Ending A Writing Year

Officially at least, today is the last day of A Writing Year. Tomorrow I return to my regular job full-time, and resume writing the way I did before -- whenever I can.

Since I know from past experience that "whenever I can" is not very often (except for some regular writing time in the mornings, which I aim to continue), I've done my best to set things up so that I can complete the manuscript of poems I'm working on by the end of January. Out of the 75 or so decent drafts that I wrote this year, I've settled on about 40 to be included in the collection and have retyped those line by line, editing them in the process. I've also started on the Afterword to the manuscript, where I hope to reflect on my experience of the year and draw whatever small conclusions I can from it.

This is not to say that the prospect of ending AWY is entirely somber. I'd say it's bittersweet. The year has gone by quickly, and I can't help but wonder if I used it as well as I could have. In many ways, AWY was my chance to try out a writing life and see if I could make poetry work for me in a more significant way, so in some respects ending AWY represents the winding-down of a certain whirring set of aspirations.

On the other hand, my regular job has grown far more engaging over the past six months, and I think I'll feel relieved not to have to balance my commitment to it and to my own writing any longer. Also, having had an opportunity to devote this time to my writing, I feel satisfied to move on. I started AWY because I felt the undertow of everyday life and knew I'd regret not giving myself a chance to be a poet before it swept me out. Now that I've had that chance, the currents feel less threatening. Writing poems may never be a full-time occupation for me, but it will continue to keep me occupied.

So what's next for this blog? Over the next month I'll continue posting updates here, if sporadically. Once the manuscript is complete, I'll post a link to the Lulu.com page where you can order a copy for your personal library. Then you will be able to judge for yourself whether this was a worthwhile endeavor or in fact a regrettable waste of time. After that, I hope to write a few more things about the process of transitioning back to work, and maybe to shop around pieces of the collection. I do hope to leave the blog up and running for a while, in keeping with my goal of providing a resource to others.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Check back for more over the next few weeks.

Halfway Through

Now that it's July, I'm over halfway through this little project. Thinking back on what I've been able to accomplish and what I've learned so far, it strikes me that there haven't been any major surprises.

By far the biggest challenge has been effectively balancing my writing time with my work time and, more to the point, conserving enough energy to be able to focus on writing. I thought that writing in the morning, before starting work, would mitigate this challenge. While that schedule has certainly made things easier, I underestimated how difficult it would be to clear my mind of each day's commitments during those morning hours.

I also realize that I was far too optimistic about my prospects for getting my poems published. When I set my goals for the year, I (naively) imagined that I could get into six journals. Having received my fair share of rejection letters before, I should have known better. I've received some encouraging feedback (well, as encouraging as a rejection letter can be), but so far, no dice. I'm tempted to say, a la Rilke, Donald Hall, and many other, wiser writers, that I should not have focused on publication at all, and instead turned inward and used this year to build up a solid collection. But the fact is that my goals for sending poems out have been a significant motivator for me at times when I felt most dispirited; at least then I felt like I was doing something, not just sitting by myself, scribbling away.

Along the same lines, having a group of readers to respond to my work has been essential. They give me an audience--however small--and have consistently illuminated facets of my poems that I had not noticed or fully explored. That's not to say that all of them have been reliable or fast in their responses, but I didn't expect them to be. After all, they're busy people. It has been hard enough for me to find enough energy for this work, and I've carved out at least 20 hours a week to do it.

Looking ahead to the remaining six months, I'd like to be better about not only drafting poems, but completing them. So far I've given myself a lot of room to explore and make mistakes. In my daily writing I feel free to create spectacular poetic wrecks and half-formed freaks of nature. That's fine, but as time begins to become more of an issue, I need to rededicate myself to not just starting, but finishing poems. It sounds obvious, but it requires patience and determination.

Relatedly, I have to start more consciously exploring connections between the poems I'm working on and begin thinking of ways to gather them into a coherent manuscript. I want to emerge from AWY with some kind of collection, even if it is imperfect. That will take work and planning. By November I hope to be well into the process of culling and editing the poems that will be included, which means I only have a little over three months to build up a stockpile of material. Jeezus.

More focus, more finished poems, and more work towards a manuscript. Sounds about right. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Strategies for Not Working

Writing part-time and working part-time has generally made for a good balance. I feel like I have enough time for writing but am still connected to and invested in my job, which I honestly enjoy. I expected that I would have some difficulty maintaining a boundary between the two; after all, my job is fast-paced and I work from home, so that boundary is really just a click of the mouse on my Outlook account. I worried that my own neurotic tendencies and workaholic nature would get the best of me, and I'd find myself laboring on a proposal when I should be drafting poems.

I've found those anxieties to be warranted, at least to some extent, but not in the way I expected. Not working is easy; not thinking about working is another matter altogether. It comes down to an imbalance in expectations and pressure. No one but myself is holding me to account for my writing, but I'm accountable to a number of people for doing my work. If I don't write, nothing much happens. Maybe two or three of my readers will ask what's going on. On the other hand, if I fail to do my work, I will get in trouble and eventually be fired (and rightly so).

