Letting go of problems

Letting go of problems means not classifying something in your life as a problem, any more.  Make a list of problems you have, and then just decide which ones are things you don't really have to worry about.  Don't try to eliminate all of them in one day, just decide on one, for today, that you will let go of.  For example, I could worry about many things, including:

*Social awkwardness
*Not making enough money
*Owing too much on credit card
*Losing hair
*Whether my book gets accepted by Routledge.
*Whether I can learn piano good enough to play in public.
*Whether I am a good poet.
*... etc

Now I might be socially awkward, but I have enough friends who I don't have to worry about being awkward with, so I don't have to worry too much.  So I could just renounce that as a problem.  It doesn't mean I am socially suave, all of a sudden, but that I just don't care as much. Not caring actually makes it easier, because 90% of the awkwardness is in caring too much about being smooth or not. Wise people care more about whether you are kind and polite, more than if every move you have is smooth as silk.

Many people are more socially adept than I am, and many others are less so. It could be something to work on, but it is not going to be an existential problem I need to lose sleep over. If people see me as awkward, then it might be good for them: they can feel that they are less awkward than me and feel better about themselves.  That would be great. If they see me as not awkward, then there is no problem.  I am helping them to be less awkward,  maybe, so either way it turns out great for everyone.

***

Many of my friends and relations are older people, older than me. One thing you can do as you age, gracefully or not, is to not worry any longer about certain things that might have troubled you earlier. But you can start the process of not worrying about shit at any age.

Think of a problem that troubled you in youth, but that now you think of as trivial.  Now see if your older, wiser self would tell you the same thing about a problem you have now.

***

You can also take your biggest problem.  You don't have to release it yet, but decide what your biggest problem is. I've found that if something is a BIG problem, it is part of your identity, in a way. It is something that would cost you a great deal to release, because you would be giving something up, some illusion necessary for your sense of self. You must be aware that you are giving something up by releasing the problem. So by all means treasure and appreciate your problem if it is important to you.

An example:

If I am not a good poet, then I am a fraud, I might think.  So I have to keep that as a problem for myself: to prove to myself or others that my work is good, that I have some underlying talent.  If I embrace my poetic mediocrity, though, then the problem is no longer there. Or rather, it becomes a wholly different sort of problem: how to write better. That is amenable to many avenues of approach. I can have fun and write different kinds of poems, and really never have another bad moment as a poet, just as I never have a bad moment playing the piano, even when playing badly. What I've given up is the idea of myself as a poetic genius, but this seems faintly risible in retrospect, though it was a part of my self-concept even in negative form.

What is imaginative freedom?

In my poetry I want to have imaginative freedom.  What is this?

There should be no no arbitrary restrictions in place.  Those are rules that are simply conventions of the genre, as might be practiced in one particular place or time, but that aren't really "rules." Or they are prejudices that many people might share at any given time.  Take rhyme. If you are imaginatively free then you can rhyme or not rhyme.  It doesn't make any difference. You can choose, imaginatively, to impose constraints on your writing, but that will be a free choice as well.

You give yourself permission to do what you want.  So if you think you can't be confessional, or sentimental, or prosaic, you have to realize that that restriction comes from you, not anyone else. You are the one denying permission to yourself, even if it seems like it's someone else.

You really shouldn't have a style.  That is to say, you shouldn't have to decide what your poetry is like and then impose that as a restriction.  (You can for individual poems or books, but that is another question.). Of course, it will sound like you anyway even if you try to avoid your stylistic tics.  Very few poets have the freedom to do whatever they really might want.  But at least in theory you can leave yourself open to any possibility.

The problem is that poets learn enough licks to be able to write ok, and then they stop. They have enough tools and clichés and can have their work considered good. There was on in the 70s I remember: poets would write the line "for hours" or "for years," which had a certain built-in poignancy. Like:  "I washed the dishes / for years." Or they would use certain words like silence, dark, and stone that they thought had an inherently lyrical quality.

The bad poetry I was writing since the summer, I realize now, is just the key to the gate of imaginative freedom.  Because if you do something in a bad poem, and it works, then you've found something that works.

