Finally got to sleep today around 12 noon and I got a full 3 and a half hours -- which, for me, is amazing. When I woke up, it appeared that Texas had somehow found itself in the middle of a monsoon and I spent (or wasted, depending on how you look at it) an hour or so just laying in bed and listening to the storm pounding my house. On the whole, it only rains three or four months out of the year down here and for the rest of the time, the state is so dry that every piece of unpaved land looks like a cemetery without headstones. As a result, for those three stormy months, you learn to savor every single aspect of the rain -- from the smell of storm brewing to the feeling of haphazardly aimed drops of water sharply pricking your skin when you step outside.

The rain has subsided for now but, looking out into my backyard as I type this, everything is a truly beautiful shade of gray, a promise of more chaos to come.

Speaking of chaos to come, I've suddenly become very aware that including today, I've only got two more days of vacation left. Luckily, after I work on Saturday, I'll be off for three more days but still, I have so much left to get accomplished in so little time. I am proud to say that I finally started writing on at least one of my four current literary endeavors. Before I went to bed, I revised two "poems" for Oswald Acted Alone. The proper term for them would probably be "prose poems" but that label has always smacked of a certain self-indulgence to me. When I hear a writer say that he's written a prose poem, that usually means that this writer lacked either the patience of the talent to 1) develop an idea to the point where it could sustain a short story, 2) give enough thought to style and language to actually express an idea through poetry (because if poetry was simply prose with random line breaks, than it wouldn't have ever been necessary to distinguish between poetry and prose in the first place), or 3) both. That sad truth of the matter is that far too much undeveloped prose has been labeled poetry (or "prose poetry") over the past couple of years and far too many readers are willing to indulge this artistic laziness because they've bought into the assumption that poetry isn't supposed to make sense or be all that engaging in the first place.

Speaking from my own personal experience, I can say that -- at least when you're dealing with the small presses and the zines and the whole self-styled underground lit. mag scene -- it's a helluva lot easier to get a bad poem published than it is to get a good short story. Sad to say but, from 1994 to 1997, I got a good deal of bad poetry published under my name and I still cringe whenever I occasionally come across some of it and realize that there's a small handful of people who -- if they do remember my name -- will remember it solely on the basis of a so-called "poem" that, deep down, I knew wasn't worth the paper it was scrawled out on even as I was sending it out to editors I knew would publish it.

Out of two hundred poems that I wrote over that three year period, there are probably twelve that I think actually work as poetry. Quite a few of the rest I ended up rewriting as short stories and I'm proud to say that once translated to their proper form, those mediocre poems produced some of my strongest prose. (A few of these appear in my first book, It's Impossible To Start A Fire If You Have No Desire To Burn with Looking for Armenia being my personal favorite.)

Anyway, I believe I had a point at one time and it basically boiled down to the fact that I am reluctant to refer to the two pieces I revised yesterday as poetry because to me, poetry is what was produced by Yeats, Ginsberg, Byron, and a select pantheon of others. To me, a good poem is the ultimate communion of language and imagination and those who have mastered this form are the ones who have truly earned the right to immortality. It's not easy for me to believe in God but I know I'll always believe in Yeats. Viewing poetry as I do, I am not comfortable with the whole idea of just casually throwing the label out there and I'm not going to do it with the two pieces I revised earlier today. Instead, I'll use a phrase that one of former creative writing professors, the Dallas poet Joe Stanco, used to describe the literary process -- "language playing with itself." This morning, I sat down at my computer and created two works of language playing with itself for Oswald Acted Alone.

The first was a revision of a piece called Say Goodnight, Icarus that I wrote back in 1995 and which originally appeared in the Spring '96 edition of Parallax, a literary magazine put out by Richland Community College down here in Texas. It's a rather abstract and, to be honest, somewhat cruel take on one of my favorite themes -- the struggle of each generation to convince itself that their are still original ideas to be discovered, to find a piece of existence that isn't covered with the footprints and the graffiti of the previous. The image of Icarus flying too close to the sun is one of those that has been kept alive since the men and women started to make the trouble to tell stories in the first place and it is, indeed, the best allegory for the artistic experience that one could hope for. For me, the point of the story isn't that Icarus got cocky and flew too close to the sun. For me, the point is that once that wax starts to melt even just a little, you're screwed. That's the risk of creation -- your mistakes, once made, will trigger consequences that can never be reversed or even stopped. Putting out your own individual vision for the rest of the world to see -- it's the closest you can get to self-destruction without having to deal with the complications of purgatory.

The other was a much shorter, humorous (in a cynical sort of way) piece called A Relationship, which is an homage of sorts to a few short pieces Irvine Welsh included in his collection The Acid House but, hopefully, enlivened by my own view point. This was something that I originally wrote for It's Impossible To Start A Fire... and it survived every draft until the final when I realized that, regardless of how much I personally liked it, it didn't fit in with the rest of the book. So, I'm glad that I've found a home for it in Oswald Acted Alone.
  ¶ 6:10 PM