October 8, 2024

Tomorrow, I turn 75. Which might make anyone reflective. But I've also been working on a reflective new poetry manuscript, The Collected Fidgets. It's an odd enterprise, given how unpolished some of those poems are—challenging formally, so it would be disingenuous to call them uncrafted, but there's an awful lot of casual meander to most of them; it's metrically and tonally intrinsic to their conceit. (The fidget is a five stanza 19 line half-form I concocted to meet my own philosophical and mutt spiritual needs; it adheres to a strict template of rhymes and refrains and patternless lines combining to strike the ear as non-metrical free verse. I've written dozens of them.) And I've realized that I'd prefer the book to be a hybrid, of fidgets on the one hand, and on the facing page, prose vignettes and reflective responses. Many of the fidgets themselves need a lot of work—to tighten them for public consumption, while still (I hope) preserving their offhand flow—and I've no idea, yet, how I'll manage those prose responses. It just feels as if that's what the manuscript needs. Anyway, this morning I was riffling through old writing folders to unearth a few more (possibly) salvageable fidgets, and of course I quickly got sidetracked. Not just by forgotten poems, but by realia, and short story fragments, and a whole series of 3000 word creative nonfiction pieces written in French, probably for some class I was taking in grad school. And it occurred to me—seeing as how I've been moving so much of my creative work onto this website that it's becoming a kind of de facto "Life of Derek"—that I really should add a blog page to it. Not crafted work, just off the cuff scribbles, like this piece. Not a proper, regularly maintained journal, given how many other projects I'm juggling; maybe no rules or expectations at all. Just a place to put stuff like this when the mood takes me. For a while back in the oh-ohs, I liked to write blog-style free verse. There was a sequence called "So, Life," a few pieces from which I turned up in my rummage today. (I'll post a couple of them soon, maybe here, maybe in the hard-to-find "Family Album" pages.) Having enjoyed that project, I may, in due course, try a few such entries here.

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Here, in its almost entirety (I've cut three pointless postscript lines; it's otherwise as I found it) is a sonnet I turned up this morning. I don't know when I wrote it, but it was typed on my French typewriter, so my best guess would be 1973, 1974. There was probably some genuine "Avignon, 1969" scribble that I drew upon, but at 19 my poetry skills were as shaky as my command of French—I can't imagine having drafted it in my teens and so thoroughly forgetting it. I do remember attending the lecture; how at sea I felt; how I doubted I could ever develop enough of an ear to make sense of this wash of sound. I could, and did, later, of course. If the analogy in the closing lines feels a little glib now, I'm not certain it was at the time. Perhaps I've made progress in that area too. Or perhaps, more likely, I've come to terms with the limits of such knowledge: of just who we are, you and I. And if myself, my partner, my friends, my kinfolk, then naturally my acquaintances; certainly my fellow Americans, in this run-up to another election, with its terrifyingly clear choice, and its bewilderingly close poll numbers. Its morass of bafflingly other voices I can make no sense of at all.