At the same time, you have to have some self-awareness not to write something bad and not even know that it's bad.  There was a bad Chilean poet who had a foundation set up for him that will essentially pay people to translate or write about his work.  I thought it would be easy money so I checked his books out of the library one year, but it was crappy stuff, and I couldn't bring myself to translate it. It was over-clever and without redeeming social value. The fact they needed to pay people to even approach it is fairly appropriate.

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This is a life hack not just a poetry hack because it is applicable to other situations in which you might need imaginative freedom to free up your life. Say to yourself: I cannot imagine not >>>>>  Then imagine not doing it.

Short piece of music

3. Here is the idea is to write the shortest possible piece of music.  So you give up all the advantages that length gives you (repetition, development, contrasting sections, etc..).  You can conceive it either as a time-limit exercise (five seconds) or as a way of getting as short as possible, to the limits of human hearing.

A sequence of two or three chords, but each very complex and multilayered, would be one approach. You be basically substituting the vertical dimension for the horizontal one. Another would be to take a piece and mechanically speed it up so that it fits the time frame. A lot can happen in 5 seconds at 600 bpm.

Ear

In a crossword puzzle the answer for "musical ability," three letters, was "ear."  (Another day the clue was "musical talent "and the answer was supposed to be "chops," but "chops" is not talent at all but merely technical prowess!) So we call it ear because musicians know that hearing, listening is more important than producing the sound. We call the capacity to write in verse, in a poet, an ear as well. So we know that the poet hears the verse. The painter sees, she or he has an eye. The chef tastes better than other people, the perfumer has a better nose.  

It used to bother me...

It used to bother me that I was teaching literature to people who weren't in school to learn literature.

I decided to let that go as a problem in my life.  Now what I think is this: I am giving some future physician, lawyer, or accountant one experience of thinking about literature that they wouldn't have had otherwise. I am it for that person, as far as literature is concerned (along with my other extremely meritorious colleagues, of course).  If someone is interested in literature, then they can learn from me.  If someone is moderately interested in it, open to it in some way, likewise.  If they aren't interested, then  they get to see someone who is.

One student who was into Spanish for the linguistics and teaching angle and wasn't too enthused wrote me later to apologize, because it took her until later, when she was in graduate school for linguistics, to understand what I was doing.  But it was actually fine. I loved it that she wrote to me, but she didn't need to apologize.

On not caring how good my poems are / whether they are good at all

I could care about whether other people think my poems are good.  I have little control (none to be exact) on other people's judgment of them.  I guess I could try to write poems that I think other people might like, but my insight into what other people's taste is limited.  I know they are different from one another and that many more people like Mary Oliver's poems than Ceravolo or Mayer. Even poetry I ought to like (written by experimental folks) is often dull to my taste.

I have zero interest in mimicking some period style that would get me published more easily.  Between 100 and 400 people look at my blog every day, so people who want to find my poems will do so.  No tenure or external legitimation or salary increase depends on the quality of my poems.

I could care whether my poems are good in some absolute sense, irrespective of any reader.  But what does that mean? There is no poetry god in the sky to whom one can appeal. So one judgment would be to not ask if someone likes it, but whether someone, me or you or her, for example, might think it would meet the approval of some theoretical poetry deities? This is surely a fool's errand.

So I can really only care about whether my poems are good for me.  What does this mean?  That is satisfies the poetry itch I feel.  To do this the poem must have some quality I value, so it is not "anything goes." What I am striving for now in my work is a kind of imaginative freedom, where I can do anything I want with no fear of badness per se.  I can be as confessional or MaryOliverish even, without it being even parodic. I will collect Rod McKuen's books. I know some my aesthetic flaws already: excessive reticence, the recording of trivial observations that mean nothing to anyone else. Those flaws are likely to be mitigated if I don't care if it's good in some pretentious sense.

A Slip of Paper

A slip of paper on which chords symbols are written

Abmaj7 9 b5 / C-7 9 / F7 9 #5

Used as a bookmark in Clark Coolidge's Selected Poems

Published in 2017 so evidence would suggest I've survived that long

The latest recorded year in human history, so far