Disaster!!! For the first time since May 3rd, I missed my 4 a.m. wake-up.
But this is actually good news!! Why? Because I felt really bad about it. It made me mad. The reason I overslept is because I had a good time on Sunday and wound up staying up a bit later than I should have. So, I paid the price... It's infuriating to be put off my game like this! Sometimes our emotions send us messages we don't really "get." For example. when we're mad we just feel... mad. In this case, my anger is a positive sign that I'm committed to my regiment, that it's not just a pose or a momentary flight of fancy. So what do I do about botching my Monday wake-up? I carry on as usual, try to make up for the lost hours by working even harder today and get up at 4 a.m. tomorrow! Tally Poems Written: 293 Submission Tally: 47 Rejections: 17 (10 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Sleeping Late" Music track (unmixed demo) completed "Global Rain."
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If you click the picture above and go to timestamp: 13:33 you'll hear Sylvia Plath talk about the experience of writing a poem and of being "a poet in rest."
I'll come right out and say: I dislike being a poet in rest and do my best to avoid being one. Even when I'm not actively writing, I'm thinking about poetry a lot, reading poetry, and trying to experience life and my emotions as deeply as possible -- with the aim of not only living to the fullest, but also of writing to the fullest. There's nothing wrong with this. In fact, if you want to reach your potential as a poet, it's probably necessary. In all other pursuits in life, from sports to music, engineering, or just running a small business, those who excel are often those who put themselves 100% into their passion and ambitions. Sylvia Plath died at the age of thirty. Before she perished, she wrote and published two volumes of poetry, a novel, and dozens of individual poems. She, along with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton gave birth to the Confessional movement in American poetry, but this is the least her accomplishments. If you listen to the interview, you'll hear Plath's contagious joy for poetry and for creation. This is the point of it all, and as a poet, you should as much as you can and you should push as hard as you can to reach your fullest artistic potential. Plath pushed hard every day, so hard, in fact, that she heroically carved out a poetic genius that many falsely assume was her gift from birth. Face it, at some level, none of us really likes being a poet in rest, we're always just waiting for the next breath of inspiration. So be ready and willing to take flight whenever it comes, no matter who tells you otherwise. Poems Written Tally: 292 Submission Tally: 47 Rejections: 17 (10 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Sea Bee" Two poems drafted this morning: "Honeysuckle" and "Small Self-Portrait." The first poem came after taking a bike ride yesterday and seeing honeysuckle everywhere. Also, I had a brief but troubling encounter with a "fugitive" man who struck up a conversation with me in the park. The second poem, "Small Self-Portrait," is about 8 lines long and I wrote it mainly to fill up the rest of the page in my notebook. Some Stats Writing: 291 poems written since 3-19-20. Probably about 35-40 typed and submitted. Submitting: 45 submissions. 16 rejections. 0 acceptances. 9 tiered rejections. 7 standard. Geeze, Daniel, no acceptances? I thought you were good at this! Well, I'm only submitting to the toughest markets right now by design, so you know how that goes... Since May 3rd, I've been getting up at 4 a.m. each day to work on poems and I'm determined to write a poem each day, type up a draft each day, and make a submission each day. I'm interested to see what comes of this push, foremost in terms of whether or not it seems to make my poems better. I've been feeling inspired lately and I want to make the most of the creative energy while its available! I'm also working on some music tracks and prose pieces that I hope to release and/or publish soon. Meanwhile, I'll probably post more blog entries like this one, just keeping a tally of my trek. Once my energy is expended, I'll almost certainly go back to tips and reviews... I'm seeing good work out there on social media and in the literary journals and 'zines. Keep it up! It's deeply inspiring. Meanwhile if you want another set of eyes and ears for your work, hit me up through one of the buttons below. The editing and critiquing services have been working out extremely well. I've had absolutely zero complaints or dissatisfied customers and have dealt with scores of individual poems. So far, I've heard nothing but enthusiastic praise and many poets have become repeat customers. If you want some help, just click one of the buttons below! Categories All The title's a bit misleading, since what I actually want to talk about is not so much a conflict between prose and poetry as the differences in imagination that are involved. What started me thinking about this was a recent poem I wrote called "Walking to Church" which involved some deep and quite personal memories. As I was writing the first draft of the poem, I realized I might be able to write effectively about the same memory in prose. I didn't think it would be better in prose, but