Addiction

I am addicted to praise and validation. In all shapes, colors, sizes, quantities. I cannot control my desire to seek it out. Whether in my career, my hobbies, my writing, it feels great to know I have worth. Often I volunteer to help with something just because of the praise it will bring or the validation I will get. For the most part it is easy to hide, as long as I also do the job right, make sure to say it was nothing, I was happy to do it, don’t mention it. While inside, I’m glowing and bursting and hungry for more more more.

 

I recently read a collection of essays by Stephen Dobyns. In a particular one on Rainer Maria Rilke, Dobyns discusses Rilke’s struggle with writing. One quote struck me:

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. (Rilke)

To the creative artist, the “state of grace” can only mean the place in which good, imaginative thought and writing occurs, and to be sinful all the way through would be the corruption of all that that writer could produce. My desire to receive praise for my work is corrupting my poetry. This I have felt for some time. I hardly approach a poem without thinking almost exclusively about its value to others outside of myself. Is it publishable? Will my mentor like it? Will my fiancé? My workshop? I am sinful all the way through. My writing is suffering.

 

As anyone who has known an addict (of any variety) can tell you, there is usually a long list of mistakes they have made. Here is mine:

 

·         Submitting poems I know to be completed to a poetry workshop

·         Intentionally criticizing myself or my work to encourage the opposite reaction

·         Bragging about mediocre success and things that almost happen

·         Asking more than once, “Do you like it?”

·         Not being honest about other people’s work so that they are more likely to praise mine

·         Feeling anxious about not being involved in something that could make me look good

Considering the distance between people I have likely harmed by my actions, the most I can say is I am truly sorry. That does not go a long way to make amends I realize.

The question remains: how can you live and write without seeking praise or validation? I have talked with my mentor about this several times. She says to treat it the same way as rejection. That in mind I will set a few guidelines for myself.

 

·         I will not ask someone to critique a poem I believe to be complete.

·         I will not self deprecate.

·         I will not publicly celebrate every poetry or professional accomplishment.

·         I will always say what I think or feel about someone’s work.

 

The last step for me is to help others. I don’t know if I can actually do that. But maybe this post rings true for some of you out there. The most we can do is try, though we may fail.

 

Next week I’ll be thinking about roles

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Write a poem about addiction, yours or someone else’s.

 

 

Secrets

Secrets are powerful. Their reputation as villainous and hurtful is engrained into our minds: the destroyer of families, crusher of hearts, weapon of treachery.

Secrets, secrets are no fun

All they do is hurt someone.

It is the weight of knowing , the desire to know, and the fear of not that makes the existence of secrets unfortunate. More often than not, they are used for vindictiveness, for breaking, bribing and blackmailing. They are used to trick and torture.

There is a long history of this. There is even a secret that has the strength, when known, to literally destroy a human. 

In the story of Semele and Zeus, Semele, the lightning god’s lover, requests to see Zeus’ face. Zeus, having sworn on the river Styx that he would give her anything she desired, was forced to acquiesce.

The weight of knowing that his true form, a thunderstorm, would destroy any mortal who looked upon him, forced him to beg Semele to change her mind.

She would not. She had been given the desire to know by Hera, Zeus’ wife. Hera knew that no mortal could look on Zeus, and as revenge for his infidelity, she punished Semele with the desire to see Zeus’ face.

When Zeus revealed himself, Semele was destroyed; she could not bear the weight of knowing.

This is more than a cautionary tale for desiring to know something we should not.

 

For humans, a promise can be broken, and we are not bound to tell our secrets. The desire to know (Hera) can be thwarted. The weight of knowing (Zeus) does not have to be shared, and so I think the fear of not knowing something for certain (represented by Semele) is the most human part of the story.

Semele not only desired to see Zeus’ face but wanted proof that he was indeed a god. The suspicion, insecurity, and I think, most importantly, fear of not knowing is where secrets get their negative perception and connotation, and yet, we live with the fear of not knowing. It compels us to seek out answers to the mysteries that can potentially harm us. Whether it is where your lover is at 3 in the morning, what your lover truly thinks, what your lover looks like in their god-form, or answers to what is unknown about the world and universe.

Poetry is an attempt to dispel that fear, an attempt to know secrets, to ask our gods to reveal themselves. The story of Zeus and Semele tells us that sometimes those answers can be used as weapons, sometimes the answers are so magnificent they destroy us, though I think I know what Semele would say, if asked: Was it worth asking? Was it worth knowing?

 

Next week I’ll be thinking about addiction.

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Keep a secret.

Questions

What about them?
 

I have a few.

 

Doesn’t everyone?

 

Yes. That’s part of the reason why I like them—how human they are, how curious.

 

There are other reasons to like questions?

