2023: An Overview of Sorts

 

The end of the calendar year is supposed to bring a review of the previous 12 months, or at least an assessment of accomplishments. In this near-post-Pandemic environment, there was a facade of normalcy, but deep differences that will take years to return to former experiences.

There were live readings, with many in attendance still masked (not a bad thing). I usually do not mask at this point, but others are of course free to do so. Am I in denial of the consequences of COVID? Probably, but here we are. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted multiple times, and even spent a week with my Beloved ill, and still have not contracted the virus. With all my allergies, I can’t believe it’s anything more than luck that’s kept me well. I’m also working from home for half the year, limiting my exposure to others for great lengths of time in enclosed spaces. I’ll take it.

I’m sorting through files again, this time with more purpose, determined to put things in a usable order. The first time I worked from home, I was too frightened about the state of the world to do much cleaning or organizing of consequence. I’ve abandoned that fear, for the most part, and am now primarily concerned with making the most of the rest of my life, artistically speaking.

There have been a few readings sprinkled in, a short feature courtesy of the Ulster County Women’s Network, a couple more live streams with CAPS, and a Hudson Valley Writers Guild reading in Albany with some Midwest poets I hadn’t yet met in person. I published another Flying Monkey Press chapbook, and helped out at Bruce & Joanne Weber’s Samsara poetry marathon this past New Year’s Day.

I’ve been writing a monthly column for the HVWG newsletter, but somehow this blog has fallen off my task list, despite appearing again and again in my planner. A lot of what I would normally say here has ended up there. Whether or not anyone reads either is anyone’s guess. Both systems make commenting difficult, and I know that there’s a lot of competition these days for eyeballs on the internet. I hope some find it at least diverting for a few minutes. Don’t we all need diversion from this reality we could never have imagined?

2023 is a big unknown for me so far. Resolutions are a daily thing, so making more at the end of the calendar year is no longer a thing for me. With recent health revisions, I am more acutely aware of changes, good and bad. I push through. My mortgage is paid off. I’d like to stop working altogether in a few years. I promise not to be bored when my schedule is my own. That’s all for now.

The After-Times: Poetry During a Pandemic, and Maybe Beyond

 

When COVID-19 was recognized as a threat to an unvaccinated population back in March, 2020, my employer, a seasonal retreat center gearing up for another round of workshops, sent the staff home for about two weeks, to be on the safe side. My Beloved and I picked up a bottle of minty hand sanitizer at the Dollar Store for safety’s sake. Two weeks soon became five months, and I was finally furloughed at the beginning of August, after working remotely. I'd watched the call volume drop sharply as the season’s opening was pushed further and further out, then finally cancelled. 

 

 While some writers thrive under pressure, I am not one of them. I had my freelancing experience back in the mid-2000s, when I’d saved up a few bucks from a miserable gig at Cosmodemonic Communications. I got by well enough, but it wasn’t the time to begin a freelance career. I’ve come to learn I need the security of a 9 to 5 to free myself up enough to be creative. It does cut into my time to do so, but it’s the only way for me. 

 

 After I was furloughed, I panicked. I tried to continue my routine- short walk at 12:00 noon, my own low impact version of yoga in the morning. Despite adequate unemployment support, I still worried I’d be out on the street in a heartbeat. A friend offered me some job coaching time, which I needed for sanity’s sake as well as to bring my own employment worthiness up to snuff. It turned out I was a far more marketable commodity than I thought. I picked up a couple of unpleasant gigs over the months, and with every new set of tasks, every new computer program, I realized that I actually missed my retreat center work. 

 

 I was called back in March of 2021, a year after this unimaginable era had begun. Again I worked from home until the beginning of July, when those of us remaining on the payroll (about half as many folks as before) reconvened on campus to birth this ‘bridge’ season. Half as many classes and participants. All must be vaccinated. Incredibly, there was kickback about this, from staff and guests alike. I gained a private office, so many had been let go. I work better and harder, and get to crank WQXR between calls. I go home exhausted. I sleep in fits and starts. I worry about the second round of the virus. 

 

 I spent a good deal of time while working from home organizing files, discarding that which no longer thrills me. I began a project to scan my old newspaper clippings onto a flash drive, which will itself probably be obsolete in a few years. I finalized my Ziegfeld poems, and sent strong query letters to a dozen college presses. I compiled a chapbook of fairly recent poems, and almost printed it before I spilled a cup of coffee on my old laptop on Memorial Day. I could reconstruct the work, much of which was backed up onto a flash drive of its own. It was the harsh reality of how dependent I was on technology to practice my art that seemed to shake me so. 

