Another rainy day in New Jersey, not enough sun so my mind’s turned to mud. Bad mood.

Taibbi was on The Majority Report, another chapter in the continuing saga of “The Whole World is a Scam.” Sam Seder—brand new dad, now of two—sounded like he’d been mugged after the conversation. He laughed at how consistently depressing Taibbi’s visits to the show have been.

Hell yes, I thought, have him back to talk about his favorite novel next week, or something. The poor man.

Taibbi sounded haggard, worn out, seemingly exhausted by what  he called “an editorial problem,” i.e. every banking scandal is worse than the last, leading to headlines screaming: “Worst Banking Scandal in History!”—every few weeks or so. No one is crying wolf, mind you. This isn’t a case of journalistic hyperbole. The News is just consistently shocking, wave after wave, each scandal much worse than the one that came before it.

After a few months of this, everyone stops listening, myself included. I mean, what can be done about this bizarre casino world we live in? It’s madness. Sure. But all we ever do, really, and I say this with nothing but respect for all activists, I love you all, but all we ever do is point out the problems and try to shame those with real power into changing things, which will never happen. We’re living in the aftermath of a massive collision: ideology, arrogance, class and/or cultural narcissism—a shit storm—creating a basic inability to admit that a cherished ideology is fundamentally wrong, an inability to change, even while that cherished ideology kills our entire planet.

I don’t know why so many in power often seem so blind. And I’m not entirely sure I believe that I’m not the blindest one of all. Some argue that becoming the President grants you access to a mountain of “Classified Information” and a staff that helps you maintain a daily, 24 hour, global perspective.  The decisions you make from that perspective, the thought experiment goes, are doomed to seem nonsensical to even the most literate amongst the “ignorant masses.”

Others say it’s already too late. The race to stop climate change, to reverse it, is over. We lost. The best we can do now, they say, is brace for the impact, because it is coming. Therefore, they rush to make as much money on fossil fuels as they can, so they can afford to protect themselves and their families from the catastrophes their industries created. Screw the rest of us. That’s the thinking of the one percent, some argue. And there’s no stopping them. That’s what some people I talk to have to say about our world. Why bother?

I always thought that was cynical. I always believed that journalists, and writers, and poets, and artists would prevail in the end. When pushed to the wall, when faced with our own extinction, the creatives would let out a roar—wake everyone up, and humanity would change rapidly. That’s our function, we artists—to be the hyper sentients of the species. Truth will out, solidarity, and all that. But lately, I don’t know. Lately, I’m struggling for perspective, struggling with how enormous our social crisis is, with the horrifying big picture.

For example, read the recent article in The Atlantic, “Green Lifestyle Choices Don’t Change the System” by Maggie Koerth-Baker. In it she writes:

Fossil fuels are an incredibly powerful source of energy. They’ve enabled us to build the comfortable, convenient and clean society we enjoy today. And that society has been molded around them. Everything about our energy system has been shaped by fossil fuels. Our homes are run by electric infrastructure that functions best when paired with highly controllable power plants that allow us to create more or less electricity on demand by burning more or less fossil fuels. Our transportation system is designed specifically for gasoline-powered cars. The chemistry behind everything from agriculture to clothing is based on oil.

None of these infrastructures had to be based on fossil fuels, but they were. This fact — not what you choose to do in your personal life — is why it’s so difficult to stop using fossil fuels.

No offense to Maggie Koerth-Baker, it was a great article, a great read, but it left me feeling hopeless, helpless in the face of climate change. And sure, maybe hope is a difficult commodity to come by these days, but maybe that’s just my depression talking, at least that’s what any therapist would say—hopelessly dark inspirations from the heavy rain conjuring images of Irene, of Super Storm Sandy.

It’s been getting humid lately, the air is heavy, the pressure building to early morning, early evening thunder—swollen bolts of lightning jumping from cloud to cloud. The Summer is coming on fast, heat waves soon, flash flood warnings. Another rainy day in New Jersey, the second day in a row—a weird rain that comes in waves like a monsoon season—and my mind is stuck in the mud.

#njpoet

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“The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem—the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say—exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself—soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late and inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all. Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent for a lifetime.” –Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

She asked me why there were books scattered on the living room floor and I semi-snapped at her, immediately caught myself, turned away from my keyboard and apologized.

