I Lost My Pen!

As people we can get too attached to objects, to things, based on history, or cost, or sometimes just because it is pretty.

For me, there was this pen.

I already have this thing about ink. I prefer blue ink when I write. I am not sure why or when this happened, some of my oldest notebooks do in fact include the forbidden black ink, but not in years.

Getting attached to a pen, saying things like “this is my WRITING pen” isn’t such a great idea. I would spend more time searching through my desk or pockets or car for a single missing pen rather than write. I would push aside piles of blue pens, for the ONE pen, as if it was the only thing I could use to put down my ideas, as if it was the only thing keeping me from writing.

Meanwhile I am not writing. Whatever was in my head is slowly sliding out, and I am proving, yet again, that I excel at procrastination more than anything else.

Throw it out. If you have one of these pens, throw it out. I left mine in a bar, seemed appropriate. Use cheep pens, nice pens, use your keyboard or hammer and chisel, whatever. Just write.

And yes, I am writing to myself, but you can do it too.

These are the Ramblings of the Newly Old

“What do you want to do when you grow up?”

The question was asked to all of us at one point. Where is your direction in life? Where are you going? What is it you want to spend the rest of your life doing?

The rest of my life.

That is a bit of time for one thing, one task, one GOAL. Seems too much for any one thing to take, a burden even Atlas would cringe at.

So perhaps instead of what do I want to do, it should be what do I want to do for now? Now I seem to be doing well as an engineer, part time writer. If I had a say, it would be the other way. Writing every day and consulting as an engineer. One of these days, no?

That being said, I was a web programmer once upon a time. Something I still dabble in, still mingle at parties with. I’d go back there too if it was something interesting. Database programming for corporate websites would not be my ideal.

So what do I want to be when I grow up? Well, since I don’t have plans to grow up, I suppose I have time to figure it out.

May Day – A Recommendation

Phillis Levin is my Muse.

Many poets have issued that title on a woman. “She is my muse.” This woman they talk of is beautiful, elegant, they are no doubt in love with her, and equate inspiration to write poetry, happy or sad, about her, to ‘Muse’.

Phillis Levin is my Muse, in the purest sense.

When I starting down this path of creativity, of writing, poetry, of using word as art (ART?) it was a journey that started in the dark (yes, I mean high school). Writings were scribblings in the corners of notebooks, they were mimics of Latin poets, and ‘experimental’ things, which later turned out to be not that ‘experimental’. But this is a part of the poet’s journey, as it is a part of any journey. This part is the beginning.

Then came college, and writing courses, and this strange, but new idea of reading other poets. This idea is a strange one to understand why it is a NEW THING.

A book, Afterimage, was handed to me, by a Ms Phillis Levin.

I read the book twice that night. Three more times in the week that followed. Some where in there I found inspiration.

It was not that I wanted to write like her, or I wanted to follow her journey. Instead what she gave me was the light in the darkness, the direction to start my own journey. I wanted to be that good, and for the first time realized that a bit of work, of tears and cramped hands, that there was more to be done with myself, than simply writing what I had been.

This was her inspiration to me, to start my journey, to take my writing seriously, to turn it into a declaration: “I write.” She is my muse in the purest sense, for I saw her as art, as poetry, as the personification of this undefinable thing I had set off to find.

Her new book is out (alas, the older ones are harder to find, but if you can get them, please do). It is called “May Day” and worth every inch of your bookshelf it will take, of every moment of your life you will read it, of every word that is on the inside leaving the page and haunting you in those moments before you sleep.

Edit: Garrison Kellior’s Writer Almanac has May Day posted, 26 September, 2008