I think if I had found any recognition when I was younger and believed it was inevitable it would have been the death of my work. At least, that’s what I tell myself now, at 50 years old, 40 of them writing and focusing on being a writer. But I like where I am. I’m not headlining readings and workshops. I’m not quoted in articles. But I am still writing.
https://rivercitymick.com/2023/03/01/on-writing-the-poetry-culture-engine/
It happened on train ride, eastbound from Los Angeles. I was reading Basho. It was raining. I’d spent 10 days being immersed in the creative writing program at Antioch. Like most programs they push both craft and commercialism. I went for the MFA, not because I needed it but because I wanted it. It was a Thing Left Undone from my 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s. It was a thing I didn’t do because I wasn’t ever really sure if I deserved a seat at the table.
My tendency to write and push it out onto the world immediately has always put me at odds with the commercial end of things. I’ve written about this before. When I first decided to go back for my MFA, I thought maybe I could find a way to help support my family with it. A last bit of naivete. I met some amazing people, pissed off at least one juggernaut of the poetry world, learned that I really love Venice Beach, and also that peacocks’ screeches sound like crying babies.
I am a phenomenon of nature, like birds, like wharf possums, like the river currents.
On that train ride home, I learned something else: I’d spent years writing about myself. Self as subject, world as background. I’d done it for years. All writing about myself had ever given me was the inability to move forward. Even as a journalist, I found ways to include myself, very Gonzo I told myself.
On the train ride home, I learned I was tired of my subject. I am a lens, not a target. I can’t shuffle off my perspective. But I can cast my eye at the world. My work is about the world, about me IN the world… not me with the world as a painted backdrop. I am a phenomenon of nature, like birds, like wharf possums, like the river currents.
I enjoy learning of personal epiphanies, thank you.
For me, I never intended for my mindfulness meditation to be a means to an end, but my creativity has leaped as I write and I suspect it’s because my mind declutters.
I think sometimes I’m not so much decluttering my mind as much as reorganizing it over and over and over.
I was also thinking just now that I should have added the sentence “We are all phenomenon.” But that feels heavy-handed too.