I want to write something book-length. I guess we could call it a novel, but I’m not sure it’ll be entirely fiction or entirely nonfiction. I’m not even sure it’ll be entirely prose. It may just be a collection of poetic observations of my world, pages of verse paragraphs about the places around New Jersey I frequent, the people I talk to and visit, the tiny life I live.

I’ve always claimed Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a model for my blogging, for most of my writing, although his Memoranda During the War might be a more accurate comparison, and a better model. Even the subtitle of that Civil War memoir has a blogging, Twitter feel to it: written on the spot in 1863-’65.

What a time to be a poet. I mean, just read, just listen to this passage from May of 1863:

All around—on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places—the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also—only a few hard-work’d transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call’d to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be suppress’d, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance. To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next day more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day. [pg. 22]

Maybe vivid, personal memoirs of the present, especially when current events are dire, are all a poet can expect to produce. Maybe my “novel” will start from there, with a lofty zen like goal, a prompt: write a book length emotional portrait of my life with American culture, Summer 2013.

#njpoet

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Today she worked from home, no commuting, and so I stayed up reading until 3 AM last night. Still woke up at 6 AM sharp, however, just like every other morning—even though I didn’t have to. My internal alarm is neurotic. And so, today, I’m tired and cranky, anxious with a tendency toward panic, nursing an allergy headache.

I crashed on the couch, collapsed into a nap with a book on my chest, about 4 hours ago. Just woke up. Groggy. Confused. What day is it? Did I forget to do something? Overslept!

So I rushed into the bedroom, heart pounding, thinking she was several hours late for work. She’ll be fired. Unemployed. Eventually we’ll be evicted. Homeless. Couldn’t breathe.

And she, tearing away from her coding, grabbed me into a hug and sat me down on the bed. She got me breathing, she got me to stop holding my breath—my hair was drenched in a sudden gush of sweat. And then she gave me a direct order, in no uncertain terms.

“That’s it,” she said, “you’re taking the night off!”

More tomorrow.

#njpoet

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My mother has aggressively shunned the online life since the first days of AOL. She doesn’t have a Facebook profile; she doesn’t even have an email address. She still uses a flip-top cell phone and she has never sent or responded to a text. Sometimes, rarely, she’ll hear about a sale—online only—and call up asking me to order something for her. Otherwise, her computer illiteracy has never caused her stress. 

“I learned how to use the computer at the restaurant,” she always says, meaning the touch screen wait staff interface the owners installed a few years ago. Just tap a few buttons, press send, and your order prints out in the kitchen.

“That’s enough computers for me,” mom always says, smiling. “I don’t want an email.”

But now the restaurant is closing. In fact, it closed last weekend and will soon be demolished to make room for a much needed CVS to compete with the other CVS down the road. And this morning my mother learned the horror of trying to apply for unemployment on the phone in 2013.

“Three hours,” she said when she called, exasperated, “they wanted me to sit on hold for three hours! Can you believe that?”

“I can very much believe that,” I said. 

And so, mom is stopping by tonight—any minute, actually—so I can teach her how to file for unemployment online. Maybe I’ll finally convince her to create an email address. Maybe soon she’ll even answer a text. Let’s hope. More tomorrow.

#njpoet

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It’s a luxury I can no longer afford, I understand that, but I would love to go back to weekly therapy. Back when I had a great therapist, this wise old woman named Harriette, therapy really helped me.

Harriette’s barometer of my mental health was my current writing status. She would ask me, every week, if I was writing, trying to publish, “and what have you been reading?”

She would read the books I raved about and then incorporate their themes, characters, metaphors and analogies into our weekly sessions.

She clipped articles about famous writers, interviews from her daily papers and magazines, and passed them on to me. Entire passages were always underlined and circled in red pen, particular moments when this or that famous writer expressed feelings of inadequacy, self doubt, and fear. Beneath each of these underlined passages, Harriette would scrawl loaded phrases like:

“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” or “Where have I heard this before?”

Then she started canceling sessions, sometimes calling from a hospital bed, in the early summer of 2005. They’re just running some tests, she’d say. That Autumn, Harriette died from an aggressive cancer. Just like that. Gone.

I still miss her. I often wonder what she would say about this blogging, tweeting, social media poet thing I’m doing. She’d most definitely be supportive. She’d probably read this blog. She definitely would. And she could definitely help me figure out my frequent feelings of inadequacy, self doubt, and fear. Where have I heard that before?

#njpoet

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Since summer unemployment started, I’ve been falling back into old writing habits—freewriting into notebooks, stories and poems. But I’ve also been trying to read outside my comfort zone, outside my area of study—trade magazines, automotive how-to books, even military survival manuals.

I listen to audiobooks and lectures and poetry readings when I’m driving, cooking, cleaning the apartment, or doing the laundry.

I study sentences, figurative turns, and punctuation choices—reading like a writer, hunting for images, rhythms, language models to help me describe the feel of the American crisis, the people I meet wandering through it.

I want to add some nuance, some depth, some grit to my writing, I told Luz during dinner last night. I want to draw from sources that aren’t “literary” or academic.

She kicks me in the ass whenever I stop writing—love—so I make sure I keep her in this loop that has become my life: reading, then writing, and then much more reading.

She glimpses my obsessive compulsive program, the secret of my penniless success, as she moves through her own complicated work life. This boot camp program has worked for me since first semester grad school. Just do more. More. More.

However….

My blood pressure is still high, despite having lost twelve pounds on my way to losing forty. I fear if I don’t learn how to take some time off, if I don’t learn to relax more in general, I may just work and/or worry myself to early death—not the easiest premonition to swallow.

So, I have to work smarter. I have to plan for relaxation. And I must take a trip to the beach, visit the jersey shore for at least one day this summer, and have some fun. I mean, I want to do those things. Sort of….

So much to learn.

#njpoet

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“There are things I’m saying now I couldn’t say even a few years ago.” -Martín Espada

I tell people that I’m a Buddhist when they ask me about religion. That generally changes the subject, but it’s hardly the truth.

True, I came perilously close to becoming a Buddhist monk in my late 20s, but I haven’t been part of a Buddhist community—a Sangha—for many years. And every attempt to join a Sangha has fallen flat.

In fact, if I scrape deep down to my basest level of honesty, I have to admit, I’m not sure I’m really a Buddhist. I suspect I’m a just writer, a scavenger poet who finds the tools of meditation and the concept of karma useful in his writing practice.

Meditation develops focus and mental clarity. All writing and rewriting require focus and mental clarity and patience. Meditation also builds patience.

And karma? How does the concept of karma fit into my compositional theory? Simple. If what I do today—my choices and actions—plant seeds for all my tomorrows, then the words I write today are seeds for tomorrow’s writing.

That idea keeps me writing every day, and that’s my only religion, to be perfectly honest. Writing these daily blog posts, and gathering tools and knowledge along the way—I have faith—will prepare me. May my writing practice grant me the patience, the focus, and the resilience to express the challenging realities to come.

“The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social norms and illegitimate authority, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump. We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.” –Robert Jensen

#njpoet

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