I had some unexpected time today so I had a chance to play around with my recent poem, Launching Rockets, and put some film clips together for a new video.

All the images and clips are public domain, except the rolling clouds, which I found at StockFootageForFree and downloaded free of charge. I recorded the audio on Garage Band and then put the whole thing together using iMovie, which came with my MacBook.

I’m always a bit nervous about putting a video on YouTube. Maybe it’s because I’m out of my element. Putting a blog post or a book out into the ether seems so much easier, but that’s probably because I’ve done so much more of that than this.

I do wish more writers would use video. It would be nice to see a Literature section on YouTube one day, with millions of hits, millions of people sharing really cool, hands right down in the earth pulling at the universal soul kind of content… but until that happens, here’s something I did.

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This recent poem seems to be pretty well self-explanatory. I’m not sure yet how I feel about it. I’m not even sure if this is really a poem, or just an expanded question.

Launching Rockets

The road behind us
is paved with atrocities.
We circle and circle,
our destination
and our centre unknown.

Ourselves, we are blameless.
We did not choose this world.
It sprouted beneath us,
without design or reason,
from the blood sweat of fear,
from dust and ashes,
from fire and cannons,
from misguided desire and greed.

We keep winding a new earth
from tight threads of light,
exploring, improving,
launching new tangents
towards the edges of time.

Our engines were forged
in the ovens of Auschwitz,
our fuel refined from
the blood of our oceans,
from the blood of our soldiers,
our children, our mothers.

With tools such as these
can we ever break free?
Can we ever escape
our complicity
from a world that
sprang from our feet?

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There is a small terror here on earth some might call hell. You see it almost every day, though you might not recognize it. It’s hidden in the shadows of coffee shops and the late-night check out counters of grocery stores.

It is a place where small demons rule, feeding on heartache and regret, while trampling hope with careless cloven hooves. It is a place where potential genius smolders in piles of ash, and the minute hand of every clock seems to be shaped like a pitch fork, pointing always in one’s face.

I’m talking about the place where anyone lives who is forced to give up what they love, who are exiled from their skills and talents, for the sake of paying the monthly rent, to afford food, to pay for the gas to get them to their job, taking precious hours and stuffing them down yesterday’s incinerator.

I met a doctor driving a cab a few weeks ago. He is new to Canada and his qualifications have not been recognized. I know a talented artist who drives a truck every day from one end of the city to the other. And I sometimes think that Starbucks was created just as a way to give struggling artists and actors some interesting life experiences behind a counter.

On the other hand, I had a conversation with an aging unknown writer who set himself out in a self-imposed exile from what he loves many, many years ago. And it seems now he forgotten how to ever get back. I asked him why he had never tried to find a publisher for the novel he had written so many years ago.

“I could never be commercial,” he said. “I know they would want to make changes to it, and I could never sell myself out…” (the way you have, was what I inferred he had wanted to say – and I smiled).

I have heard this opinion before. It usually goes hand-in-hand with statements like “artistic integrity” and “art for art’s sake alone”. These are lofty ideals. I’ve only met a few people who have been able to live up to such ideals. They are happy with their choices. They smile when they speak of it without a hint of bitterness or despair.

For the rest of us, there are two ways of selling out, and nothing is for free.
One is to create works of inspiration and form them in a way to ensure they will have meaning to others. The other is to keep your work to yourself, and trade your waking hours for dollars.

If you sincerely believe that Van Gogh never wanted to sell a painting, or that James Joyce never wanted to be appreciated by more than a handful of people, you have probably used words like “art for art’s sake” and “artistic integrity” more than a few times in your life.

If you are a bona fide genius, that is one thing. But if not, then you should ask yourself what price you are really paying for refusing to make a living from the talents and skills you were meant to use for the benefit of others. An athlete who does not have the opportunity to use their muscles on a regular basis, soon loses the right to call himself an athlete at all. An artist who never has the time to paint, or a writer who hasn’t written a word in a few years, soon discover the talents they had sought to protect from our commercial world have been suffocated to death, locked in a cabinet labeled “in progress”.

Most of the great artists, musicians and writers of history we celebrate today were great in their own time as well, recognized by the people they shared the world with for their ability to communicate with others. Shakespeare was a sell-out, as was Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Chopin and Picasso. Artists not recognized until after their death, like Van Gogh or Emily Dickinson, are painfully rare.