So keeping my morning writing time free of work tasks is generally a simple matter of refusing to open my work email or open the folder on my desktop that holds all my work-related files. But on weeks when work is hectic--when I have too many deadline-driven projects and time starts to become an issue--just focusing on my writing can take real willpower. Reading Keats this morning, my attention kept wandering ahead to my to-do list for this afternoon. It's a frustrating experience that has motivated me to find ways of clearing my head. Here are some of the things I'm doing:

• Making work lists: I'm being more diligent than ever about tracking projects at work and clearly listing out daily and weekly priorities. I find this helps me avoid some of the mental hand-wringing that happens when I'm worried about forgetting something.

• Setting daily/weekly writing goals: In addition to the overarching goals I set for myself at the beginning of AWY, I'm trying to come up with smaller, weekly goals to keep myself on task. The hard part here is not allowing myself to get away with busywork -- going through the motions of writing without actually investing myself in it, purely for the sake of meeting the goal.
  

• Changing my writing environment: I'm a creature of habit but that doesn't mean I can't recognize a rut when I'm stuck in it. This doesn't necessarily entail huge changes, but small adjustments, like where I sit when I'm writing (since it's spring here in Chicago, I've tried writing out on our back deck a few times) or putting some quiet music on (jazz or blues I prefer -- nothing with lyrics, which are distracting).

• Righting the pressure imbalance: In other words, doing things like redoubling my commitment to sending out new work to my readers, or asking my wife to demand to hear new poems from me at the end of every week -- anything to balance out the pressure I feel to get my job-related work done.

• Practicing rigorous focus: Which is not to say I know how, exactly. But I'm trying to find ways to block out all thoughts of work during my writing time. For example, I've discovered that reading aloud, or at least moving my lips with the words, decreases the chances that I will space out. The rest is a kind of mix of meditative practice and sheer stubbornness.
  

Having listed out these strategies, I notice that I'm still essentially accommodating my behavior to the demands of my work (without addressing what may be real issues on that side of things as well). So I should say another thing I'm doing is communicating more clearly with the people I work with about my capacity to take on new projects and meet the demands I face. To date, they have been flexible and understanding when I cry uncle.

Thoughts at Month 3

It's somewhere near terrifying that I'll be a quarter of the way through A Writing Year in just a few more weeks. Fortunately, over the last couple weeks, especially, I've felt a new energy for writing and a sense of confidence in the work I'm producing. I'm drafting about one poem a day, and though they certainly won't all be worth keeping, I feel like that pace is helping me build a kind of creative momentum. I'm thinking about new poems all the time and suddenly seeing solutions for problematic older drafts. When I started this year, I worried about having enough material to keep my readers occupied, but now I find I have to hold myself back so they aren't overwhelmed.

That said, I'm still cautious. Having found a good routine and achieved a kind of productive rhythm, I'm wary of doing something that could mess it all up. So I'm trying to avoid thinking about it too much and to conserve some energy from day to day, keeping a balance between creation and revision and attending to new ideas one at a time, across the week. For now, it seems to be working.

Though putting them together felt totally lame, the goals I mapped out for myself before starting AWY have kept me motivated and are helping drive my current pace. Here's a quick update of my progress so far:

Writing
Since January 1, I've drafted and typed up 23 poems. There are probably 6-10 more that have yet to be ensconced in MS Word. That translates to 3-4 poems per week, or almost double what I was aiming for. Which is good, because probably half of them are scary disabled things, missing legs or eyes and calling out barbaric yawps. They will not be allowed to play with the other children.

Publications
Nothing so far, but I've sent off submissions to two journals (Kenyon Review and Tin House), and likely will be sending another this weekend. So I'm on track for my goal of putting together at least one submission per month.

Reading
I said I wanted to read 2-3 books a week. I've read about 12 so far, which means I'm behind. But personally I think Carl Sandburg's gigantic Complete Poems should count as about five books alone. It's good, but good lord...

Literary Events
Made one in January, missed one in February. Damn. I'll try to make up for it this month.

Publishing Options
Haven't done a thing about this yet, but I think that's ok.

Documenting the Process
Yer lookin at it.

Priorities and Pendulums

I'd been feeling guilty about neglecting the AWY blog over the last several days, until it occurred to me that not blogging because I was too busy working on actual poems might not be such a bad thing. It already feels a little strange not to be posting any of my work here (though not strange enough to warrant a change, yet), and I think it would not be difficult to slip from simply documenting my writing year to commenting on all things poetry-related. That's not to say that the former is more valuable than the latter, or more worthwhile, or even that the two are incompatible--only that it's a writing year, not a blogging year, so the poems come first, always. That said, I'll try to keep the stretches between posts as short as possible.

