On Discipline (addendum)

I have not written a poem in three days. I am not planning to write one tonight either. I don't know when I will write another poem. This thrills me and terrifies me.

In August of 2008, I conceived an idea of writing a poem every day to try to improve my poetry. I was fairly consistent, usually only missing one or two days a month and sometimes writing more than one in a day. For a long time, it was very rewarding.

I do push-ups every morning. This is something I have done for years. It is also the one of the only work-outs I have ever done with any consistency. I don't remember why I started. Perhaps I wanted big arms to conform to the masculine ideal. Perhaps I wanted to be healthy. Perhaps it was basic self-improvement. That is why I still do it. I believe there is a great deal of merit to discipline. This is something that seems to have fallen out of our culture. I believe in repetition. You may not understand something the first time. You may not understand something the tenth time. Perhaps the hundredth time you will. Perhaps it will mean something because you've done it one hundred times.

The Laban technique used by actors and dancers is based on the repetition of certain movements. These often seem pointless, mechanical, and downright odd. The point is to build muscle memory. It is the "wax on, wax off" mentality. An expressive movement needs to be instinctive, reflexive. As an actor or a dancer, movements must come naturally, so having them already prepped in your body allows them to come without thinking, the same way that an actor repeats lines so that they are prepped and can come without thinking.

There are certain things that develop in babies at around nineteen months. For instance, as language skills develop, their vocabulary grows a great deal. There is a beginning of independence, asserting their own wills. But one of the most interesting is that at around this age, they begin to be able to tell when something is wrong, when something is missing, or when there or inconsistencies in what they expect and what actually is.

Over the past months, more and more of my poems have notes jotted at the end. I will finish writing, look at what I have, and jot a note on it as a reminder.

This could say more

Needs work

With revision, could be better

More?

Good idea, should expand

This could be something

Needs more

Weak ending

Needs developing

One of the most interesting parts of being in England is how old it is. I can walk around and see buildings that have stood since before America was a country, before it was colonized, and even before it was discovered by Europeans. As cool as this is, there are some shortcomings. For instance, there are a lot of things still around that have long ceased to serve any purpose, but they don't remove them. They just take up space.

There are no endings. Not really. What was continues on whether we are aware of it or not. There are consequences, reactions, resonances. Even when something new has begun, what has just ended is still with us.

There are points on a line.

There are points in a circle.

I used to do sit-ups with my morning push-ups. But when I hit my last growth spurt, I had some twisting in my spine. My sit-ups were compounding this. I was hurting myself, so I stopped.

At some point, my poetry stopped being work. It stopped working. I got very good at "spontaneous overflow[s] of powerful feeling," but it was never in reflection, never seen clearly, never structured. To be frank, my technique, if I have any, is negligible. My poetry needs work. If I am just vomiting some words on a page every night before I go to bed having forgotten or having been to busy to write earlier in the day, I'm probably not going to develop as a writer. That is the stuff of sincere emotion, but it has stopped being the stuff of good poetry for me.

I am not giving up writing poems, but I am changing the way I do it. I need to learn. I will probably go back to some of those poems with notes at the bottom and see if I can make anything of them. I will probably do a lot of reflection. I will certainly do a lot of reading. I'm sure it won't be that long before I write another poem. It is too cathartic for me to abstain for too long, but when I do write one, I am going to work at it. I expect it to be hard, the way that writing a poem every day used to be hard for me. I expect I will write some bad poems. That happens. Mostly, I plan to learn.