I wondered what kind of images the imagination might choose for a prose piece, and how the same memories might be expressed in totally different ways, almost as if by different people. Plath's "Ocean 1212w" is a spectacular example of a poet doing a better job in prose some of the trademark poetic imagery. In this case, Plath's childhood memories of the Massachusetts coast, so vital to her poetry, find a fuller expression of lost innocence than even the best of her poems. Personally, I've never tried to consciously engage with the same theme in both prose and poetry, but I think I'm going to try it. Maybe you should too and if you find out anything interesting et me know. Also, if you've already experimented with doing this, please let me know. Nothing makes me happier than growing and learning as an artist. Which brings me to my last bit for this post: why this blog is so seldom updated. Well, the good news is it's because I'm writing! I've been on fire creatively and eager to cover as much ground as possible. As such it's been tough to keep up with poetry tips and reviews of other poets, though I'm still reading a lot every day online and elsewhere. I'm aware of the work you're all doing and posting and it's inspiring. So, the blog may take a bit of a turn and I'll yack about my writing and submitting experiences until the creative fires inevitably dip back down and I'll go back to more reviews and tips. I'm still open for polishing, critiquing, and editing -- just click a button below or email me at writerdan@mail.com or pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com Categories All The picture above is of Sylvia Plath, along with her daughter, Frieda, and her son, Nicholas. When the picture was taken, Plath and her husband, poet Ted Hughes, had just acquired a country house. The flowers in the picture are daffodils that grew by the thousands on their newly acquired land. To me, this is one of the saddest pictures in the world because I know quite well how the Plath story goes, as I'm sure most of you do, as well. If you don't know, suffice to say that both Plath and her son succumbed to mental illness and perished, decades apart, as suicides. Hughes has a wonderful poem about this picture called "Daffodils." Read it by clicking the picture. The closing image of the poem leaves no doubt that this is a poem of deep, almost unyielding, grief. Yet, if you look over the poem carefully, you'll see color, life, tactile sensations of joy and love. These are colors that contrast deeply with he poem's hard hitting theme. If the poem had been written less inventively it might have been all about tossing flowers on a grave with wolves howling in the background. And that Gothic flair is even something Hughes excels at -- but in this case he constructs a lexicon for his grief out of the beauty of life: Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers In the draughty wings of the year. On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering They return to forget you stooping there Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April, Snipping their stems. Go and do the same because, if you just use your black crayon for all your color, no-one will be excited to see what you do next. If you'd like some feedback or polishing for your poems, click one of the buttons below. AND don't forget to check out my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide, available now. Click the button below. Categories All At least half, if not more, of all of the poems ever written could probably be considered "sad." Elegiacism, melancholy, ennui, mourning, loss, nostalgia, unrequited love, blocked ambitions, political disillusionment, dishonor, and death are some of the subjects commonly associated with sadness in poetry, but the list is comet-tail long.
Some poets, like Plath, or Poe, or Baudelaire are so well known for grappling with sadness that they are most often conceptualized wearing black, looking crestfallen, and writing by candlelight in a cobwebby room. The question is: is the pallor that punctuates poetry as obvious and complete as it seems, or is there room for new shades of sadness? The fragility and melancholic music of Tennyson's "Tears Idle Tears" may be the correct match for our autumnal empire, but our phone-locked minds no longer respond to such delicacies. The brooding, unrelenting mourning of "The Raven" may have been our cultural heart beat all along, but most of us are inured to such Gothic brooding and would feel quite cozy under Pallas's raven-topped bust. We may be living in the "the worst of times" or "the best of times" but it seems to me that our age invites new colors of sadness and mourning. We've all colored with the black crayon so much it's just a stub now. Maybe it's time to find new colors of sadness by mixing new pigments. And I'll start talking about how I think we can do that in the next post! Until then, if you'd like some feedback or polishing for your poems, click one of the buttons below. AND don't forget to check out my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide, available now. Click the button below. Characters can make or break a poem. Just like a novelist or short story writer, the poet needs characters. The poet need not have character personally, as is often the case, but the poem itself demands living personages.
