Another Ballgame

The feeling one gets when one is about to be published is manifold. It's like getting one's first tattoo.

It cannot be described, but it can be channeled. One can, let's say, use it to write. One can channel the excitement into the act of, for example, writing professional book reviews.

Where are we to go from here? Are we going to watch your dreams drown with the rest of the struggling writers and poets of the world, or are we going to do something crazy like start our own YouTube channel to bring in some networking and revenue?

I'm not one to write self-help articles, writer's-help articles, or anything of the like, though I passionately support art for art's sake. I'm a gardener and a dishwasher and a struggling new father. Nothing comes more natural to me than humility, and I could, if anyone out there has anything to say on the subject, use a few tips as far as the patience department goes. The swings and roundabouts which manifest as my dexterous ability for mood swings help neither my poetic output nor my sleeping patterns, to say the most.

Yet, we have the fact. I'm about to be published. Why aren't I happy? This has been my dream for the past decade, hasn't it been? Or am I fooling myself? Am I coming down with a case of Salinger pre-op?

The lack of excitement is probably coming from a few factors. One: I am not rich. I am self-publishing my first book of poems. Yes, self-publishing. When I said 'the feeling one gets when one is about to be published' I meant the first time one publishes a whole book, whether it be a novel or a book of poetry (in my case it is a book of poetry), in print, exclusively work of one's own hand, and gets it set up on the shelves. As far as the shelves go, they're as open as a Californian sperm bank here in Spain, where I live with my family.

There's a poem I left out of the book. The book is now being set to print in the shop, a print shop in Granada. One hundred and twenty pages of bilingual poetry preceded kindly by a three page introduction written by the author. The poem I left out, it's to be published on a blog. Its title is Proust, I Like for His Elegance. I omitted it from my book of poems because it is too prose-filled at the end, an experimental touch of mine, and, most importantly, too literary. Yes, the irony. Not too literary for a bookish blog, though.

Proust I Like for His Elegance; a prose poem

Proust I like for his elegance,

Kerouac, for his spontaneity and empathy and authenticity and poetics,

Joyce for his lyricism and his imagism and his narcissism and his eloquence and his epic nature,

And Bukowski for his dialogue, jokes, guttural tactics, sense of humor, and street wisdom;

But Proust I like simply due to the colossal aura of his elegance.

My wife says to me, as she catches me one fine summer day’s afternoon swaying this way and that in the hammock with one of his many volumes in my hand (twelve, in my collection’s print), “He is boring.”

He may be boring, love, I’ll concede to that, but he is just about as goddamn elegant as God, if you’ll pardon my French.

So, he’ll be staying in the fast lane

Of our bookshelf’s catalogue, M. Proust, for the next couple of months

At least;

At least until I finish my apprenticeship as a novelist working with Postmodernism and his own guts.

As Kerouac’s ocean slurs by Big Sur and the waves break into rough, choppy Finnegan-barks upon the brink of consciousness for twenty something pages or so, I’ll concede

Kerouac

Was about as drunk as

Joyce was

When he first conceived

(Almost) the same idea.

Blurwerpyderwerpynurrfelpedoodlydumtin.

That word is my gift to Literature. It means: the seemingly deeper look of the sky when you are out in the desert and your brains are frying on acid.

Am I a poetic genius? To answer this stupid question, I must look mawkishly back over the yesteryears, and drink in the prose as it flows forth.

The first classic novel I read, there in the brightly lit classrooms of the 2000s all those few years back, was The Great Gatsby. I wasn’t much enthused. High School was all Rock N Roll and talking shit about your parents with your friends and about your friends with your friends and talking about sex and pornography and fake, dreamed up girlfriends. I kept in contact with the English teacher who taught the course though, Freshman English 101. He also taught American History and Algebra. He was a curser and an alcoholic and an avid collector of model planes and an overweight salsa dancing teacher and a nicotine addict who quit every other month but never kept with it. He was a great man.

The next one I remember reading is Lord of the Flies. That was my second year of High School. The character Piggy made a big impression on me and my classmates. Such a big impression that we began to pester our token chubby boy of the class with the name. He kept it for the remaining three years of his time at the Catholic boy’s High School.

Not surprisingly (the American curriculum itself is quite suggestable and self-absorbed) I had to read The Great Gatsby again my junior year of High School. I liked Gatsby a little more the second time around.

I freshmaned a Fitzgerald, sophomored a Golding, juniored a little F. Scott again, and then I topped off the final year with Howard Zinn and Palahniuk, Parnassus’s twins.

In the same course in which I had to read Gatsby again I was also required to read J. D. Salinger’s classic, Catcher in the Rye. That first time around walking through Salinger’s universe, I was bored as hell. The only other books I remember reading in my High School years that made any impression at all upon the whisps of my ADHD-driven memorybank were Howard Zinn’s history books and a few of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels. Chuck Palahniuk was not required reading but Zinn was. I read Palahniuk solely for the sexual content and the pessimism, ideas which I thought would make me cool if I could somehow figure out ways emulate them in my speech and sense of humor. I tried and I failed.

Then the ball hit its first home run, the ball of my mind’s eye. The university days started with a bang. I had a run in with the LAPD, and was put in the county prison for a few days. When I got out, I continued attending my classes, but I also took more time for myself at home. I had become somewhat frightened by my time spent in prison, though it was only a few days, and I began to delve inward and introspect. I reread, for some reason or another, Salinger’s Catcher. I fell in love with the narrative, the form of the novel itself, the feel of the act of telling or reading a good story, and I fell in love with the idea, seen and glimpsed there among Salinger’s pages for the first time in my life, of being a writer.

From there, from that transformation, I walked back out into the world.

But not before I did a little research. I had sat down before the old Dell desktop and Googled “books like Catcher in the Rye” and Google donated the following suggestion first: Jack Kerouac.

I ran back out into the world more like, right to the university library. I found Kerouac. On the Road seemed to me a little too long. I was a lazy reader at first. Later, though, I would come to devour behemoth novels by the boatload. I chose the shortest one the university had by Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums.

By the time I finished his novel about mountaineering and Beat characters and philosophies and spiritual introspection, I was a changed man. I was a new man; I was a writer.

Kerouac’s voice was my own. I was finished with all the other dreams and desireful pursuits I had in life, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to try and change the world. I changed my major to English Literature, and after a semester and a half of trying that boogie, I stopped attending the classes at the university. If I was going to be a writer, I would have to teach myself. I would have to take the path Frost blah blah’d about.

I began to devour everything Kerouac ever wrote. Notebooks, dreamlogs, etc.

Then, knowing I would have to deepen my perspective in order for my dreams to plausibly have a chance at taking off, I began to devour the classics. Dostoyevsky was the first of the old masters I made to approach. Then Rimbaud, then Tolstoy, and James A. A. Joyce. Then Proust.

I had found my life’s calling. I was a writer. I bought a typewriter and I went at it.

My electric Smith Corona has remained my sole dream weaver for the past decade, the ethereal hearing aid with a jammed space jar, choppy tape, you know the jam, which I’ve used only to descry the edges of the discreet voice of my fleeting and subterranean Muse.

Here in Spanish Andalusia, years after I first bought this Smith Corona from a pawn shop in Temple City, California, I turn it on and write the following erotic conceit to my partner, my heart’s Muse.

And there the prose poem comes to an abrupt end, as, though I hold in my hands the erotic conclusion mentioned tantalizingly in these lines, they, the lines implied, are much, much too personal to divulge on a bookish blog.

I'm about to publish my first book of poems. I'm also about to change a dirty diaper. I'm a fool for the quotidian. Aristotle's toy.