kisses are a better fate than wisdom

kisses are a better fate than wisdom... 

for life's not a paragraph...

 and death i think is no parenthesis 

                   
e e cummings 

Week # 55: e e cummings Master of Uncharted Territory and AWP

The e e cummings Tarot card rules my week. This is probably a good thing because I am embarking on uncharted territory in so many ways.

I am feeling unsettled. I am both unsettled and and anxious. Unsettled because I am back to being a pretty ardent self critic.I know that self criticism has it's pluses, but it also has a very slippery downside. Once you let it take control it seems that it can more negative than any writer or artist needs to deal with. When that critical voice is questioning most everything you are writing it can become a self fulfilling prophesy. You think there is something  wrong with everything you are writing and soon you lose the ability to free yourself to take the risks you need to take to be the best at what you are doing.

I'm anxious because I want so much to move on past this questioning phase. I'm anxious to push myself and to try new things  or try things differently. Unchain myself from predictability. And While I am anxious or wanting to do this I am on the verge of something about two and a half weeks away. That would be my first trip to an AWP conference.

Currently there are two overriding aspects of the conference that create nervousness. One is that it means I will be taking a week's vacation time from my regular job. People who know me well also know that I always have accrued vacation time that hovers at or near the limit I am allowed to carry without being truncated. That means if I go over the limit, the I lose and new time I would acquire until I bring it back under the limit. My vacation time is generally used a day here, a half day there. Tag a day onto a weekend or a holiday to maximize time off. My job tends to be crisis driven and when I take time off I come back to more stress. So just taking a week off is freaky.

The second aspect for which I am experiencing some consternation is that I hear war stories about the conference. Some of these are very veteran attendees. Some people try to be helpful by writing essays or blog posts with suggestions of what to expect or how to get the most out of it. Still, each one seems to emphasis survival.  It doesn't help that well meaning people use such titles as:

•  How to Avoid Going Insane During the AWP Conference 
• An Introvert's Tool Kit for AWP
• First Time at AWP? 11 Ways to Tame the Beast
• 21 Dos and Don'ts For and AWP Newbie
• 11,800 People Sharing in the Existential Agony of Writing

I could go on, but you get the picture. It's insane, not a place for introverts, it's a beast, there are lots of dos and don't and that 11,800 people in agony is an old number - it will probably top 14,000.

If there is anyone out there who doubted I might be experiencing a little high anxiety about now I'm guessing  that partial list above has built a strong case. But I digress....

Mr. Cummings (or cummings) is probably who I need for this trip. This seems like the Poet Tarot card I should have drawn the Sunday of the trip - but maybe there is yet a better one in store for me then. Maybe Mr. Cummings is just softening me up a little before in hope that come the 8th (departure date) that my feet will seem steady and I will be of (mostly) clear mind to experience this event and by experience it mean learn some things, garner some excitement and come away persuaded that I can better meet any challenges, including that nasty Nemesis of all artists of any stripe self doubt. 

Things I believe I need to embrace:

1. spontaneity
2. experimentation
3. the possible instead of impossible    
4. quieting the fear

Looking at the weeks card - I hear Mr.Cummings warning me not the turn away from uncharted territory but to use it learn new ways for it is in fresh language and unique approaches that art blossoms. 

So AWP can serve as a beginning of uncharted territory - My goal is to tame the beast, come home with a fresh perspective and energized (after a day to decompress).  

Quote of the Day e e cummings

“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.” 

~e e cummings

Quote Of The Day - e e cummings

“I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”

 ~e e cummings

cummungs Quote of the Day

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination. e e cummings

Week #26 - e e cummings

This week I have a return visitor.  Mr. Cummings who I drew on week twelve is I believe the first repeat card for me and I can only include that he has something  else in tor for me to learn.

Cummings was not always appreciated by the public and some felt that childish or foolish with his lower case writing and lack of punctuation. Many felt him simple and yet today I believe we would say these things were experimental and that he was fundamentally a risk taker.

I think there are times I've felt foolish with respect to some of my own work and certainly this has lead to second guessing myself. What if e e cummings had called into question his work? He must have known some were critical of his unorthodox style. Did he care? If there was a shred of evidence that he cared what people thought, he did not let it detract from his work.

• Am I willing to take unorthodox risks with my writing?
• Can I truly not worry about what others think? 
• What if I choose to take ownership of all my work, accepting the bad as an inevitable road I must walk down to find the good in my work. Know that if I keep writing that in the end the good writing will win out and this is what others will remember of my writing. 

Read some more of Cumming's work this week think of what others might have been critical of, but find the good in his work.

Be About Making

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making. - e e cummings

Week #12 - e e cummings tarot card

Drawing a new Poet Tarot card, I shuffled the deck, fanned it out and selected from the fan e.e. cummings for this week. As I write this post I am already asking myself what it is that he might teach me.

If there is one think about Cummings I can already identify with it would be his tendency to write poetry void of punctuation. While I don't always do so, it is not uncommon for me to  cast punctuation to the end. Many of the later works of W.S. Merwin are too free of punctuation. I would say that my influence in this regard comes from Merwin and not Cummings, but  I feel him today smiling while nodding with approval.

Cummings appears to me to be one of two things if he was nothing  else...
first, a risk taker and second, one who managed to be void of concerns about what everyone else thought.

These are both things I admire and wish for my own artistic adventures.  It seems the ability to put aside worries about what others are thinking is of strategic importance to risk taking. If you cannot freely disassociate yourself with critics then you will likely worry yourself into a frenzy, an act that cannot be healthy of allow you to sustain your risk taking for very long.

This week I will contemplate who or what  inspires me to take risks with projects? How can I harness this inspiration to risk reaching further from my comfort zone