And just as in prose, it's often the minor characters that do all the heavy lifting. You can't have Hamlet without Ophelia. You can't even have Hamlet without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And most importantly, you need Horatio. He is the frame for the whole play, right down to Hamlet's demise. For those of you who don't know your Shakespeare -- you can't have Frodo without Sam. That said, what are some good ways to use minor characters in your poems? Poe has a great one in "The Raven" and it's not even the bird. It's Lenore. She's as mysterious Mona Lisa's smile. Plath has an entire cast of wonderful minor characters in "Lady Lazarus" -- ranging from adoring fans to probing psychiatrists. Robert Pinksy's poem, "The Questions," is full of mini-portraits and they give the poem life and blood and fever. In fact, so many poets, from Sappho to Bukowski, rely on the presence of passing faces and personalities to give their poems depth and life, that portraiture and the principles of dramatic stage-movement should be learned by every aspiring poet. They key is to let people move through your poems, as organically as possible. Try not to fixate on your subjective response to them, but capture their essence as it relates to the poem in question. Don't give us too much information, but paint colorful personalities and bodies with a few well-placed brushstrokes. Here's something you can do just for fun that will really show you what I mean. Write a poem with no people in it. Focus on the setting. Now write a poem with he same setting, but add at least two people. If your second poem is shorter than the first, there's a slight chance you may be staying in too much. It's perfectly fine to write a poem without people in it, but doing so makes a statement in itself and doing so a lot will make your poems seem abstract whether you want them to or not. Using Big Famous people in your poems is like using big shiny words. If you drop a Big Name, there should be a good reason. Drop it and move on -- or just go ahead and write the poem about the famous person. Last little hint: the more you use people in your poems, the more dimension you give yourself as an observer. This will make your vertical pronouns pop! @BlackstonDan If you want to read more tips on how to write good poetry, check out my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide by clicking the button below. OR if you'd like some direct feedback, polishing, or editing for your poems, click one of the buttons below or email me at pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com Graphic depictions of violence snake through virtually every form of American entertainment and art, from classic cartoon violence of The Simpsons, to movie violence of Tarantino, and graphic depictions of violence in horror by Ellis, Caine and other writers. Even highly acclaimed episodic shows such as The Sopranos and Game of Thrones thrive on routine depictions of beatings, murders, and rape. By contrast, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single graphic depiction of violence in any celebrated American poem. Even Poe at his darkest, or Bukowski on his most misanthropic whiskey binge, never touch upon the kind of larger-than-life depictions of violence that otherwise groove the pulse of our cultural machine from stealth bombers to genuine life serial killers. As far as I can see, this widely accepted artistic aesthetic is missing from American poetry. Don't get me wrong -- there's a lot of it being written and even posted or published in zines, but it's almost all angsty teenager stuff even if isn't being written by literal teenagers (which is mostly is.) Tupac gets talked about as a violent poet. I agree. Some of his words deal directly with violent subjects and issues, but still no projectile vomiting or slow-motion beheadings. You won't find a crash-test dummy segment like Tarantino painstakingly assembles in Death Proof. And you certainly won't find Bones and All. Playing spoiler here: I personally think this is a good thing. I'm all for drawing a discernable line between spectacle and art. On the other hand, intentionally or not, our society is doing everything to erase that line. We celebrate the spectacle of human torture and suffering in film, but unlike the Romans who remained aware of the online between spectacle and art, we embrace violence as art. But not, seemingly, in poetry. How do you feel about this? If you'd like a bit of secret friendly help for your poems, contact me through the Poem Polisher button below, or email me at pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com Please support the blog by making a donation through PayPal (rainlight@hushmail.com) or Cash App ($writerdan) If you send a donation of $10.00 or more, I'll send you a free copy of my 7 Secrets of Poetry pdf. Categories All Next time you're getting ready to write a poem, think about who's actually writing it. It doesn't have to be you. Any number of famous poets, from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, (and virtually everyone in between) experiment with poetic personas, masks, disguises, and characters. Shakespeare is the most obvious example, given that most of his work is overtly written for the stage. But If we learn anything from Shakespeare, it's that everything (and everywhere) is a stage. And that holds true for a poem. Imagine if Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, or Emily Dickinson didn't use poetic disguises. Or consider your favorite rapper or hip-hop artist. For the most part, the art they create reflects a persona, or a variety of personas, and this is a good thing. In his youth, James Dickey was a middling poet, average running back, and all around unremarkable guy at Clemson University. That is until one of his writing professors told him it was OK to lie when writing poetry. In Dickey's words this realization caused "the dam to break," after which, book after book of daring original poetry (and prose) poured out of him. In fact , Dickey's use of personas was so successful that he fooled critics as wise has Robert Bly into mistaking poems such as "Slave Quarters" or "The Firebombing" as works of authentic imperialism. What I'm saying is: when you write a poem, choose to be anyone, including yourself, but not limited to yourself. If you'd like a bit of secret friendly help for your poems contact me through the Poem Polisher button below, or email me at pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com Categories All One of the best things about being a poet is that every poem gives you a chance to get things right. If you don't like what you did in the last poem, or the last 20 poems, this poem is your chance to get everything in place. Whatever mistakes you may have made in the past are only pointers to use to get better. There's just basically something inherently hopeful in writing a poem. Even if the poem itself is a poem of grim and unrelenting doom. The very fact that you're writing a poem means you still believe in a few basic things such as human communication, artistic expression, and the capacity of language to conform to your emotions and thoughts. So when you face a blank screen or blank piece of paper or simply sitting alone with your creative thoughts, consider every moment and Act of Hope. Every poem you write ( up to a point) helps you write the next poem better. But what happens when that's no longer the case? Is it possible to reach your Peak as a poet? If you do, will you know? Can anybody tell you? You probably will reach a peak as a poet, but you probably won't know when it happens, and neither will anyone else. If you happen to write a very popular poem, or a very popular book of poems you may still write better poems even if they don't gain as much instant popularity. So I guess I'm trying to tell you to look at every poem you write (or try to write) with the belief that you're still getting better. Don't let doubt or fear stop you; don't let the past or social media stop you. the worst thing you can do as a poet is to stop growing. As long as you're writing your growing so just keep writing! If you'd like a bit of secret friendly help for your poems contact me through the Poem Polisher button below, or email me at pitchblackpoet@yahoo.com Categories All |