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| The author, Dane F. Baylis |
WHERE DID YOU GET THAT IDEA?
Sliding along with the
poets of ASKEW POETRY JOURNAL, ISSUE #14, Let's close this offering of Geoffrey Jacques. Tight, concise, and with a wonderful gift for
building the picture, a layer at a time. Each object is where it belongs, yet
nothing is concrete enough to offer you the comfort of anchorage. With no
further intro:
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Geoffrey
Jacques
Photo by D.F.
Baylis
How
I don't quite know what I'm doing
night sounds whoosh and whimper
Coleman Hawkins humming the moon
a lover anointed with plums
seasonal plaster & dirt draping each object like a cool
giveaway---
---each mite gathering in every corner
the melody drifting away over rooftops
I FOUND IT IN THE POETRY SECTION AT THE BIG BOX STORE.
So I'll admit to being something of a whore. After having, as the Australian aboriginals call it, gone walk about for longer than is healthy for anyone's writing ambitions, I'm back on the trail. This time around I bring a pragmatist's view and a short fuse when it comes to certain questions.
I was at a poetry reading and open mic this afternoon as a member of the audience and waiting my turn to read along with all the other supplicants. After the festivities, as I was making for the door, someone asked me where I found my ideas. Huh? What did they expect me to say, I order them from the on-line idea store?
I find this question comes mostly from the I, me, mine school of poets and writers. The ones who took the advice, "Write what you know", to mean, write about yourself. Any idea that doesn't scream of egocentricity just baffles these people. They can't fathom how you can take the raw material of your own soul and apply it to someone else - or why you would want to.
I do it this way because I got stone-cold bored to tears with myself. That left only one alternative. Find something else to write about, or give up writing - something I offer as a course of action to so many writers today. Look around you. Do you honestly think you're having original feelings or ideas? If you do, seek therapy. If you can imagine it and write it down, I'll take the odds it was done over and over through history.
What you can do is find an original way of interpreting the basic emotion and struggle that is the nature of life. In order to do this, you have to have lived or be in the process of living. You have to take a chance that some of the shit that gets slung about everyday is going to land on the toe of your expensive designer running shoe and you'll just have to find a way of dealing with it.
When you begin to grasp that most of the world's calamities are totally impersonal and driven more by chance than choice, then you will begin to grasp where the honest-to-god ideas come from. Your story is yours, the one you are looking for isn't. It's the story of the mass, it's the common feelings and aspirations, told in an honest, nasty clarity that is the beginning of figuring out where the ideas come from.
After that, well, it's just slogging hard work. Like I keep repeating here, it's the writing, rewriting, rejection, tears, and sitting back down at the typewriter and striving to make the damn thing happen. That's where the ideas come from. From the day in and out filling of notebooks, emptying of pens, consumption of pencils and reams of useless verbiage. That's where it all comes from. Like a prospector, you get balls deep in ice cold water and pray you find something of value - or at least keep your mental kindling intact so you might scrape together enough intellectual heat to keep the whole thing from freezing your heart to death.
So, where did I get that idea? I stole it from a bunch of teenager's I hung out with five decades ago. It's the same dreams and hopes and disappointments we all shared and every young man and woman shares today. I just happened to find them beautiful enough to write about without having to say I, me, or my even once.
Next question!
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THINKING ABOUT A TRIP INTO THE DEEPEST, DARKEST DEPTHS OF SELF-PUBLISHING? THEN FOLLOW THIS LINK FOR A BIT OF REALISTIC CONSIDERATION.
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Meanwhile...live, love, write.
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Tomorrow,
Dane F. Baylis
Author.
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