My poem “absolute zero” is the featured “Poem of the Issue” in this week’s edition of The Austin Chronicle. This one has its origins in a journal entry from early 1989 which was forgotten and then rediscovered in October 2010 when I was working on the Iron Man Family Outtakes project. I can’t remember now in what state of completion this piece was when I found it, but I don’t think I had to do a whole lot of work to finish it.

I have extremely vivid memories of writing many of my poems: what was going on for me in that moment, the time, place, circumstances, etc. For others (like this one), I can’t recall much more than a general context and a time frame. Then there are those pieces, some of which are quite significant, for which I have no recollection whatsoever of the process of creation after some time has passed. Why I would remember writing some so well and others not at all has always been a mystery to me.

As I’ve been reading this one right now, it seems to me that it started with me feeling like I was too blocked to write anything (first two lines), which is kind of ironic in retrospect. I toss off a few lines in a journal, forget about them, and 22 years later I have a published poem. What a crazy, mysterious, unpredictable process this is.

Many of the insights offered about the process of creating a photograph echoed my own experience as a writer and poet. Leverant speaks of photography as “an art of waiting” and “an art of listening.” If the photographer listens well enough, if he has developed sufficient discipline, the photo takes itself. I’ve often told others that I feel as if my poems write themselves, but this only happens when I’m able to give them the time and space they need to emerge.

The processes and philosophy in this book may be specific to photography, but I believe that anyone engaged in creative activity who reads it can gain some valuable insights into the value of waiting, listening, and allowing art, whatever the chosen medium, to find its own path.

Today’s poem on video, “present time”, was written back in late November and recorded in early February, both of which feel like a lifetime ago as I’m writing today.

I suppose it’s appropriate that I post this video today as this is my last day of “strange freedom”, as I put it a little over nine months ago, before starting a new job tomorrow. I’d love to say I’m excited about it, but I’m not. Relieved that I’m not going to go completely broke, yes. Grateful that I have a way to support myself when so many do not, yes. Happy that I’m going to survive, yes. Excited, no.

These last nine months have been a wonderfully productive time for me. I’ve grown by leaps and bounds. It was absolutely necessary that I take this time with myself, for myself and my own work, and I have no doubt about that. Even so, it’s been a huge drain financially to go without an income for nine months. And once again I have failed, for whatever reason, to translate my most heartfelt passion into livelihood.

I still believe there is a need for what I have to offer. My life would actually be a lot easier if I didn’t believe it. But need and demand are not the same thing. There may be a need. I may be right about that. However, there doesn’t seem to be much of a demand. Or perhaps I just haven’t figured out how to deliver what I have to offer to those who would find it valuable. Or maybe I haven’t fully defined it yet.

When I left my last job nine months ago, in all the uncertainty I felt about what my future might hold, I was sure of one thing: by the time I either found another job or ran out of money, my second book would be out. But Scapegoat’s Cross remains as it has been ever since September 2009, a completed manuscript with no artwork and no path to publication. This is one of the most difficult realities I have to accept as I prepare to move back into cubicleland.

A couple of years ago, I wrote:

Writing, for me, has always had the qualities of a trance, a charm, a spell. It requires a suspension of disbelief on my part: the suspension of my disbelief in myself. It requires me to believe that what I have to say, and how I’m going to say it, will be meaningful and interesting to others. This is a fragile state, magical and mysterious, that can last for moments or months, in which every word matters and every thought or feeling might last forever, if only I’m quick enough to catch it.

At some point, the trance always ends; the charm fades; the spell is broken. My words, thoughts, and feelings seem ordinary again, and there’s nothing left to write.

I feel like that wonderful trance I’ve been in since Iron Man Family Outing began to resurrect itself in September 2007 may be coming to its end, not because I have nothing left to say or nothing left to give, but because the material realities of my life are beginning, once again, to overwhelm my inner vision. I’m simply not going to have the time, the energy, and the opportunity for writing, and for the deep self-work that is the foundation of the writing, and I know it.