There are two ways of selling out. You can sell your ideas to others and use your talents to contribute to the lives of those around you, or you can trade your time for money. Aside from these two options, there is no free ride.

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Did that get your attention? The title was just a lure. There are no rules of poetry any more than there are rules for what you should do after you wake up in the morning.

The post I wrote recently on Murderous Poets seems to have cause a stir. It was only a small stir, beneath the surface, most of it in the form of private emails, saying things like: Yes, it’s about time someone spoke up, I agree, etc.

If you liked it, I’m pleased. If it embarrassed you for some of the things you’ve written and shared with friends on your blog, I’m not pleased at all. But if it made you rethink what you might try to send to a publisher, I’m back to being pleased. And, for a couple of you pro’s, if it made you get all pissy and recoil, sputtering “Well! I never!” … well then I’m back to being pleased again.

Write what you want to write. If you’re a douche, then write like a douche. If you want people to feel clueless and question their intelligence when reading your work, go ahead. If you want to read other people’s work and rewrite it to make it look like something original, be my guest.

Now I do have some rules for myself. And I have been asked what they are, so I’m sharing them here. I would never suggest anyone follow these rules. If they make sense to you and you want to borrow them, be my guest. But they are really just for me.

1. Notes are not poems. Most of my notes look like poetry, only because my writing is so illegible I’m the only one who can identify most of the words. If you could read the words within the poetry-like lines, you would know they are not poems at all. Taking sentences and cutting them into separate lines… those are wide margins, not poems.

2. Most poems are private. I would say about 80 percent of what I write falls into this category. They only make sense to me and people who are close to me. Love poems are private, for example. However, that is not to say that with some revision they can’t become poems that others might be able to appreciate as well.

3. Rewrite. I’d say on average, anything I write that becomes a public poem goes through at least a dozen revisions. Rarely will something spill out of my pen ready to go out into the world in one draft. The last poem I finished (this morning actually) went through about fifty revisions. It is only 18 lines long. At one point it was 50 lines. At another point it was 8 lines. Over the course of a week, I spent about 20 hours on it. I don’t usually think about the time, I just keep working on it until its done.

4. Read. For myself, if I didn’t read poetry by other writers on a regular basis, I don’t know how I could write poetry myself. I don’t understand people who call themselves poets who do not read poetry, or novelists who do not read novels. Imagine a car mechanic saying to you, “Oh, I drove a lot in school. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in twenty years.”

5. No Lint, No Sand. When I’m writing a poem, it has to have meaning to me and to the audience. One of the poorest lessons we learn while studying literature is that there are academics who will analyze every word of a poem, compare it to the biography of the writer, compare it to other poems, and put footnotes and references at the bottom of the page. We’re then tempted to take this lesson and apply it to our own work, writing verbose sonnets about the the most mundane things in our lives, inflating them with literary allusions without giving the keys to what those allusions should mean.

“Ah, its finding the whole universe within the grain of sand,” I was recently told. That’s fine, but without the universe exploding from inside, it’s just another boring grain of sand. It’s just a piece of lint from the navel of your life.  Read Whitman. Read Neruda. Read Shakespeare. Read Plath. Look for the lint, without meaning, without feeling, without the whole of the universe and the whole of humanity exploding from inside each page. You won’t find it.

When I’m writing a poem I am keenly aware that every second someone spends reading my words is a second that is either going to be added to their life experience, or just taken away from their coffee break. My work won’t always have meaning to everyone who reads it, but my goal in transforming a private note to a public poem is to give it as much universality as possible.

For the record, the grain of sand reference comes from William Blake’s
“Auguries of Innocence”:

“To see the world in a grain of sand,
and to see heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hands,
and eternity in an hour.”
~William Blake

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We are as swimmers
treading water.
Our heads watch and listen
as we contemplate
cool white clouds
and the vastness of sky
and beneath our bobbing chins,
the silky mirror of loneliness
that keeps us distant and cool
and aligned.

Yet beneath this skin of water,
fingers touch extended fingers
and caress our rhythmic thighs,
as the reality of our love
surrounds us
and embraces us and
keeps us buoyant and warm.
Our bodies celebrate,
ecstatic, beneath
lonely eyes and ears.

(click here for a larger image)

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We must stretch the edges of our love,
kneading the heart from its centre
always outward to another.
We must stretch our voices
to fill the silence.
We must stretch our hands
to heal the impossible.
We must pour out our spirit
to fill the shallows
with our abundance.
We must extend ourselves
to become always more.

