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| That's Milosz. |
People who checked in on this blog have triggered me to do this entry. Eighty-two looked in yesterday. I have more or less finished with writing the eight line poetry for the book Wrestling Hanshan. I plan one or two more read throughs before looking at contests to enter it into. Am submitting them in groups of five to lit. mags. I have written 120 of them. That may be too many for a book. Some contests limit total number of pages. Thus one read through will be to mark any that would go first if I had to trim the length and another to get an idea how it sounds in my head start to finish.
Off Topic: today I bowled two games at a local alley. First time in four or more years and following the radiation treatments. I bowled 99 and 102. The first time I bowled I was in my early teens, and I failed to break 100. Never since that time until today have a failed to break the century mark. In my heyday, I could break 200 on a semi-regular basis. You can see the arc of a life in my bowling experience. I was too weak to control the ball and missed my spot nearly every time, although I did get two strikes in a row, the only marks in my 102 game.
The other day, I was writing in our local Barnes & Noble, and I want to support them, so I bought a collection of the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize winner. Beautiful stuff, and I can understand some of them. They touch me. Buy books at your local book stores, small and large. Amazon will do okay without us.
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| Wouldn't it be nice? |
Nothing is more mysterious than our emotional apparatus. Mine included. I've been experiencing continuous days of happiness, sometimes punctuated with ecstatic joy. I'm not spending thousands of dollars on stuff I don't need, not flying off to exotic vacations on Caribbean islands. It's not the manic phase of a bipolar swing. Maybe it's the screenwriting course I'm enjoying extravagantly. Maybe it's the increasing number of readers of this blog. Maybe it's the recognition and publication of my poem Legacy in WA129 [Sage Hill Press] and the concurrent invitation by Poet Laureate Tod Marshal to join him and Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna and his wife Toni Luna for a joint reading sponsored by the Washougal Library two weeks back. Very good to be included among them. Perhaps it's Tod's warm appreciation of other of my poems as well. Part of my joy has to be the steady sunshine of my wife's love for me that warms and nourishes me, and the love I feel for her that opposes the constant goads of ego that we all experience. I'm blossoming like a petunia in the corner of a rarely visited garden of the literary arts. Maybe it's Portland itself. Whatever it is, I'm standing at the window of World Cup Coffee at the corner of 18th and Glisan in Portland on a powerfully sunlit day and feeling as successful and rewarded as if I'd just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Can something be awaiting my lifelong efforts? Feels like it, but, then, the emotional apparatus of the human species is mysterious as hell. Isn't it? And as far as I can see, no actual gold laden Spanish galleon rides the horizon.
This writing machine will shut down, most likely, for several days. In two hours, I'm off to get a tooth pulled. #21. Then comes Thanksgiving. P'rhaps some family will show up? Who knows?
I'm not going to say much this morning ... I don't think. I had a short burst of creative juice yesterday, saw my way through to a new ending that will cause the novel to run one or two more chapters longer. Several potential endings are in mind. One is a pretty nifty surprise. Some are upbeat and some not so upbeat. Not sure which will win out.
Just because I see the ending, doesn't mean it's a done deal. Truth is, though I know what "actions" need to happen, there's still the problem of making sure I get all the information in too and in proper order, i.e. the background stuff that's been hidden from the reader so that everything makes sense and comes to a neat conclusion. I do have one line I want Charley Manning to assert near the end: "This investigation ain't no neatly plotted book, pal. There ain't no smoking gun. Just a lot of smoke, mostly, and a dozen suspicions."
More than once, lately, I've felt no impulse to finish the book, almost a fear of completing it. Could it be that I don't want to have to send it around and find out no agent wants it? I'm reading a Sam Beckett bio too. Don't know why I do it to myself. That's not my ambition at this time ... to win a Nobel Prize.
Wrote more than I planned to, didn't I?
