply need to exist, and they do, and that is the larger result.