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I don’t personally suffer from writer’s block. If anything, I have a problem keeping new ideas from overwhelming the work at hand. However, that is not to say that I never suffered from it. In my early days, a blank piece of paper and I would engage in staring contests for days, and sometimes weeks.

If you are suffering from writer’s block, here are a five writers block ideas to help you get going again.

1. Write about your writer’s block. On paper, or on your computer, dedicate yourself to writing two full pages about writer’s block: what might be causing it, how you feel about it, why you hate it, how frustrating it is, and what you wish you could do about it. Once you set yourself in motion, your mind is going to get quickly bored of the complaining, and you can begin writing about what you would like to write about instead of writing about writer’s block.

2. Transcribe What You’ve Already Written. This something I do as a matter of habit, without exception, and one of the reasons I seldom suffer from writer’s block. When writing fiction, I seldom leave at the end of the chapter. If I get to the end of a chapter, I always write a couple paragraphs of the next chapter. Then, when I sit down again, I’ll begin re-writing those paragraphs, letting the words already written pull me into the character and the setting.

3. Transcribe Someone Else’s Work. If you are thinking about something you want to write about, open a book, a magazine, or a web browser and find something of interest and start retyping what was written. After a few paragraphs, you will begin to get into the flow, like a parent holding the back of a bicycle for the first couple peddles. Before you know it you’re off and running with your own words. I’ve tried this myself only once after watching Finding Forrester – a great movie about writing – and it does work. Just make sure you delete the words you retyped! Interestingly, Hunter S. Thompson had said that he taught himself to write a book by retyping Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in its entirety.

4. Sketch. Go Outside. Sit in the park, on a bench at the mall, at a coffee shop, a bar, or anywhere else where you don’t normally go. Like a painter will make sketches, do the same thing in your notebook. Describe the scene in front of you, the people passing by. Imagine where they are going, where they came from, ask yourself about their hopes and dreams. Describe how they speak, how they dress, how they move.

5. Write Every Day. With computers and the internet, it is very tempting to do all of your work on a keyboard. Unfortunately, that means you might not be doing as much personal writing – writing just for yourself that no one else will see. Making a point of writing a page or two each day in a paper (old-school) notebook. Months later, once they have been set away, these raw and unpolished nuggets can become priceless treasures, inspiring some of your best work.

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Writing has saved my life on quite a few occasions. This is a deeply personal story, probably the most personal, and one I’ve shared with only four people. But the last person I shared it with urged me to tell it again, publicly, because, she said, it seemed important that I tell others. I trust her advice, so here it is:

I was suffering from depression at the time. Despite a successful career personally, the company I was working for had gone bankrupt and the bills were piling up. Getting work in high tech was not easy at the time, as thousands had just been let go from several other companies. My marriage was not doing too well at the time either, and I was also in a bit of pain, having a couple cracked ribs from a sparring tournament. There were a lot of other things going on, but let’s just say nothing was going well. Then, one morning, in the midst of a long walk, I found myself standing on the railroad tracks without any real intentions of stepping away.

That was the moment I realized there was something seriously wrong with me. There was something about my brain chemistry, or my thoughts that was desperately flawed. Now I have always believed that what we focus on around us has a lot to say about where our lives are, where our thoughts are, and the direction we’re heading. I had no idea what was wrong with me, so I went home, got into the car, and decided to drive without any destination in mind. I would empty my thoughts and would just flow with the traffic, letting the world take me on a journey. If I had a green light, I would drive straight, or turn left. If it was a red light, I’d turn right. I would watch for everything that came my way and see where the world might take me. I had done this only a few times before, but it had always somehow resharpened my focus on life. (There is a bit of Jungian psychology behind this, but that’s another story.) In this case I had only one thought in mind: what should I do next?

So off I went and within a half hour I found myself in the parking lot of a mall. I went into the Home Depot and began roaming the aisles, watching and listening for anything that might strike a chord in me. I soon encountered a carpenter with only one arm, trying to wrestle down a sheet of plywood onto a large cart. I asked if I could help, but he grinned and assured me he was quite fine.

Perhaps I should focus more on other people right now, I asked myself, instead of worrying solely on getting another job? Perhaps that’s what I’m doing wrong? Maybe I should get a job building houses for the summer and forget about sales and the high tech industry… And I continued on, out of the store, and into a Walmart next door.