 

 In the last year I’ve had to replace both the computer and the printer. The printer in particular is the latest version of my old reliable HP, but a shittier design and now with a Wifi mind of its own. The madness between us never ends, and it has come close to ending up in the street several times. The chapbook remains unpublished. I am stymied about the cover art, usually my favorite part of the home printing process. A so-called arts festival I’d planned to sell at turned out to be a scam, and live readings are still few and far between. I let go the rush, and settled into civilian life for a while. 

 

 I’ve been writing a monthly column for Albany Poets (albanypoets.com) in the last few months, and my last piece talked about the possibility of retiring from the Poetry Life. It’s still a tempting notion. I felt I had nothing left to say, and that few others had much to say to me. Even the silly tricks of erasure and freewriting produced nothing to jog a poem from my noggin. My routine, especially without regular readings in the flesh, provided little stimulation for the arts. I gained back the 20 pounds I’d managed to carve from my frame as quickly as it had come off. A monthly group of poet friends continue to Zoom, and I’ve always managed to scrape up something to share, but I never felt the need to produce much more. 

 

 I had no regrets. I’m happy with what I’ve written so far. If I was to pass away tomorrow, there would be files and clippings to keep my loved ones occupied until grief exhausted itself. But one occurrence did inspire me again, an odd one. I am in the habit of googling exes, as so many of us are. I determined that one of mine had passed in March, of what I could not tell. It was the most bare bones obituary I’d ever seen, and sad for someone who’d been so interested in so much around him, and himself. As my Beloved pointed out, there was no one left to write his story. I wasn’t grief-stricken myself. Too much time had passed, and it had been a good break for me. But the idea of no obituary must have finally touched on a poetry nerve. I wrote a poem, one that I’m pretty happy with. I’ll run it by the Zoom group next week to see if it can stand on its own, without a knowledge of intimate history behind it. And maybe it will see the light of day sometime.  

 

 

The “Job” of a Poet In Times of Crisis

So many look to our ancient scribes and modern wordsmiths (or “wordsmythes”, as my Beloved calls us) for comfort and reassurance in trying times. I remember listening to NPR on September 11, 2001 and hearing Billy Collins on the air, clearly unprepared for an event such as he was asked to comment thoughtfully and artfully on at a moment’s notice. When racism rears its ugly head on a seemingly daily basis, quotes from Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King speckle the interwebs. I don’t find much comfort in their words, despite their idyllic messages of hope and peace, especially since both, and so many more seeking the same, met violent ends. 

Change is like birth. Neither is accomplished without some bloodshed. The future progress of America won’t lie in the hands of poets and songwriters, nor should it. If people are inspired to go out and do the things, make the sacrifices that will be required, that’s fine. But thinking that a song will change the world all by itself is falling far short of the necessary steps. Rally cries, soundtracks can motivate, but they can’t compel, nor should they be required to do so. 

The landscapes of poets is as wide-ranging as the number of folks who label themselves poets. Some write to forget. Others, to remember. Some put pretty words together and live or die on the praise that follows. Some craft abstractions that may hold meaning for a precious few, but escape the understanding, and often the attention, of the masses. The masses have gradually been excluded from the enjoyment of poetry anyway, as schools spend more time sustaining the lives of students at the expense of their emotional survival. 

It interests me to note how art continued thru wars, depressions, political upheavals, and natural disasters over the centuries. The Germans continued to be born, fall in love, paint, and write even in the darkest days of Hitler’s reign. These brutal humans, in the big picture, always end up being a blip on the radar of humanity’s long existence. This doesn’t mean people don’t die in the meantime. People will always die, it’s safe to say. But there is a bigger picture. Humanity survives. Good does eventually win out, despite the cost. And unless subsequent generations are taught the lessons, made to believe that the lessons are real, evil will repeat itself. And the artists will continue to record it all. 

Maybe the history books should consist of poems and paintings. Maybe each page should play the songs of an era, all points of view. Art seems to get closest to the ideas in discussion. I have resisted for a long time including the horror of COVID-19 in my poems. I was unwilling to afford it the dignity of a poem, draw any more attention to it than the illnesses and deaths it has left in its wake already have. But I can’t always select what my poems will be about. In fact, I can rarely write these days without very personal motivation. I am still horrified by wearing a mask, and consider it a necessary tragedy of our everyday lives now. Yet, I wrote a poem about them. I have an old friend who died early on, slipping into an induced coma before we all knew what was happening. I know he’ll make an appearance at some point, but I can’t predict when. Others I know who’ve survived will no doubt incorporate their experiences into future work, in their way. 

It can’t be an artist’s job to lead, follow, or assist in the spread of propaganda. I believe it was former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove who described her role as that of a witness. We are powerful witnesses indeed, and when all the bodies on all sides have been shed from their electrical selves, when time passes and brings us to the next big medium, it is the art that will tell the stories of people. It will be the art that remains, our voices in the future wilderness.