Furthermore, I seem to have maxed out all of the channels I’ve been using to draw new folks to my work. Readership for Iron Man Family Outing seems to have peaked and, as I said previously, Scapegoat’s Cross is still dead in the water. The outer side of my work seems to have stagnated and now I can feel the inner side beginning to shut down as well.

Musician Joe Strummer once said, “Songs don’t tend to come to you if there’s no outlet for them.” This has certainly been true in my experience. When I feel I don’t have an appropriate outlet for my work, my creative flow just stops dead. Maybe that’s not happening now, but it sure feels that way to me.

In any case, today is my last day of freedom, freedom that no longer feels strange, but natural. Tomorrow will be different.

If, as I suspect, my well is running dry, I may not post again for a while. In the event that I’m correct about that, I’d like to leave everyone with these three thoughts:

* Men are hungry for ways to access their emotions safely. No man wants to open up and be shamed or scared into shutting back down again.

* Poetry is both undervalued and underutilized as a means to move into the heart of our experience, especially for men.

* The other men I’ve met (and I met some amazing men at Mike Lew’s male survivors workshop yesterday) who are working to recover from childhood abuse are some of the bravest men on the planet.

I hope I’ve done something to bring the truth of these three statements home to some other people. Men need understanding and encouragement if they are to do better. They need to be seen as they truly are. We all need that. We all deserve it.

I still believe there is a different life, a better life, a wholly and completely natural and heartfelt life that serves my needs as it serves the needs of others, waiting inside me to be lived. But I won’t be living it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. Perhaps that life is still out there somewhere in my future, but now there is only now.

I’ve also decided that it’s time to wind down my efforts to promote Iron Man Family Outing. As I wrote in a previous post, “Twenty years is a long time to stick with anything.” I decided three years ago that I was going to do whatever it took to get the unused copies of the book out to people who would find it personally meaningful, and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of it. Most of those copies are out there in the world now. Based on some of the feedback I’ve received over the last three years, quite a few of them have done or are still doing some good.

The amount of time and effort I’ve put into Iron Man Family Outing over the past 38 months has been staggering and would probably shock me if I’d actually kept track of it. I have kept track of the amount of money I’ve spent and it’s been substantial. Shipping free books all over the United States and internationally has not been cheap. I have a deep commitment to the work I do, but I also have to acknowledge that there are some very real limits to how much of myself I can give to an extremely demanding form of work that provides me with no material support whatsoever. My friend David Jewell likes to say, “Crime doesn’t pay and neither does poetry,” but personally I think that most criminals make a much better living than most poets do.

This brings me to the subject and the status of my second, still unpublished book, Scapegoat’s Cross, which has been essentially dead in the water for over a year now since I completed the final manuscript in September 2009. I’ve had no success finding an artist to work with me on illustrations and graphic design, which is something I know I can’t do on my own. I don’t have a publisher either, and don’t even have any leads on getting one. I’ve known all along that the chances of finding someone who’d publish the book were slim, and I’ve been willing for some time now to publish it myself and give the work away (again) for the sake of getting it out there, but without the artwork I can’t even do that.

Lately I’ve been wondering if maybe I shouldn’t publish it at all. Maybe all the blocks and difficulties I’ve encountered since completing the manuscript (breaking my wrist and shoulder, leaving my job and losing my income, being unable to find an artist) are signs that I shouldn’t go forward with it, that I’m not meant to do that. I just don’t know anymore.

I had similar struggles and doubts during the process that ultimately led to the publication of Iron Man Family Outing, so I know that none of this sturm und drang necessarily means that Scapegoat’s Cross shouldn’t or won’t see the light of day. But I also know that there are certain doors that have to open in order for me to move forward with it, and they’re just not opening.

