I traded e-mails with a friend who is finishing up 31 in 31 for July, and has found what many of us have, and what keeps me coming back: the process is liberating, despite all its constraints.  Here’s what I said to her in a moment of clarity:

Well, congratulations on 31 in 31!  It’s no small feat, which you’ve obviously intuited not only from the work itself but from the attrition rate within the group. It’s a worthy and commendable thing that you have carved out the time for your craft, however unpolished those drafts are… And, of course, revision rocks and is the best reason to be a poet.  Think of all the raw work you can now revise.  When this process works, it really works… When you go back to these in a couple months, you will see connections and obsessions that will frighten you and enchant you.  The desperation involved in producing something daily is really instructive.

Most people choose to try it in February, since February only has 28 days, or in April, because it’s NaPoWriMo.  But we’ll go whenever.  If you want in on August, let me know before tomorrow night and I’ll include you in the introductory e-mail.  But remember: the only unforgivable sins are missing a day or dropping out.

Also, is this the guy who thought the Internet is a series of tubes?  Did anyone notice that the media is now burying the fact that the guy is a Republican when he’s crooked, but displaying in line 2 of the story when he’s a Democrat?  Is that because crooked Republicans aren’t really newsworthy these days?

Also, please note: Dale broke the Internet.  It’s his fault.  This happened right after he started a game with me.

When will the annoying to-MFA-or-not-to-MFA prattle end?  Everyone in a MFA program is awful and MFA programs just take your money, you don’t need an MFA to be a writer, only real experience and heart can make you a writer and no amount of MFA will give you that, people with MFAs have a stranglehold on every conceivable publishing avenue, there is a secret syndicate of MFAs who were responsible for the Bay of Pigs and seek to destroy everyone who’s ever put pen to a piece of paper that wasn’t an application to an MFA program, blah blah blah.

Still, the idea behind this new online journal is kind of cute– the editors are a married couple, one enrolled in an MFA program and one working full time.  And to their credit, they don’t seem to skew in one direction of the MFA-or-no nonsense: they want top-quality writing from both ends of the spectrum.  It’s out there, so it just depends on where they solicit and how they market for submissions.  However, take a look at this statement from the website:

So what’s the difference between these two separate paths? What do you gain from an MFA program and what do you gain from doing it on your own? That’s what we hope to find out, and document, on this website.

If they’re successful in finding good writing from both populations, I don’t think that they’ll be able to.

It did not suck.

Please understand that this was kind of important, as my last presentation to teachers was such a god-awful disaster that I seriously considered leaving my job.  I was entirely sure that I had lost any and all of what made me worthwhile in my current position.

Everything we do, if we are to get out of bed in the morning and interact with others, requires a little bit of ego.  Not a ton– though I am an egotistical sonofabitch by most standards– but enough to get out there in the world and not have it crush you like the cockroach you are.  (Feel free to swap “you” for “me” and “I.”)  But for a couple days after one ill-fated presentation, even that took monumental effort.

I used to have no problem with standing in front of a group of people and talking, either about things that I know well or things I know nothing about.  Somewhere along the line, that changed; it took a turn for the worse.  And it’s not all groups; I was able to present my class at school to my peers, a group of people I have tremendous respect for, and my teachers, whom I adore and would never want to let down.  That was no problem at all.  In fact, I looked forward to it.

I wonder sometimes if this is a sign that I am so far removed from the classroom that I know in my heart that I’m less qualified to talk about things than most.  I am feeling that way, even though I was teaching at the college level only a year ago.  But K-12 is a different animal, and it requires a different understanding.  If you have not taught K-12, you cannot actually understand… but then, I suppose what I fear is that I have not taught K-12 in so long that I cannot actually understand either.  That’s disappointing.  And a little scary.

So it was nice that today did not suck.  But I am not out of the woods yet.  I need to find my way back into the school environment for a little while if I am to continue to do my job well.

I am, at the moment, struggling with a new poem.  It started with a pleasant idea, which I suppose is no stunning endorsement, but each time I think I have nailed down the mechanics of the poem, I make a discovery which confounds that logic.

When this happens to me, I often find that some time away helps, so I just leave the poem alone.  And since I am hosting trivia tonight, I will probably do just that.  But it pains me to walk away from this one. I have this nagging suspicion that what it really requires is more attention, not less attention.

My impulse towards making the poem, as opposed to just writing it, has been strong lately.  I find myself drawn to heavily organized information resembling received forms.  And it shows in what I have been enjoying reading recently.

Speaking of what I’m reading, I’m in the middle of a novel, too, and just about three times on every page, I ask myself, “How on earth is the writer pulling this off?” If you analyze it at the sentence level, most of his prose is ridiculous and impossibly unstable.  The novel ought to be a mess, despite its careful organization, just because those sentences are so far out.  But it’s working.  I remember feeling this way about Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  The individual elements in that movie were so out of whack that they simply should not have worked.  But they do.  They work famously.

But the real triumph of the day was mowing the lawn.  Longtime– and I do mean longtime– readers may remember that my most transcendent moments all seem to occur when I’m mowing the lawn, be they revelations about where my life is headed or 70’s porn moments.  (Man, I wish I had not lost all the blog comments when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress… some of the comments accompanying that latter entry were pure gold.)

I hadn’t mowed my own lawn in over a year, since I discovered early last summer that the mower had died.  I honestly don’t recall how I managed to make it through last summer, but this summer I was paying the same guy that mowed for my next door neighbor.  Until, that is, one of the kids from the neighborhood offered to mow for me.  He’s a good guy– I had met him through Lisa– but a total stoner.  I never had any way to contact him, so when the lawn was hilariously overgrown, he’d appear a couple days later.  He would borrow lawnmowers from whoever he could borrow from, and a couple of times he asked me for a raise from $25 to $30, which is what I had been paying him all along (so I always agreed and let him think he was getting a raise).  He would sometimes bring a stoner friend; occasionally I would bring him dinner.  When I found out he was 21, which completely shocked me since I assumed he was 16, I would sometimes hang out and drink a beer with him on the front stoop when he’d finished.

Just before residency, he came by late at night (did I mention he never began mowing before 8:30 PM?) and couldn’t finish the whole yard before it got too dark, so he left the side yard unmowed and said he’d get it in the morning.  I went ahead and paid him since I was leaving in the morning, but when I got back into town, the lawn looked decidedly overgrown in that area.  He came by Wednesday night, late once again, and finished only the front yard (though he did manage to mow an X into the back yard… why that happened, I cannot be entirely sure).  I paid him when he said he’d be back in the morning, but as of this morning, it was still looking pretty rough.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, I’ve been outwitted twice by the neighborhood stoner.  So, cognizant that spending another $30 would likely get no more than a small swath of my lawn cut– I would suspect that he was conditioning me to expect less and less, until he could one day ring the bell and have me just hand him thirty bucks, saying “See you in a couple weeks,” but seriously, the kid is a mad stoner and I just don’t think there’s enough guile there to undertake a summer-long program of conditioning– I finally got my mower up and running, a process which proved much easier than I had envisioned, and spent an hour puttering around that lawn, choking the mower almost to death in the thick patches that hadn’t been mowed in quite some time.

It’s a little thing, chopping up the grass on a patch of land that you own (or that your wife owns and allows you to manicure).  And it’s a little thing, finishing a job left undone by your neighborhood stoner.  But for about an hour this afternoon, I felt like the returning conqueror, like the hero in a late-night western, like the king of the fucking world.