“I’ve been trying to write poems,” I explained. “Things may get a little weird for a few months. Bear with me.”

She understood, even my crankiness, thanked me for apologizing, kissed me and went off to take her shower. Leaving me with the task of coaxing awake the poetic in me. Pecking away at the keyboard. Mostly nonsense.

The books scattered on the floor are attempts at inspiration, sources I’ve been reading randomly in no particular order—Leaves of Grass, Howard Zinn’s People’s History, Studs Terkel’s Working, some poems of Adrienne Rich, some collected letters of Hunter S. Thompson, some Shakespeare, and a used bookstore anthology called Seven Centuries of Verse: English and American.

I also listen to political audiobooks while driving, housecleaning, grocery shopping. This week it’s The Shock Doctrine, last week it was Death of the Liberal Class, next week I’m on to Dirty Wars. During lunch I listen to The Majority Report, and catch Democracy Now! as often as I can. Saturday it’s Economic Update with Richard Wolff—my favorite show.

And every day I sit with this keyboard, or curled up with a notebook. I force myself to write for at least two hours—frustrated or not. And every day I commit to blogging something—viewing blogging as a writing practice, blogging as a workout for my writing muscle.

That’s mostly my new work plan, as structured as I’ve been able to manage. Study and write, and blog, and then study until it’s time to write again. From that chaos pull more blog posts, maybe two a day, and books—must write books! Edit, revise, reconsider, rework. Be yourself, poet. And really do it this time, you stupid asshole. No more procrastinating.

That’s my tough loving self talk, and it seems to be working. I’ve been writing every day, but it’s still slow going, to be perfectly honest. I’ve been lax and lazy too long. I’ve been slacking. So far, I can only manage a slow walk on the literary treadmill, dashing off lines of poetry in the mornings, stuff like:

My headaches smell like
gasoline, and taste like charcoal
tablets swallowed to settle
my stomach after
eating our plastic food.

In the afternoons, the evenings, I pull a blog post out of my head. That’s all I can manage for now, then it’s back to studying. But it’s a start. By Summer, I’ll be running. By Fall, maybe Winter, there will be a book drafted: hopefully a collection of poems to accompany my blog prose. Hopefully I’ll be posting several times a day by then. And hopefully I won’t be too depressed from all the political audiobooks. Let us pray…so, anyway.

The moral of today’s story, perhaps we should call it my thesis-mission statement, is this: I just have to keep at it—no time for doubt.

#njpoet

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for Manny Jalonschi  

So, I promised myself that I’d write something for my blog every day. Seriously. I came clean with my friend Luke. I said, “Dude, at this point, if I don’t write every day, it’s because I’m choosing not to write.”

It’s true. I stop writing, straight up, because I get scared.  Because I’m a writer that writes to see the world clearly—driven by a scar, by hyperawareness, a residue of early childhood trauma.

And it’s valid fear. The history of writers, of poets who wrote to see the world clearly—that is not a warm and fuzzy story. Plato kicked the poets out of his utopia. Authoritarian states will just cut a poet’s head off.

So, my imagination scares the shit out of me, often.  Fueled by way too much political News-type reading, fact, and not nearly enough poetry reading, and writing, another fact, and not nearly enough meditation—now I’m kicking myself. Stop it!

Friends at my local bank call me worldly.  No, really, that’s hysterically true. Just because I’m striving to be aware of my entire planet as a whole, not just my blind-luck spot—perched atop the global pyramid scheme: consuming, consuming, consuming.

Sometimes, when I’m with friends from other countries and they tell me stories of being harassed, I say something like, “I’m sorry. My country is very sick. 9/11 did serious psychological damage, collective psychological damage. Most of us don’t even see it or feel it. I do. I wrestle with it. And, I’ll tell you this, my country has become a very scary place to live, my country feels scary to me now”—a painful thing to admit, but I realize I’m only inching closer to that global perspective I just mentioned. And how did Joseph Conrad describe it, the unfolding of that global awareness? The Horror. The Horror.

#njpoet

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What am I going to write about today? The mundane? Housework, some quirky moments with my cat? Or maybe some romance with the lady, some true love. Maybe poetic sex scenes before bed…

But there’s enough porn coming out every twenty-nine seconds. Enough said.