Doubts and concerns notwithstanding, I was very naive and idealistic when I was working to get Iron Man Family Outing published. I didn’t realize what the experience was going to cost me personally or understand the seismic effect it was going to have on my life and my relationships, and I certainly didn’t anticipate that I was committing myself to a project that would consume a twenty-year chunk of my life. I’m not saying that I regret doing it. I don’t. I honestly can’t imagine myself having gone any other way. Telling the truth, in the way I told it, was a matter of life and death for me. But I know now that there’s a price to be paid for taking that path, and I wonder if I’m up to it a second time.

Perhaps more than anything, I wonder if there’s really any substantial interest in what I have to say. As was the case with Iron Man Family Outing, the work I’ve done with Scapegoat’s Cross doesn’t seem to fit with anything else I see anywhere. It’s out of step with a good deal of what I see going on these days in the arena of what is commonly characterized as men’s work (too much of which seems, to my eyes, obsessed with a bizarrely adolescent fixation on getting chicks and getting laid, as if that’s the highest life purpose to which a man can aspire). Nor is Scapegoat’s Cross like anything I’ve seen in the adult survivor literature or the self-help / personal growth genre, and I’ve learned the hard way over the years that the work I’m doing is seen as some sort of strange, illegitimate aberration (at best) in the MFA-strangled universe of contemporary American poetry.

It’s been said that Iron Man Family Outing was ahead of its time, and there might be something to that. It’s certainly been far better received in the last three years than it was when it was published in 1990, although there are still some rather high-profile gatekeepers of the men’s movement (whatever that term even means now) on the web who continue to exclude it from their lists of books for men and poetry for men, and not for any lack of effort on my part to make them aware of it. I guess, for these guys anyway, if it ain’t Bly, it don’t fly.

Maybe Scapegoat’s Cross is ahead of its time as well. I don’t know. I’m too close to it to say. But it sure is stuck, and it’s been that way for over a year, and I wonder if maybe that’s telling me something.

The larger question for me at this point is whether I should continue the work I’ve been doing as a writer at all. I often feel like I’m doing a ton of work in the dark here, the majority of which seems to go largely unseen by anyone but me. Maybe I’m not very good at promoting myself. Hell, I know I’m not. I don’t even like doing it, and my explorative forays into utilizing social media have been, quite frankly, a bust so far. On the other hand, maybe the work I’m doing is simply so far out on the edge that there’s not much interest to be had, whether I’m good at promoting it or not. Again, I’m too close to the situation to know.

What I do know is that one of the best aspects of the work I’ve done over the last three years has been making new friends and allies all around the world who are actively committed to helping men grow and heal. Becoming acquainted with these men and women has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement for me. There’s a lot of great work being done behind the scenes with and for men, and I’m honored to have been a part of it in whatever way I could.

Nevertheless, I feel like I’m at a sort of crossroads here. With my efforts on behalf of Iron Man Family Outing winding down and with Scapegoat’s Cross in hibernation or stasis or permanent sleep, whatever it is, I’m asking myself some serious questions about my next step, which has to include some way to make a living. Unfortunately, I only know one way to do that, and the prospect of committing myself to it yet again makes my guts shrivel and shrink. What do you do when doing what you love pays you nothing, and doing what pays you breaks you down?

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing for public consumption here on the blog in the near future. To be completely honest, I’ve been disappointed in the lack of response to what I think have been several pretty good posts published in the last month or so (here, here, here, and here), and another piece I submitted to one of the big men’s websites a couple of months ago has apparently been rejected. I say “apparently” because their stated editorial review period expired weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to the status of my submission since then.

I have one other post nearly completed, and I’ll probably publish it here in the next week or so, along with the one mentioned above that’s been in limbo for the last couple of months. After that … I dunno. Yet to be determined. Maybe it’ll be easier for me to think clearly if I stop banging my head against walls for a while. Or maybe I just can’t help myself, and the banging will continue.