I browsed the aisles, and watched the people, still looking for direction, and one of the things I noticed was a young clerk, opening a cardboard box with only one hand. She seemed to have a birth defect, and her other hand was only really a stub. She was doing very well and obviously was in no need of my help, so I continued on.

In the parking lot, as I approached the car, I passed a mother and a toddler going into the store. The toddler had, not one, but two artificial arms. I got in the car, wondering now why I was noticing this coincidence of all the things I could be noticing… and I shook my head and began to drive.

Within the next two blocks, I saw a woman pedestrian with only one hand. And then another child, with a missing hand. And then a man with two missing arms.

In a half an hour I had seen six people with missing hands. I couldn’t make sense of this. There was no hospital nearby. These were not the same people (seen in the store and then outside afterwards for example – yes, I thought of this!) None of them seemed to have anything in common, except this same disability. There was no hospital nearby, no clinic that I knew of. There was not a conference nearby.

Then, within a few more minutes, I saw the seventh such person, and my head began to swim with questions. I had set out looking for some external sign about what I should do next with my life… and this is what I keep seeing? What could this mean? I kept wondering if I should do something to help people who are disabled… but none of these people were in need of my help. So I kept asking, if this is some kind of sign, this synchronicity, what the hell could it mean?

I went home immediately and hugged my children and tried to put this out of my mind. I even wondered if I had hallucinated this. Or perhaps, I wondered, there are a lot more disabled people living in Ottawa than I had noticed before… I was honestly at a complete loss as to what I should think, or what I should do after this strange journey. (I did book an appointment with my doctor for the next day.)

That night I had a vivid dream. I was a teenager, at home, talking to a family friend who had always encouraged me. In the dream, however, she was staring at me with only a cold disdain.

“I had such hopes for you when you were young,” she explained to me. “You had such a talent and what have you done with it?”

“My writing?” I smiled. “I have bigger problems right now. Besides I have my poems and stories and my articles…. I admit I’ve not had time in the past few years…”

“It’s been too many years,” she said. “You’ve squandered your talent. And that’s a sin you can never be forgiven. Everything we hoped for you is now gone.”

“But I can always write again,” I began to explain. “Right now I have a family to worry about and bills to pay…”

“No,” she said. “We both know you’ll never write again.”

“But there will always be time later…”

And then her disdain turned to pity. Her eyes softened.

“But David,” she said, pointing at me, pointing at something I had not noticed yet in the dream. “How can you write….”

And this is when I awoke. Screaming.

“… when you have no hands.”

I sat up in bed and the image of two stumps where my hands should be took a few seconds to fade. I got out of bed and went down to my office in the basement, took out my notebook and began to write the first lines of what would later become The Tanglewood Murders.

A few days without writing seriously had become a few months, and then had become a few years. I had, I believe, completely isolated myself from that part of me which desperately needs to keep writing. After that dream, it took only a couple weeks for my life to start getting back into shape. In fact, I was offered a great job only a couple weeks afterwards. With the help of my doctor, the depression was lifted. And I’ve written every day of my life since that dream.

This seems a silly story to me now as I’ve written it out for you. In fact, I’m not going to proof read it, because I may not ever hit that publish button if I do. But there may be a couple lessons in it, I hope. If you feel you have a purpose in life, don’t turn your back on it. And if you’re in the belly of a whale, ask for help to get out.

So there’s my story. One draft. Unedited, unread.

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Some time ago I wrote an article asking what is a poet, including some very insightful takes on the word by a dozen writers, artists and musicians.

Someone recently reminded me that I had not actually answered my own question, so here it is, from the preface of First Stirrings…

The poet is not the dreamer amongst us, whose head is in the fog of clouds, unable to face reality.

It is the crowd around him, walking past on the busy streets, in a hurry, driving their cars, working their machinery, watching their television sets in perpetual re-run who are asleep in dreams. Those of us who walk through our days repeating in our heads the dialogues of yesterday’s lunch meeting, last night’s encounter with a loved one, yesterday’s argument with a co-worker, or a parent, or a child; those of us who project into the future our fears and expectations, rehearsing scripts of what we are going to say whenever we get to where we are going, what we should have said, what might be said to us, what we should say in reply to that… It is those of us who are asleep.

Reality exists only in the present moment. The past and the future do not even exist, except as dreams, whether they be the dreams of memories or the dreams of anticipation.

