The Reset Button

Those of you who actually follow this spiel may be noticing a little difference lately (compared to last year): fewer posts, more (MUCH more) poetry. This isn't really by design, but there are a couple reasons for the current state of affairs.

First, I've been writing a lot of poetry lately. I've always scrawled lines in notebooks, and sometimes strung the lines together, but I've had the tendency to edit them into oblivion in the past. I'm making more of a commitment to my poetry these days - get the poems out into the open instead of throwing them away or deleting them like I used to do. This means that a few stinkers creep out, and a lot of stuff that is going to go through a lot of changes, but that's ok. There's some stuff here that really makes me happy as well.

Second, I was starting to descend into the lie of the dialectic, especially as it applied to American politics. I had a bunch of half-formed bullshit sitting in my "drafts" box that I finally just deleted. The crash and burn of the public political dialogue almost sucked me in, but in the end, pointing out the obvious stupidity of T-baggers who show up to protests with signs saying things such as "KEEP THE GOVERNMENT'S HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE" isn't worth the time or effort. You just get sucked into pointless conversations, and the level of discourse sinks down to the ridiculous. I'll leave that shit up to Rachel Maddow.

That doesn't mean that I'm becoming apolitical by any stretch of the imagination - it's just that I hope to rescue the political from the base "politics" dialectic that has become institutionalized in our crass culture . . . at least as far as it pertains to my writing. I'll probably still occasionally visit overtly political topics, but more of my stuff will be political in the sense that "Crescent" was political. We'll see how that works out.

And now, I hit the RESET button.