“This memorable and occasionally haunting book of poetry is less about art and more about sharing and integrating the experience of growing up as a man. It gives words to men that we have not had before. It is graphic and real. It doesn’t pull punches. This is not your momma’s book of poetry. But it is just what you might need if you are a man who is looking for an example of how to come alive!

“This book is twenty years ahead of its time. That is to say that, on its 20th anniversary, it is very timely today for a male gender that is starting to claim a deeper way of life. I have used this book for my own growth and in my therapy work with men who are looking to live more fully. Rick shines the light on the path. Now it is for us to walk it.”

There’s no way I can possibly express how much it means to me to see a response like this to my work, twenty years down the line. For the better part of those twenty years, the majority of the 2000 copies of Iron Man Family Outing printed in October 1990 remained packed in their original boxes, the casualties of a publication deal gone wrong, stacked like bricks in one closet after another as I moved from place to place to place.

I’d felt the work very deeply while writing Iron Man Family Outing, and my conviction that it had value for others was also deeply felt, but I could find no place for it out in the world. I felt haunted by all those boxes of unused, unread books that were always with me, and in the spring of 2006, after more than fifteen years of trying and failing to find a solution, I finally decided to scrap them. I just couldn’t bear the thought of holding on to them for the rest of my life, and then leaving it up to someone else to dispose of them after I was gone. I made them, I was responsible for them, and I honestly felt that there were no other reasonable options left, so I began the process of breaking them down, one book at a time, and recycling the paper.

I knew this task was too big, not just physically, but emotionally and psychologically, for me to take it on all at once, so I made a commitment to scrap one book a day until they were all gone. Every evening, I pulled one book out of its box in the closet, removed the front and back covers, and tore out all the pages until nothing was left but the spine. Then I tossed all of the pieces into the recycling bin.

I’m not sure how long this went on; probably for about a month or so. At some point during that time, I happened to be standing in the front yard outside my home when the biweekly recycling pickup at the curb took place. As the recycling truck drove away carrying the remains of the books I’d scrapped during the previous two weeks, I saw one of the trashmen riding in the back pick up one of the detached front covers and give it an interested look as some of the torn-out pages swirled around him in the wind. It was a surreal, painful moment for me as I watched my long-ignored work finally catching someone’s interest while its remains blew around him in circles in the back of a trash truck.

This process of scrapping books, one book a day, could have gone on for quite a long time. I was convinced that I was doing the right thing, that I was doing what was necessary to move on from what I saw as my greatest disappointment in life, and painful as it was, I had no intention of stopping. But something completely unexpected happened: I had a dream, a dream that told me, in no uncertain terms, that I should not continue to scrap the books. And so I stopped.

I didn’t know then why I was supposed to stop, but the information in the dream was completely unambiguous, so I did. Eighteen months later, to my complete surprise, Iron Man Family Outing was reborn. Looking back, I can see how absolutely fitting it was, given the genesis of the book’s development in my dreams, that it would be rescued, quite literally, by a dream. I’m just glad I was still listening after all that time.

I sometimes regret scrapping those books and wish I hadn’t had to do it, but I think it was necessary. It’s hard for me to say exactly why. The best theory I have is that I had to let go of all my prior long-held needs and expectations for the book in order for it to become what it was supposed to be, and that I had to sacrifice a little part of it to do so. I had to give up hope to make way for the truth. But even in doing that, I kept my original promise to myself to see the project through to the end, even if it meant tearing up every remaining copy myself with my own hands. I think this was the key. I gave up my hope, but I never gave up my responsibility to the work and to what I had created.

Twenty years is a long time to stick with anything. Earlier this week, a reader wrote to me and said he admired what he characterized as my “perseverance and dedication,” and that sure felt good. But I also know that there’s more to it than that. This project, this process, has always had its own schedule and its own life, and my role has always been to serve the process rather than to drive it. This is trickier than it might sound. When I forget my role in the process, when I try to put my own desires and expectations ahead of the process and the work, I’m only getting in the way and causing myself all kinds of unnecessary trouble. Letting go, being present, being patient, and waiting for direction may sound like “soft” work, but it’s some of the hardest work I know.

