Reflections on Week One of Poetry Sharing
I did it. I managed to post one poem a day, Monday through Friday for a full week. I guess I’m going to be taking weekends off since I didn’t post either Saturday or Sunday.
Posting has made me much more aware of my language and audience as well as what I’m doing and the mindset I take when I sit down to write. The poems I’m currently posting are older and I’m writing new poems in the morning (or trying to at least—I think last week I manage three).
Previously, I sat down and worked to enter a flow state—I turned off the internal critic and just wrote; I allowed surprise, and interestingness, and no, this doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to feel fun. Writing these new ones, knowing I might post these poems has, well, taken away some of that for me. And yet it also has me flexing my writing muscles in other areas.
I continue to reflect on the why—why do this when I feel like these poems have potential for publication, when I see a line and think, “oh, you are very interesting, I think there’s more or different”, and when I know that the algorithm on Instagram will serve the poem to 30, maybe 40 people? Sure, poets have found success as Instagram Poets but they are the exception and not the rule. For every one “famous” IG poet there are thousands of people like me, just trying to share a little something.
Part of it comes from my frustration with the literary magazine/academia world. I live and work in this world so, dear god, I hope I don’t step on any toes, but academia will tell you that your worth resides in your ability to publish; never mind that publishing is rife with inequity, that it’s a total crapshoot and that having a piece accepted often depends on the editor’s mood that day and in that moment. As an elder millennial who has a few toes in Gen X (a cusper, a Xennial, whatever), I can see how literary magazines are essential and important (and struggling!) but also how they are still sort of stuck back in an analog time.
(Yah, yah, it’s the same old gatekeeper argument. Gatekeeping is good! It’s bad! I don’t want some editor to tell me what to read!
But guess what!
The algorithm is the new editor!)
Timothy Green over at Lit Mag News writes about this much more eloquently in his Substack piece, Uncurated: The Case for a New Term for Art. From his introduction:
“…the literary community has spent decades unnecessarily shackled by language itself. The word “published” bears no weight in the digital age, and yet, purely out of habit and momentum, we still pretend that it does. Literary magazines continue to require submissions be “previously unpublished,” so we hide our work offline in the dungeons of our file folders like some archaic virginity rite. We avoid sharing our newest writing on Zooms and open mics, as if it might become deflowered by the exposure. We refuse to genuinely engage in the medium of the day from this senseless fear alone. Poems, especially, must be banished from our friends and fans when they matter most—when they’re fresh and relevant to the cultural conversation.
We’re creative writers, and yet we constrain ourselves over a simple lack of imagination: we haven’t thought of a word to replace “publication,” now that publication is irrelevant.”
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Heide’s future is blurry and ambiguous. God, it’s not even blurry. It’s a black hole in which nothing big or major can be planned; doing this little writing project gives me a sense of control. We might never move into a (slightly) bigger house, or travel through the world, or do other big things we’ve talked about. I might never actually publish a book but gosh darn it, I can write prolifically. I can write and write and write. I can write good sentences and awful ones. I can “write like a motherfucker”.
Part of my problem is that I’m not driven by fame or money. I just want to play—with words, ideas, story structure. Characters and setting. In What ifs? Publishing, or attempting to publish, takes a whole lot of administrativey energy and at the end of the day, I’d rather jab my eyes out with a fork than do the logistical work of publishing. I’d rather write, I’d rather play. It’s a weakness I’m working with. Thanks for coming along.
So, at least for now, I play and I work. Here are the rest of last week’s poems: