Project Failure

Yes, I wrote haiku in a spare address book.
Wasting stationery is a sin, damnit!

Just to clarify; this post is about a project that failed, not about 'Project Failure', which is something entirely different... By the way, if one tries to fail, and fails, has one succeeded?

Enough! On with the post:

You may have seen me talking about my 'yearly projects' before (I've done 'diary a day', 'line a day' and, last year, 'haiku a day'. Well, basically, I'm declaring last year's one a failure. Although I'm guessing I wrote well over 365, the aim was to write at least one every day. It was more about the discipline of sitting down every day to write, not the amount I produced. As usual with these things, I ended up messing up here and there, having a few days where I hadn't written anything, then having to catch up. I came to accept 'slipping' as part of the process (hey, life gets in the bloody way, alright!), but I knew there had been a lot of slippage since I last looked. About a week ago, I thought I'd go back and finish it off. The last entry I made was on the 15th of November... I decided not to carry on.

On the plus side, I think there's a couple of decent haiku what I did. However, my tendency to make them 'about the day', i.e. 'plot-based' (rather than about the image or setting) often hampers them. I realise, when I go back to reading other people's, that there's a massive gulf between most of what I write and the potency of the form done competently. The same can be said with respect to most writing, but there's something about this whole 'daily thing' I've been doing that can make it hard to see the wood for the trees. You know, you sort of spiral down into a 'just do it' mentality, rather than what normally happens spontaneously which is more, you get an idea every so often and think 'I might have something here', then you put it down on paper. But again, I suppose reading is a good guard against that 'spiral', and conscious concentration, so it comes down to my personal incompetence, really.

I find the whole analysis of it more and more distasteful as I try and look at it. What's wrong with intuition, just doing things? Well, that doesn't seem to be enough for me... I can at least say that writing a lot, regularly, is good for stamina (or rather, I've found it to be so). The real problem here is that I can't comment on much else, because I'm hardly in a position to say 'my writing's getting better', and even if I was, I don't think it has. And that's the big issue for me; I was less concerned with how these projects turned out - whether they could be deemed a success in and of themselves - but was hoping it would have wider-reaching implications for my writing as a whole, and I don't think that's the case. The 'haiku' thing may have been good to try and sharpen my viewing [of the world] process, but it didn't encourage any serious engagement [with poetry, or writing, as a whole]. And yes, I can use these haiku for another project [collaboration with the self, as Richard Barrett had it], but I want to stop building this material up and kidding myself that, if that's all I've come up with, it's been worthwhile. If I make a good poem out of it, then groovy, but right now my effort has been poor and I've got little to show for it.

Since giving up on the latest project, I've still been writing. Not enough, I'd say, especially given that hours in my job dried up in January, so I've had more time to do what I want (what's necessary, even?). I think the idea of putting tasks into your diary is good, as it can help you 'ring fence' time. In this respect, I need to take my own advice, because I do suggest it to others, but haven't done it myself. Then I wonder why I hate myself, and why I have to write another blog post like this!

 

This year I was going to plan something, like a poem a week (finished, that is, or to a decently-edited degree), or something like that. That's a good target - more than, on average, what I would normally be doing (I can write new stuff at that rate, sure, but it's the editing where I come a cropper). Then I did nothing. Had no specific, long-term fixation. I want to say that not having a project has felt liberating, or I've put more energy into something else, but neither's true (well, except for more social pursuits and the recent collaboration).

It must be time to wrap this solipsistic sh1t up... I never think I'm doing enough. I find targets helpful but sometimes I set myself big and slightly inflexible ones. So maybe I should do a weekly quota/target? Something less rigid, with more chance for affirmation (things are lonely enough without doubting yourself...). I know some people might find it pathetic that I have to go through all this, but then there are other writers that I speak to who find they need deadlines and extra motivation to get to solve their craft problems. I'm struggling a bit, for sure, but at least it's not a struggle from the bottom (i.e. doing nothing) up. It's a struggle from the near-bottom up. Hey, that was almost positive!

 

I always try and find justification for my posts, otherwise (by and large...) I don't publish them, and I think that is why I write about these projects. Anyone reading can see another perspective on the struggle for production, and certain other aspects of the work. Hope this one's helped, even if only in a small way!

Peace, love and light.

Haiku a Day - Just A Few Lines

I know I said I wasn't going to write a load of posts about my latest 'annual project' [this year I'm writing a haiku a day. Last year was ‘a line a day’, the year before that 'diary a day'], but I don't think one update will tip anyone over whatever edge they may be on. After all, we have knocked through, rather inelegantly, into the second half of the year already, so it’s the perfect time for a neurotic person to take stock.

I'm still finding that there are some days I don't bother with the regime, and there has been a recent stretch of just over a fortnight where I was behind. Every time I fail and I write about it, I hope that putting my finger on the faults will stop them happening again. That's not happened! The greater wisdom, though, is to accept upsets are inevitable, and, though I wish I wrote 'perfectly' [both in the act of doing and in the words themselves], I have to realise that's just silly isn't it? Suffering comes from wanting things that are impossible, and wanting to change things that are inevitable. So there.

What I'm finding quite exciting is my engagement with 'haikuism', that is, what is a haiku, what are they to me, what makes a good/bad one etc. To me, a haiku isn't strictly the strict 5-7-5. I have tried to write at least one of these a day, before usually going on to do more in a less restrained and, hopefully, more intra-natural way, whether it be traditional or more 'pop-y'. After all, as Kerouac said in American Haikus [1959], it's unusual to think that the structure used in one language should be the same in a different one. Then you have the considerations of nature that are usually found in the traditional ones. I can see their original function, but first off they strike me like rhymes - clichés, wastes of space on the page... Secondly, nature isn't always natural in our lives today. When writing about a street fight, it may be lit more by streetlight than the moon. And maybe the colour of blood is more intriguing than the yellow buzz of halogen. And that's it, you know, I never believe you have to stick to this or that rule. You do what's right for the work. I remember having a conversation about this with someone who said, “'Yeah but it's good to follow the restrictions,” to which I say “It can be” [and we need look no further than OULIPO to make this point]. I mean, hey, sometimes you express something great in fewer syllables. Is that not worth applauding? Since the whole essence of haiku is to be essential, why stick more syllables in just to conform?

The other thing I was on about was what makes a good/bad one. The bad ones I've written are those where, put simply, there's no movement in it, no soul or energy or life or whatever you want to call it – it’s been bent by human hand, not living as if created cosmically. They're just 'this stuff happened, line break, this stuff, line break and this is the end'. Maybe that's over-simplistic, but here's a bad example of mine, from April 2nd:

Red Men keeping lead

'gainst Spurs, what a great result!

then Lovren gifts Kane...

As you can see, it's just exposition. No 'heart' or 'soul', really. I mean, there is a bit of humour. The exclamation mark suggests a finality that is ruined by the curt last line. But it's not good. Here's one of my favourite all time ones by Jack Cain:

 empty room:

one swinging coat hanger

measures the silence

What do you think of that? I think it’s really evocative. It's not just the image that is there in my head, as if I was already thinking about it without reading anything, or maybe even feeling like I'm there, but it's also the 'emotional connotation'. I always got the sense of the loneliness in the room, and it made me feel melancholy. Have I just missed something? Or [this has just come to me] has someone walked out on me? Anyway, that's great in my view. And here's one of my own that I think has turned out alright, just to balance things a little:

ocean's opposite sides:

pensioner waves, baby guggs

and bus rolls on

If you were to ask me about the effect of this year's 'project', I wouldn't speak about it too highly, but there are lots of little positives. It gets you to put pen to paper, it gets you to engage with your surroundings, it has a 'no pressure' [or little pressure, at least] thing about it, y'know, 'ah it's only three lines', which makes it accessible. And you learn a disproportionately great amount about poetry in general from those three lines [although I'm saying that having written hundreds of them...]. You can learn about sounds and rhythm, wordplay [linked heavily with where you 'turn' and also line breaks in general, but also ambiguous words/synonyms], form [more through the restrictions rather than the freedoms, i.e. you might think how you'd do it without the 5-7-5 syllables, or even if there's any point to it, y'know. It's like the mind examines the poetics of it once you're down in the rabbit hole] and, perhaps above all, focusses on the hygiene of what you're doing, the weight of each word, how it holds up after cutting out this and that.

So these aren’t earth-shattering revelations, but I remember the point where I'd written a few and thought 'hey lots of these are shit. All I'm doing is writing, essentially, diary-tic exposition, but breaking the line after five syllables, then after the next seven. It's not haiku, it's practically prose'. And then I started to bring it back to the basics, and asked myself 'what's the image, how's the mood and where's the opportunity for play'? Also, I found that I was beginning with this scene-setting [expositional] line every time, and actually, if I swapped the final line [which was often explanatory/illuminating] for the first, more curiosity was created. It wasn't clear what was going on, you know, there was an ethereality to it, a gas to walk through to try and feel through. And what I found then was that I sometimes wanted to delete the clunky line, and write something that didn't make everything so obvious. Not necessarily intentionally ambiguous, but just shining a light on part of the memory of what I was writing about, giving a fuller flavour of the situation I was in.

Again, it sounds basic, but sometimes I get so far down the road with, say, visual poetry, which, without going into detail, has different focusses than, say, lyric poetry [sorry for the simplicity of this...], that I get amazed all over again at the foundations of another genre. The unifying experience of most poetry I’ve worked on is how you can treat language like a material. Cut it another way, drape it over the back of a chair while you move the rest of it about, then stick it back together in a different order. What I'd like to do is move more towards the 'modern style', where small, mundane things take on an effortless gravity. It's just really cool. The last example of mine [above...] was a bit too self-consciously grand in theme. But we'll see what happens. I'm getting light headed here... Better lie down…

Line a Day 2015 - The Final Word[s]

I've only recently realised that I didn't 'wrap up' my last 'year project', which was essentially writing a sentence a day. I called it 'Line a Day 2015', which soon became a bit of a joke because the sentences were often longer than a line, but I digress... I suppose the fact that there was no real impetus to blather on even more about this simple discipline is telling, i.e. there's no big story here. But at least that means there's not gonna be a shedload more rubbish to read for you, dear human.

So I wrote these three-hundred and sixty-five sentences throughout the year. Some were poetic and imagistic, some were merely straight diary-tic style. Sometimes I yearned to break lines like mad and make the form something special, whereas other times the content got the boring shape it deserved. Most of the time, I used punctuation like Scarface uses coke. A chaos of commas.

I don't know... It was fun-ish. Really I wanted to foster a sense of hygiene, summing up entire days in one 'breath' [again, not strictly true as it turns out, but I'm trying to be romantic], and basically training the eye and the mind to work more like a venus fly-trap - waiting long periods inactive before SNAPPING on something that sustains. And when I say 'inactive', I don't mean I wasn't doing anything else, I just mean in terms of my 'centring project', if I can be call it that. Either way, I failed. I didn't even hit on the rigid habit that I wanted. I had periods of a week and longer where I left my entries unfilled, and caused plenty of other headaches along the way, and to top it all, I don't believe I've enhanced my technical ability that much more. But hey, it was better than doing nothing.

I'm in the process of typing it all up now. I envisaged trying to get it published somewhere, the aim being to show a poet's year, unadulterated, in its naked journalic persona. Of course, there are temptations to edit on levels of lexis, sentence, form, structure [inter month, inter year etc], but that's not what happens with our diaries, is it? Anyways, watch this space if you got time to spare and an appetite for disappointment [in which I am a specialist :-) ].

By the way, and this'll be my only Blogtastic word on this until the end of the year [and maybe not even then...]; this year, I'll be doing a haiku diary. Not necessarily just one a day, but as many as I can, again with possibility to publish, but I'm not bothered. Will have to see what the quality and radicality is like. And no, before you ask, they won't necessarily be 5-7-5s. I want to do at least one of those a day, but in general I favour the Kerouacian 'pop', which lets the snapshotting mind breathe and dwell on the beauty of imagery more naturally. Form can be tinkered with and 'metre' can be negotiated, and that's always good.

Anyways, have a happy future full of peace, light and love,

M x