Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Obligatory Creativity: The Poem of Drought and Slaking
I do feel a bit, oh, obliged now to be creative now that I got that funky recognition thing with the chick surfing in the evening gown, and if that is not inspiration for artistic genius than I guess I don’t know what inspiration means. Which I probably don’t, except in a purely technical sense, as the opposite of expiration - a component of respiration; or alternatively, it is 1/100th of genius, in combination with plentiful warm soggy perspiration. Let’s remember that Edison did not invent the incandescent bulb - he hired a bunch of immigrants to test filaments in asbestos-riddled subterranean dungeons in New Jersey till they made him a millionaire. Inspiration was the only part of the project that Thomas Alva brought to the equation. Thomas Alva Edison: perspiration out-sourcer. I seem to have gotten off track.
What I was getting at originally was the recognition that this blog, though recognized for its alleged artistic merit, has been distinctly not artistic lately. I blame you, of course. I’m just as sensitive and creative as ever, but you’re giving me squat to work with, cybernet. Where’s the passion? The profundity? The pinking shears that leave fanciful serrations on the hemlines of my soul? Where, I ask you, is the poetry?
Oh, there it is, just below. In the absence of any help from you, TYVM, I’ve been self-stimulating, creativity-wise, by jotting my typically inane illegibilities into my beloved “Dr Manhattan” memopad for a few weeks now, and though much of my artsiness has been taken up with stuff that either is not ready to be divulged here yet or that never will be (I do have a life outside this blog you know) I did scrawl a few words a few weeks ago that never really left my mind once I got them on the page. I just kept on repeating those few words over and again to myself, knowing that something was supposed to come after them but not knowing what it was. And in fact, I still don’t. That did not, however, stop me from forcing the issue by writing those words at the top of a fresh page of my official “writing” notebook and staring at them for a week or so as if a poem would self-generate on the remainder of the sheet beneath them.
My poems take two forms: free and, I suppose, “fettered.” The words with which I started seemed fairly fettered to me, a rhyming couplet with parallel syllabic stresses. But I was having trouble getting more than just those two lines going. Like, sometimes I’ll be standing in the shower and I’ll just suddenly think of three-quarters of a decent sonnet. Not this time. I wasn’t even coming up with a general subject - just those two lines, arising occasionally from my subconscious, reminding me that I’m not getting any younger or more creative. Or, while in the shower, any cleaner.
Well, enough of that borax. Lack of creative spark is no longer an acceptable excuse for failure to produce. If I don’t spontaneously generate my generation’s response to Paradise Lost while shaving my head of a bleary morning, then I will settle for forced extrusion of vaguely-rhyming phrases with certain similarities in scantion. The internet does not have time for inspiration to strike me. It hardly has time for me to strike myself, though god knows I try. Not very hard, but at least I’m consistent.
SO: having giving up on patiently awaiting artistic enlivenment, I embraced hurried hacksterism. I sat riding to work on my new boring bus and forced a poem out of the original couplet that had been mouldering on my creative plate. And since I have no shame in such matters, I hereby share it with you. I am not professing it to be good, but it is finished. There is something to be said for closure, is there not? And if so, who am I not to say it? - Thusly:
THE POEM OF DROUGHT AND SLAKING
I rinse out my mouth
with a bucket of drougth
and direct my attention in general south
where the soil is arid,
the skeletons, buried,
and the dissonances, unfamiliar and varied
my soul is enblistered
emotional twistered
my eyes find my shoes and my thoughts are sequestered
vertigo surging
the fundament lurching
but something left broken inside me is merging
I stand up and savor
ineffable flavor
though parched and confused I resolve not to waver
each step brings things nearer
my vision grows clearer
and the unspoken voice finds the ultimate hearer
despite that I’m reeling
the damage is healing
I fear that it’s time to experience feeling
See? That’s all it takes to be a poet-by-compulsion. And in fact I’ve got some cool photos and an essay about a shirt and a story about a wall, all stocked up in the rusty outbuildings of this Chucklehut. Ooh lookit me I’m authoring! It’s enough to make real authors think of something else to call what they do. But until I get that cease-and-desist letter I will call this a poem. I might even do so afterwards. This punk feels lucky!
