Despite and still

I’m writing again, after a year in which the hour a day I had gotten into the habit of devoting to poetry started to seem like the 50 pages I wasn’t reading for prelims. Prelims are over. So is the campaign for research assistants at my university to get the right to form a union, the other reason I had stopped writing. Again, that hour a day I wrote largely unintelligible (and certainly unpublishable) fragments in my notebook started to seem legible only as the hour I wasn’t writing a press release, knocking on an office door to have an organizing conversation, or simply marshaling the immense emotional resources required for an introvert to do such things. Compared to other things I should have been doing, writing started to seem like time I couldn’t afford.

I’m writing again despite the knowledge that my having time to write is underwritten by the middle class-ness that implicates me in the overlapping systems of oppression my writing has not the slightest chance of changing. I’m writing pieces driven largely by my life, despite the fact that my life is noteworthy only for its viritually exact replication in countless other middle class bodies: white, female, 30, grad student three times over, married, able to afford food every day. I’m trying my hardest not to write this poem: “I ate/did/saw something yesterday that was so delicious/meaningful/pretty. It taught me X.” But on many days, every poem seems like that poem.

I’m trying to write despite not having conquered the impasse of my MFA defense: one committee member telling me I had lost my voice, that the writing I did before the MFA was better; one committee member telling me that wasn’t necessarily true but offering little in the way of feedback to help me understand what I might now be trying to do. One reader saying I’d gone too far in trimming out the emotions, one reader saying the emotions weren’t what was missing but something else still was.

I’m going to write even though I’m pretty sure I’m never going to publish. At some point, because I want to be read because I want to keep growing, I’ll probably start trying to get published again, but if readers are what I want, I don’t think publishing in places I currently know how to publish is the answer. I don’t need acceptance slips, I need a community–but all of poetic history tells me you can’t plan those, they just happen in certain cities at certain times, so I have assuredly missed that boat. I’ll write anyway.

I’m going to write even though I also feel fairly certain that I am part of a lost, or at least a gap, generation in many regards: my parents, literal and figurative, have for a long time been unable to prepare me for the meaning of work and achievement in the world ahead of me. I grew up in one world of achievement and am an adult in a very different one. I spent several years trying to become a writer for the future, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that in any meaningful way through trying to. As a literary critic in training, the gist I’m getting is that the approach to dealing with the massive poetic output of present moment, the concrete evidence that my feelings of unimportance are not defeatist but just accurate, into a blender and running a nutritional analysis of what comes out rather than reading individual writers. I don’t know how to write around this except to stop writing, and I now think I am not willing to do that  just because it would make sense.

As I’m writing, I’m thinking about just putting my poems on my blog and sending links to friends who might be interested. I’m feeling pretty far outside of any other social network that is likely to lead to formal publication of any kind. Given my frustration with whats getting published via the sampler systems of PD and DV these days, I don’t think I could embarrass myself that much worse than many others appear comfortable with. It’s a thought. What generation am I writing from if I don’t do it? If I do?