Prose (& cons)

I got up early to write--always a good feeling--and ended up with two pages of something new, not sure yet what it is but I knew when I went to bed last night that I had the voice situated clearly in my mind. Simple, really, but emphatic, it said All right. This is what I remember. And for a few days, that was all. Then finally, the logjam broke and I couldn't get words onto paper quickly enough, scribbling one scene while visualizing another and another, jotting key words and phrases and hoping I could come back to them and still have the voice recognition key that would allow me to re-enter the stream of it.

I don't care if it turns out to be crap. It felt so good to be such an open conduit again.

* * * * *

A cover letter that I couldn't throw away after recycling the appalling poems:

Dear Mme/Sir:

Enclosed are five of my poems. I have never been published before. I have decided to make my living as a writer, so I hope that you like these poems and decide to publish them. I'm currently working on a novel called ________________, its an anti-war novel and will take time to complete, so I hope to get a good start in my career with these poems. I have written 110 poems and they comprise a book called "___________." The five poems I have selected most clearly represent the whole.

Sincerely,

X________ Y__________

The voice reminds me of myself at around age 14: I was so certain I was going to be a Poet and write Poetry (note how I distinguished between the two). It's the combination of innocence and hubris, intelligence and absolute lack of experience that's almost heartbreaking. "I have decided to make my living as a writer." As if tomorrow morning I should get up and decide to be an architect, I who know nothing of scale, dimension, who can't hold a picture in my mind well enough to sketch it.

And yet. . .

I did this. I wanted first to be a writer. Eventually, I wanted to learn how to write. And I do this, this thing which has nothing really to do with making a living, but so much to do with making a life.

Who will save this young writer from the harsh, indifferent world? How will he grow from "being" to making? How much encouragement is too much? How much, in the end, does discouragement matter?

When I was in my late teens, I sent terrible poems to journals--journals I'd found listed in Writer's Market, journals like Antioch Review and Bitterroot and Cape Rock (working, as I recall, alphabetically through the listings). Someone, Menke Katz I think, once scribbled a note on a rejection slip: "Try again in five years." I heard a poet recently say that the most succinct comment she'd ever received (or maybe this was already a second-hand tale and she was relaying that it happened to a writer friend) said simply: "Not these." Which led us to joking about notes we'd love to see (though not necessarily on our rejection slips): "God, no." "Never." "Please stop." As if writers would obey such admonitions, as if we didn't already have at least some small belief in our gift that was inviolable. My novel is going to take a while, so golly I hope you take these poems because, after all, I have decided to make my living at this.

Wow. And-- wow.