These Are My Dramas

So, now and then I get into a Moleskine state of mind. Even though I already have a few blank ones, I feel a need to buy more. I write poem drafts in them, and if I were to keep a journal I would journal in them. This week was very eventful insofar as I bought a couple of ruled ones for the first time. Moleskine or not, all of my writing journals, for both home and out-and-about use, have always been unruled. Maybe you think this is unimportant. However, I must have spent an hour or two the other day trying to decide whether to make this switch.

Maybe it’s because, as a poet, I am very sensitive to white space on the page. Maybe it’s because my Zen training has made me especially sensitive to the use of white space in some varities of traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. Whatever the reason, I’ve always felt a strong, visceral preference for unruled paper. It feels spacious, open, vast. And I can draw on it, too.

But now the ruled paper has called to me. It feels more “literary,” in a 19^th-century sort of way. For instance, I’ve seen Whitman’s notebooks from the first drafts of what would become Leaves of Grass; his notebooks had ruled paper. And the resistance the lines provide—the anti-spaciousness, if you will—is kind of nice to work against. It just feels more writerly. Plus, I can draw on ruled paper, too, if I really want to.

(Of course, it could also be that the ruled paper just gives me a handy excuse to buy new Moleskines. Can’t use those unruled ones, no, no, no.)

Perhaps some of you may scoff at my disproportionate concern for such things. What can I say? I am a writer. These are my dramas. (Actually, I have other dramas, but this is not that kind of blog.)

On a related note, this book is being released next month, and it just makes me so f-ing happy. (Seriously.) C.G. Jung is probably my central intellectual/cultural influence. His ideas are fundamental for me (however much I may have strayed from them in my actual life. Damn you, grad school!). Finally, someone is publishing a facsimile of his famous Red Book. Many of Jung's central ideas derive from a period known as his “creative illness,” which sounds euphemistic but really isn't. He had a sort of mid-life near-schizophrenic crack-up, but he climbed out of it and forged this psychic raw material into ideas. He kept a journal (not a Moleskine, alas) of his “active imagination” dialogues with symbolic figures in his own psyche. He then reworked these journal entries into this beautiful Red Book, combining the dialogues and ideas with fascinating and often beautiful little paintings of his own. It is a modern holy book of the soul.

This book has always fascinated me. I consider it representative of what I’d like my body of poetic writing to be.

It's actually on exhibit in New York this fall. I’m sorely tempted to go, even though I can't really afford the trip. I mean, it’s the Red Book! For me, this is like seeing the True Cross, if there were a True Cross. At any rate, I’m damned well buying the facsimile, even if it is very pricey. His insights are like talismans than I can use to ward off the evil spirits of banality and nihilism that devour our culture so rapaciously. It is my hope that reading this book, and just looking at it, will propel me back into the Jungian waters that used to nourish me so well, and which gave birth to my sense of poetry vocation in the first place.

As far as that vocation is concerned, I guess I’ve once again accepted that it is just my fate, no matter how horrified I am by many of the trends in contemporary poetry. Maybe my work has a place here, or maybe not. (I did get a nice acceptance e-mail recently from a very fine journal, the subject line of which read “Your wonderful poems.” Maybe the ice is beginning to crack.)

One of my current projects is an essay/presentation called “That I was blessed and could bless”: Toward a Poetics of Joy. Let’s just say that I am very concerned about what poetry has become, especially since I’ve resigned myself to the job. It seems so narrow now. I was talking recently to a non-lit, non-creative-writing professor at a local university, and when I mentioned that I was a poet, she said, “I like Billy Collins. He gives me a chuckle.” Of course my first impulse was outrage at her (inwardly, anyway; outwardly, I just smiled and said, “He is very popular.”) But then I thought, can I really blame her? Why would any sane person who isn’t already fully embroiled in the poetry world submit to the grim, often-petty, hair-shirt “interrogations” of language that constitute a good chunk of contemporary poetry?

At any rate, I didn’t get into poetry to confess anything or to subvert the relationship between signifier and signified. So, currently I’m trying to develop a poetics that makes, or regains, some room in poetry for the sort of experiences I consider worth having as a human being. (This is not to say that I find there to be no room at all for such experiences in contemporary poetry. As with any polemic, I guess I’m focusing very strongly on the side I disagree with.)

I will continue to fuss with these thoughts—possibly in a Moleskine!

(This blog entry is not brought to you by The Moleskine Company, though it might as well be.)