 

Sure. I also like how they are infinite and how kids seem to understand that much better than adults—that there is never truly an answer. You can never satisfy “why?”  There is something sublime in that.

 

Anything else?

 

How they desire to have something to accompany them, even if it is just a simple yes or no. They invite relationships. They can open a person up.

 

You’re a romantic aren’t you?

 

That’s beside the point.

 

What if someone refuses or can’t answer?

 

Maybe that itself is an answer.

Maybe the question has already been answered.

Maybe the answer isn’t important, just the question.

 

Do you have an answer to everything?

 

No and I never will. Life is punctuated by one gigantic question mark.

 

You mean death? You are making life a sentence metaphor?

 

I guess so. I think it works, too. But I don’t think life is about pursuing just that particular question. It’s one you can spend a lifetime asking, though.

 

Do you believe in life after death?

 

That is beside point.

 

What is the point then?

 

I don’t know. Like I said, I have a few questions.

 

Next week I’ll be thinking about secrets.

 

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Answer a question, a hard one, with a poem.

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What Would It Be Like

For dinner a gourmet hamburger and fries

at the kitchen table facing the wall.

 

Knowing where all the remotes

to the television are, and my shoes

when the garbage is finally full

after weeks, maybe months.

Ties and v-neck sweaters and slacks

all without stains or wrinkles.

A new book every week.

Some different poem

about what it would be like

to have a family.

Fear

When I was in sixth grade my father took my brother and me to the Upper Peninsula (Michigan) to visit my grandmother. She lived on the edge of Lake Superior. The jetty for the neighborhood was within walking distance from her house, and my brother and I took a 5 five gallon bucket, some night crawlers, and two poles down to fish from the edge.

 

Not having the patience for real fishing, we began throwing rocks into the water soon after we arrived. Not long after that, my brother walked back. I stayed and cast out my line a few more times.

 

The fish I caught wasn’t particularly spectacular. I don’t remember if it was long or short, fat or skinny, but I was proud of that fish, and I let it flop around on the concrete while I splashed enough water into the bucket, excited to show everyone.

 

I ran home full sprint, except for a slight, unplanned, wild and seemingly unnecessary sidestep.

 

I was told to put the fish back in the water, which I didn’t mind doing;  I had left my fishing pole anyway.

 

On the walk back, in the same spot as the involuntary sidestep, I lost control of my limbs. I dropped the bucket, kicked it over; the fish skidded on the dry concrete. I couldn’t see. I lost my breath.

 

Maybe it was only a second. Probably it couldn’t have been much more than that. As my eyes refocused, I saw the snake—blue-gray, perfectly blended with a chunk of turned up rock and rubble.

 

I threw rocks at that snake just to see it move. Seeing it, I wasn’t afraid of it anymore, and it took only a moment to come to the realization that I had been afraid, more afraid than I had ever been, a subconscious, instinctual terror.    

 

It would be hyperbolic, and an insult to that snake, to say that writing poems feels like the fear I felt standing on that Michigan jetty, but maybe a primordial fear of snakes is just one end of a vast gamut of what I fear.  If so, for me, many things fall in the middle:

 

heights

planes

tall buildings clustered together

failure

being a bad father

being a bad man.

When I write, I fear what other people will think of it. It is acute, like a snakebite

 

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The next poem you write, do not censor the content or the form during the first draft.

 

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It’s 3:30am and you are disappearing 

 

Not in the same way you hide behind your hands.

Not in the same way I leave and return through doors.

 

Yours is evaporation: a vanishing of ounces.

 

They say (the doctors) they’ve never had one blow away.

They say (those who don’t know) so petite, so small, so tiny.

They say (those who do) they’ve never seen one so happy.

They say (the books) you don’t even know you exist apart

from your mother.

Struggle

Poems are not necessary.

They are want; they are desire.

I don’t need to write poems. I want to write them.

It is the struggle inherent to desire that I find necessary. Necessary to my poems. Necessary to being human.

I teach high school. I have a daughter, a family. Most days I don’t have time to work on writing. I write poems during lunch or on planning. More often, little bits, a line or title, will strike when I can’t write it down. I use my phone; if I’m driving, I tell Siri to take a note. Some of what is recorded is unintelligible, hilarious:

“Birds on a typhoon of conversation taking place in their Thailand.”

I can’t remember what this was supposed to say exactly. I don’t think it would have turned into my greatest poem, but I tried, and I continue to try. I sometimes repeat lines over and over again trying to memorize them:

“There was no ceremony about you / only the slapping and biting / of…”

The rest is gone, but it is a start.

I keep a notebook. There are months when I don’t write a single word in it.

I read as much as I can.

This is about struggle. It is about want and desire.

I don’t need to write, but I want to.

 

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If you have time, return to a poem you started but didn't finish, for whatever reason.