Last notes on the cull

What is it like to tell a defensive crow that he has no natural enemies? Sort of embarrassing. 

A poem-per-day challenge based on my earliest forays into what-was-not-even-really-poetry seemed like a festive way to participate in National Poetry Month. However the project was far tougher than I’d expected, when half-realized during a late-March jog. I knew my source material had limitations and I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to interrogate it. But I didn’t consider just how insufferable working with one’s own past is, let alone abiding the habit of facing its artefacts every morning before work. And I certainly didn’t think about the anxiety of self-publishing poetry each day, whether it was, in my eyes, finished or not. (Being a “basher”, as defined by Kurt Vonnegut, didn’t appease this process.) There are more pertinent writing tasks I could've been working on.

But now that April’s through, I’m satisfied with The sulk crow cull. Not proud, but satisfied. For better or worse, I owe a lot to the discipline of my teenaged self. And even though I’m not very patient with him over the course of this erasure series, I’m happy to mangle and immortalize his compulsion to ape whatever it is we call poetry.

More notes on the cull

When I stumbled upon the idea of writing erasure poems on my high school writing, I wasn’t too concerned about quality control. I figured, under the guise of National Poetry Month and my recent Material Purge 2015, this series would serve to close two unrelated challenges with ease. Eleven days into this project, however, I must say: squinting over high school notepads at 6am and composing brief retorts during breakfast hasn’t proven the best way to spend my waking hour. 

Content-wise, I expected The sulk crow cull to be a foolhardy endeavour, like getting blood from a stone, but I gave less attention to the aspect of writing and self-publishing work within a two-hour window. On most days I click “Publish” with a vague sense of dissatisfaction I would normally tend to over a few more drafts. But this is the challenge: not vindicating these early attempts at poetry, but shaping them into something useful, if merely sturdy.

Reliving my teenage years has been pretty insufferable but I’m doing what I can to poke fun, interrogate and minimize a lot of self-created baggage. Would it aid the reader to see these source materials I’m interacting with? Would their proper reproduction make my erasure revisits less of a one-way conversation? Probably, but I favour keeping my high school dramas off-screen, so to speak, and looming as though they belonged in reality, not just a sixteen year old's mind. Worries have no weight, off the shoulders. I think most of us can recall teenaged self-pity just as well without ink proof. 

With yesterday’s post I washed my hands of 1999, 2000 and 2001, save for one unfinished piece I’ll carry over into my focus on 2002 and 2003. Thanks to those of you who’ve shuddered or grinned alongside me so far. As April moves forward, it’s going to get a bit sunnier around here.

Notes on the cull

I was first drawn to poetry at the age of sixteen. Not through Plath or Cohen, although they came later. It was poetry’s elemental nature — words arranged on paper — that provided my first spark of interest; a means to channel predictable, teenage concerns into needed affirmations and defences. The results were no less predictable: pages, then whole volumes, of horrid verse. 

Writing was as much about getting to know myself as it was creating a “self”, a poet with a capital P. Although fuelled by pretensions that seemed novel at the time, writing became a not-quite secret dimension in my life. Instead of playing video games all night as I’d done before, I’d stretch over my bed, piecing together stanzas about girls. I’m grateful I developed confidence so effortlessly in this regard, given how low my self esteem was in virtually every other category, because had I known the lousy state of my writing, I would’ve stopped.

Fast forward another sixteen years and I’m faced with all of that old poetry — rough, finished and abandoned drafts of six collections. My adolescence, in about 200 poems. Handwritten in the days before I had a computer. Half-resurrected in the same storage container once stacked in my parents’ basement. I’m too paranoid to put five years of navel-gazing in the recycle bin, but just as unwilling to bury their incriminating bricks in yet another basement. It isn’t a matter of being unsentimental but rather keeping things tidy, current. 

I’d been working to self-publish a manuscript of marginalized prose-poems for National Poetry Month, but it isn’t ready. So instead I’ll undertake these journals and post an erasure poem, based solely on my teen vocabulary, for each day in April. This, too, may seem like navel-gazing on an almost meta scale, but I see these budding scraps as small commemorations to the ego, manic and unfulfilled. Overblown reflections distilled to thirty-something indifference and then, finally, released. 

For the first week, at least, I’ll cull from the period of 1999 through 2001 — the most challenging source material because I’d barely discovered imagery. This early stuff is also the most foreign, a fortuitous cheat. The idea of journeying into my younger self, as well as its “self”, brings no satisfaction. But I believe anything worth keeping for sixteen years deserves to be utilized, somehow. 

I’d walk away from this, if I were you.