It is possible that poetry in our western culture has been dead for many years, ever since it was first bludgeoned in Ezra Pound’s train station about a century ago. It came very close to death certainly when it was dismembered by well-meaning hippies who, unable to find the universe in a grain of sand, attempted to elevate that grain to mythic proportions and then scoured fields and bedrooms for anything minuscule and ordinary so far untouched with poetry or prose which they could celebrate in epic free style sagas and quaint, well-meaning haiku. It suffered its last gasp, I believe, at the hands of inept academics who, unable to create beauty themselves, derived their own derivative works based on the derivative works of previous academics who long to touch our souls as Shakespeare, as Keats, as Byron, as Williams, but sadly had only thumbs where their fingers might have been.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. And for those exceptions to the hoards, I can say with confidence that poetry is not quite dead. It is still in a coma, but still faintly breathing, on life support in the farthest back corner of of the bookstore, on the bottom shelf where the occasional hopeful student of a poetry workshop night school class still checks in to make sure it is still there. And it is beginning to stir.

But while poetry may be near death, the poet is very much alive. And therein lies our hope for our future. Make no mistake: this is what drives the universe. Unlike any other art form, it is poetry that can remind us to be awake to the present moment and nudge us out of our sleep-walking daily lives. Gently and carefully, certainly, because you can not just jolt a sleep walker from his daze.

Give it a try today. Step outside, onto the street and watch those who walk by. Watch their eyes as they dream about where they came from and where they are going, but have closed their eyes to where they are this moment. Watch their lips move slightly as they replay yesterday’s lines or rehearse their scripts for tomorrow. And then look around to see if anyone else is watching too, or even watching you. If he has a pen in hand and if you have difficulty focusing on his face, it could be the poet.

See if he winks.

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This is a question I’m often asked, Where do you get your ideas? Usually, people assume my ideas come from my own experiences and from people I know. In my articles and poetry, that is almost always true, but not in my fiction. Fiction can be inspired by personal experience, certainly, but almost never from people I know, or their experiences. Regardless of what I’m writing, the ideas always come from the same process:

1. Watch & Listen to People: My best ideas almost always come from people. Not from their lives, or their stories, but single moments. Each moment of observation is a seed for hundreds of ideas. For example, I was just coming home tonight with a pizza and I saw two people who just happened to catch  my eye, two blocks from each other, on the other side of the street. The first was a business man wearing a tailored suit, with shaggy hair, pulling at the locked door of the barber shop, then stepping back, shaking his head with frustration. The second was a four-year-old girl with a big rosy cheeks (apple cheeks, as Orr from Catch-22 might say). Her father bent down and cupped one of those cheeks with the palm of her hand and said something to her that made her smile.

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

2. Think about people: When watching people, ask yourself questions about them. What did the father say to that girl to cause her to smile? How often does he touch her beautiful cheeks with his hand? What could he see in her face that no one else could see? Does he remind him of her mother? His own mother? I assumed it was her father, but what other relationship could they have had? Why were they standing on the sidewalk, as if they were waiting for someone?

When contemplating the man at the barber shop, I asked myself questions like these: How long had he been intending on going there, and how long had he been putting it off? Was that his wife in the car waiting for him? Had she driven him there? What would have been their conversation before going there? What would she say to him when he got back into the car? Would she laugh? Would she be angry? Would she be relieved? Does he hate haircuts as much as I do? What does he do for a living? What might be happening tomorrow morning that would make it vital that he gets a haircut tonight? What could have caused them to be late in getting there?

Each of these single moments could spawn a dozen short stories, or chapters in a novel, depending on how you answer any of these questions.

3. Make Notes: Most often, these moments will not amount to anything right away. I have an analog style black notebook, filled with notes. Most of them are point form, or almost like immature poems. For example:

bushy haired
business man
banging on the
barbershop door.

This is not really a poem as far as I’m concerned, except maybe in Jack Kerouac urban haiku kind of way. But it is written down and, maybe in a few weeks, or months, when I’m leafing through my notebook working out a problem with a character, or playing with a new poem, these few words will then react with what is already in my mind, and become a new idea. What if, for example, I later have a character rushing to a wedding or a funeral…? Or what if a witness observed such a scene the night before a crime was committed at a local store? What if the shop owner owed this man money and had promised to be there at this time?

An entire mystery novel could result from this one 5-second observation, simply by looking across the street while walking home with a pizza. Ideas surround us. The answer to where to get ideas is usually right in front of you, waiting to be seen.

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