Now, back to the writing. I've been thinking about form poems lately, and villanelles specifically, which allow for a kind of exploration of sound and image that I find appealing. With their constant refrains and insistent rhyme patterns, they always remind me a little of the Foucault pendulum that used to hang in the Smithsonian, touching and re-touching the same points, but shifting with each stroke over the course of the day, its arc changing constantly if imperceptibly. Like the pendulum, villanelles seem to provide the hypnotic proof of some greater movement.

I've done a few villanelles before, and the urge to write one always seems to catch me by surprise. A line will occur to me, and something about its rhythm or imagery will suggest its suitability to the form. "The kids got guns, they say" is the phrase that's been haunting me all week. Whether there's motion behind it isn't clear, but I'm going to set it swinging and see what happens.

Finding My Voice (Cue the Enya)

My friend Lucas observed that the first group of poems I sent to my readers span a range of styles. In his response to me, he suggested that this was either an indication of my great virtuosity or evidence of internal conflict about the kind of work I'd like to produce.

Much as I'd like to believe the former is true, his conjecture about my conflicting thoughts on what and how I want to write is probably more accurate. It's not an unfamiliar conflict for me though -- I've always been torn between various different types of writing and felt a genuine interest in the possibilities offered by them all (or nearly all). One day I'm pulled toward Frost and his focus on plain speech and sentence sounds. The next I read Kay Ryan and want to write twisting, crystalline observations. And a day later the complex grammatical mechanisms of John Donne and Carl Phillips seem the only things worth creating.

As a result, I end up exploring all of these styles and others as well. At this point, I think that's the right thing to be doing, but there is the problem of coherence, and I don't relish the thought of seesawing back and forth between styles forever.

Poetry People always talk about "finding your voice," and I despise the touchy-feelyness that encumbers the phrase. I think when most people say it, they have in mind a kind of beatific blossoming. It seems like something that a lot of scented candles and dreamcatchers would help. (Plus, how do you know when you've found it? Is there a bell of some kind? A glowing light? Enya?) Still, I have to admit that I see the basic idea behind it as a central challenge for me this year. I have a multitude of voices in my head that I need to corral together into a single shouting crowd.

And that's the thing -- I don't feel that I should have to choose between these voices or among the many schools of poetry. For me, "finding my voice" means figuring out the kinds of rhythms, sounds, words and images that blend together best, that express the way I see the world, and that approximate, if always imperfectly, the unachievable, a priori poem that is behind everything I write. The real challenge is focusing, and listening, and working hard. Maybe in the end it's not so much that you find your voice as your voice finds you. No Enya necessary.

Goals for the Year

Already into week three, which makes me mindful of how quickly AWY may pass, which has me thinking about what I want to accomplish.

"Goals" has a kind of corporate aftertaste to it and suggests a focus on product that many would argue is or should be antithetical to the writing of poetry. I think that's probably true, or mostly true. However, I'm also aware that defined goals keep me writing when I otherwise might do something easier and more immediately entertaining. I'm doing AWY because I want to write, so I need to make sure I don't waste the time I have.

So, my goals for the year:

1) Prepare a manuscript of poems
That means I need:

• 50-60 good poems, which should require...
• 65-75 drafts, if not more, which means...
• 6-7 poems drafted per month, which comes down to...
• About 2 poems per week.

2) Get a few poems published along the way
Specifically, I'm aiming for:

• 6 poems published over the course of the year (at least), of which...
• At least 2 are published in national or otherwise prominent journals and...
• At least 2 are published in local (Chicago-area) journals; so that means...
• 1 submission per month (yikes).

3) Read a lot
Focusing on great poets, first books by poets I like, biographies of poets, and essays on poetry and poetics.

• 2-3 books per week

4) Tap into the Chicago literary network
I haven't done a great job of this in the past, so I'll make more of an effort by:

• Attending at least 1 reading or event per month
• Submitting poems to local journals (see above)
• Reading the work of at least 3 Chicago poets

5) Explore publishing options
By which I mean:

• Identify competitions and deadlines for young writers / first books
• Discuss options and strategies with friends in the publishing world
• Reach out to friends who may be able to help

6) Document the process

• Through this blog, by making at least 1 post per week, and...
• By writing an essay or article about the experience

What This Is All About

For a long time now, I've wanted more time to work on my own writing. Now I have an opportunity. I'm cutting back my hours at my full-time job for at least a year, with the goal of producing a collection of poems ready for publication. To keep myself motivated and productive, I'm thinking of this experience as a kind of do-it-yourself MFA program and an experiment in balancing life, work and writing outside of an academic environment.

Thus, "A Writing Year." I plan to use this blog to document the process from start to finish. In other posts I'll talk more about my decision, my goals, how I worked things out with my boss, and so on. As I was preparing for this year, I was struck by how few resources are available to anyone who wants to write on their own. If things go well, I hope that this blog helps fill that void.