Hard, frustrating, disappointing, painful, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, lonely … yes, the last twenty years with Iron Man Family Outing been all of that and more, at times. But not for nothing. Every time I hear from a reader who’s found my book helpful, I feel a little freer because I know I’ve helped someone else feel a little freer. I know I’m not alone in this work, as do they. I liberate myself by helping others liberate themselves. Any sacrifice I make comes back to me a thousandfold as I see one more ugly little shard of my past transformed into something beautiful and life-affirming. That is reason enough to have hung in there with this work for the past twenty years, and to stay on the path it’s shown me, that long, crooked, and sometimes broken path, for as long as it continues to unfold before me.

I’m especially pleased to see “party girl dance” posted. It’s one of only three poems I’ve written in 2010 and one of only five I’ve written since breaking my right wrist and shoulder (my writing arm) in October 2009. The last eleven months have been pretty tough for me as a writer (and as a person), and there haven’t been very many moments during that time when I’ve felt that mystery element at work in me that I have to feel in order to write a poem.

Back in January 2009, I wrote, “Writing, for me, has always had the qualities of a trance, a charm, a spell.” The fall I took eleven months ago broke more than my wrist and my shoulder. It also broke the trance, the charm, the spell that had enabled me to write the Scapegoat’s Cross manuscript (and numerous additional poems) during the previous twelve months after not writing even one line of poetry in over fifteen years. Truth be told, it broke my heart a little bit, too. Well … a lot. And I’m still working on that.

So yeah, I’m very happy to see one of the few little gems that have emerged from me during this time get some visibility. It means a lot, and it helps me heal a little, too.

The interior of the book will be printed in black & white (no color) so I’m looking for illustrations that can be reduced to 4.5″ x 4.5″ for a 6″ x 9″ book and reproduced in halftones without losing the effect of the original artwork.

My goal is to develop artwork for the book that expresses, distills, frames, and amplifies the themes, energies, and tones present in the writing. My intention is to provide the reader with a visual context that both introduces and reinforces the material in each section.

This project will require an artist who is able to feel some resonance with the written material and is also capable of translating challenging subject matter and strong archetypal themes from the verbal to the visual, in a manner that is both subtle and powerful.

My preferred style of work for this project is collaborative. I have specific images, themes, and/or visual concepts in mind, in a very raw form, for six of the seven sections of the book, and I would expect all or most of these visual reference points to be incorporated into the finished illustrations. But I’m also looking forward to a creative process that includes input from the artist with regard to concepts and thematic visualization, and I believe that level of active participation on the part of the artist will be essential to the success of the project.

If you think this project may interest you, I encourage you to have a look at the “New Book” page on my website, where you can view the table of contents and read excerpts to get a better idea of tone, style, and themes. You might also find it useful to explore some of the other material on the site (most of which is drawn from or related to my first book) to give yourself some additional reference points.

If you think you might be a good candidate for this project, please contact me via the email address listed on my website at http://rickbelden.com/contact and let me know how I can see some samples of your work.

“I’m aware of my songs. I’m aware of them because they’re about true emotions, true feelings, things that matter. And you don’t ever forget grief or joy, do you? They’re the constant companions of a human being. If you can coin them accurately enough, they will always be there.”

- John Lydon from A.V. Club interview, April 6, 2010

Beautifully expressed, and so very true.

Is My Soul Asleep?

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

Antonio Machado

These periods when I am not writing, when I seem to be unable to write, are always difficult for me, and I do feel at times as if my soul is asleep, or has left me somehow. Those angels with whom I was wrestling not so long ago seem very far away from me now, and I miss them.