So, I could go global politics: Syria, chemical warfare—depending on what you mean by “maybe”—and red lines of human suffering being drawn and re-drawn everywhere.

Or how about domestic? A small fraction of the people who lost decent jobs in the economic crash of 2008 found much shittier new jobs last month. It’s an Economic Recovery! Hurray! Just don’t take your eyes off the stock market and/or the corporate peoples. And never, ever look down, my brilliant masters. Our petty groveling might upset your delicate job creating magical bullshit spells. Yes, we know. Your alchemy is such a fragile pseudo-science. We know.

Maybe I’ll just keep it local. My neighbor with the PhD in computer science was just leaning out his window smoking an unfiltered cigarette. He told me that he finally landed a teaching gig making $15K a year—full-time, no benefits.

“No more cutting people’s grass,” he smiled, shook his head, flicked some ash. “Thank God.”

He looked calm for the first time since I’ve known him, dragging his cigarette, flicking ashes out the window, looking me in the eyes and smiling. In the months since we first met, he always seemed like he was bracing to be hit, frozen in mid-flinch, a subtle wincing. Now, for the first time, he seemed to me unwound and confident, like he finally felt successful, out of trouble.

I still don’t know if I envied him in that moment, or felt a deep compassion. Confusing conversations, I’ve been having a lot of those lately.

#njpoet

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I’m much too much of a newbie at my current university to score a Summer class, or two, so I’ve been putting together a writing plan for this hopefully temporary period of unemployment.

I requested two courses for the Fall. We’ll see.

Until then, I’m going to keep scribbling into my various notebooks, poetry and/or prose. I’m going to be venturing out into the world more than has been my habit—trying to break my hermit habit, finally.

I’d like to take some train rides into NYC, meet a few blogosphere people for coffee. Collaborate. Make plans. Make noise.

I’d like to spend a few days in Newark, catching up with former students and colleagues, park for an afternoon at the Rutgers library, and wander through the sights and sounds of Penn Station for an afternoon—writing, writing, writing.

I’d like to start weeding through all of this scribbling I’ve been doing into various notebooks, freewriting since January. I’d like to produce a book of prose and/or poetry. I’d like it to be more literary than journalistic. I’d like it to be highly poetic, my best effort, yet accessible to my working class mother.

Then I’d like to find a healthy work rhythm, a balance, a system of continuous freewriting and editing that will produce more books of prose and/or poetry.

That’s my summer plan, lofty goal, get busy writing my books, whatever it takes—that and much more blogging about what it’s like to be a poet in the land of markets that don’t value poetry as a commodity, much more blogging about my place in the American literary tradition I once studied to teach, and now study to participate in, much more free and open and honest  blogging about the everyday life and thoughts of a struggling poet professor from New Jersey, USA. Yeah. That.

So, here goes everything! Past is past! Carpe Diem! And all that shit. I’m relatively sure I can do this…

#Help

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She wants to talk about writing. She’s going to ask me about my writing process, and I’m going to try telling her that I don’t have a writing process, but that’s bullshit, because I do have a writing process. I’m just too much of a knee-jerk rebel poet to ever nail myself down to something as well-defined and worked-out as to be called a “writing process” or worse—ick—a “writing schedule,” which is, of course, a major limitation of mine—a weakness. Luz tries to organize my work, to manage and focus me, and I sometimes react like a spoiled child, or, most often, like an apologetic cripple. I can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. Or I pontificate some nonsense about needing inspiration, waiting to be inspired, yadda. She doesn’t accept that, any of my writerly bullshit, of course, which is why she’s my wife, one of the many reasons I love her. She pushes me, always, because she knows when I don’t write for a few days, or, at worst, for a few weeks, I spiral into a depressive sickness—stomachaches, headaches, fatigue, nightmares. And that hurts both of us. So, I keep trying. I’m always trying to write—in the notebooks scattered throughout my apartment, in the hundreds of stray word pad files on my hard drive. Maybe that’s “the secret,” if there is one, to writing. Just keep trying to write. Keep making attempts. Accumulate failures. That, and a writing schedule is a really good idea. Luz has always been right about that one. I guess that’s what I’ll tell Natasha at 6 pm, among other things. I’m working on it. I’m trying.

blogtalkradio.com/creativenexus

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