Whut, it's been like a year?

Well, I got one damn thing published in Prick of the Spindle. Submitted some other stuff. Trying to produce new things instead of constantly rehashing old ones, though I think some decent stuff may come of the old things yet. We'll see. Locking on to target, &c.

I submitted also to Typo and the Valparaiso Review or whatever, got a no back from Valparaiso, still waiting on the other two. That's fine with me! Now I will go have a look at the things that were rejected and see if anything more can be made of them.

To be honest, I haven't written much new-new in a long time. A lot of things need sorting out. What stuff to write when I won't let myself have my own stuff?

To my credit

I submitted 5 poems to the Cortland Review last week. I wasn't so happy with the shape they were in, but I did it, and now I at least don't have to think about those particular 5
for awhile. A whole year, maybe.

I am messing around with the kite one again. I can't seem to get anything new started, though, it's all re-re-re-rehashing of drafts I already have. How to get new stuff going?? A mystery!

Long time, also very stuck

I can't write any fucking poems because I am too far away from everything outside myself, and the time it takes for something from outside to get to the inside is so long that by the time something trickles down for me to react to it's hardly worth it. Little world-fragments make their slow way into the small white room where I sit and then what? I just stare at them. What am I supposed to do with these?
The opposite of abundance, but also not a lack, since I've engineered myself never to experience lack.

Fffffff

I am a stupid 5 on the stupid enneagram and if I let anything go it is a loss to me, a loss at the center of me, and everything is so tidy that I can't get to where it all mixes and becomes real, and even though I can write when I make myself I'm so apart from myself and it's so apart from me, I don't know if I am able--

when I do write I have to separate it from me and not care about it, otherwise I can't do anything at all. Like I have to fool myself into thinking it's not about anything really, and then let it come back around to where it is real and me, and then I get grossed out by it all and abandon the effort.

Concludatory remarks

Workshop's over, it was... well, overpriced, and I clearly can't afford to do something like that again, but it was still helpful, and I liked the other participants, and I got some useful feedback and I hope I offered some to them, too. But overall the result was that I don't really want to write anything anymore. I used to feel obligated, and guilty when I wasn't working on something (which is, like, 95% of the time). But now I just don't really mind one way or the other.

1.) I am overZenning it about everything, unintentionally
2.) I am being a punk, unconsciously, and figuring that it's better to think I might be good at something but not try to be really good at it
3.) Poemy phase: completed.

Hard to know!

"Too accomplished" is not the worst criticism a poem could receive

I'll give it that.

There's something stuck somewhere and the thing to do is try to unstick it. Or the other thing to do is live with it stuck. Either way something in me is operating at half-, or quarter-power.