Initially, I was reluctant to call what I was writing “poetry” at all. The use of that word struck me as a bit … I dunno … conceited? Self-important? Pretentious? Preposterous? I wasn’t even sure I knew what poetry was. It seemed to be a lot of things, according to who was writing it and who was reading it, and it struck me as one of those words that’s somehow developed so many different meanings and connotations that it barely means anything at all anymore, like “love” or “god.”

I was also concerned that, for a lot of folks, the word “poetry” can be roughly translated into “something I’m not gonna want to read.”

Ultimately, I set all of those concerns aside because I knew that what I was writing certainly wasn’t prose, and I needed to use some sort of recognizable terminology to describe it. So it’s poetry … okay. What kind of poetry?

Every one of the labels I listed above (poetry for men, survivor poetry, etc.) expresses one very specific aspect of my writing while excluding many others. It reduces the work, in some substantial way, to something far less than what it actually is. There are also connotations and assumptions associated with each of these labels that may or may not be accurate and appropriate in the case of my writing. And that’s something I’d prefer to avoid if I can.

If, for example, I describe Iron Man Family Outing as “poetry for men” then I feel like I’m basically telling women, “This book is not for you.” But that’s not the message I want to send, and it’s not true. About half of my readers are women, and they relate to the material just as strongly as the men do. If I characterize Scapegoat’s Cross as “poetry for adult survivors of childhood abuse” then those who would not describe themselves in that way might think, “There’s nothing in this book that will speak to me.” But that’s not true either, and it’s not the impression I want anyone to have. While the adult survivor theme is central and very critical to the structure of Scapegoat’s Cross, the scope of the book is much broader, and much more universal, than that.

How do I accurately communicate, with a non-ambiguous label consisting of two or three words, the depth and the breadth, the variety and the richness, the individuality and the universality of the transformational processes I’m attempting to illuminate and share in my writing? I still don’t have an answer. To borrow from Zen, words are “but a finger pointing to the moon.” I guess I’ll just keep trying out all of my fingers until I find the ones that point the best.

Hello,
I’m writing to offer you a complimentary copy of my book, Iron Man Family Outing. I believe this book may be of interest to you. I would be very happy to provide you with a copy at no cost to you, shipping and handling included.

There’s no catch here and no hidden agenda. The simple fact is that I printed more copies than I’ve been able to sell, and I don’t want the remaining copies to go to waste.

Over the years, I’ve received many positive, enthusiastic responses from folks who’ve read and enjoyed this book. I’ve also discovered just how difficult it is to promote and distribute work of this nature. My primary interest now is to get the remaining copies of my book to people who would find it personally meaningful.

I’m enclosing some introductory information about the book, including a brief excerpt. Please contact me if you would like to receive a copy or if you need any additional information.

Regards,

Rick Belden
Author, Iron Man Family Outing

With that, Iron Man Family Outing, published in the fall of 1990 and then forgotten and presumed dead for the next seventeen years, was reborn.

I didn’t have a website two years ago today. I didn’t have a blog. I didn’t have even one reader review for Iron Man Family Outing at Amazon, or anywhere else on the web for that matter. All I had was a closetful of unsold books and a renewed conviction that it was important that I get them out to people who could make use of them.

In the two years since that day, I’ve contacted over 1800 individuals and organizations around the world, and sent out nearly 900 copies of Iron Man Family Outing to recipients in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It’s now being used worldwide by therapists, counselors, men’s groups, and organizations that work with men as an aid in the exploration of masculine psychology and men’s issues, and as a resource for men who grew up in dysfunctional, abusive, or neglectful family systems. It’s been ranked in the top 20 poetry books and the top 35 books on father-son relationships at Amazon.com, based on reader reviews. I’ve made new friends and allies all around the world who are working to help men grow and heal. And I have the most unexpected result of all, the completed manuscript for a brand-new book: Scapegoat’s Cross, my first new work in nearly twenty years.

It’s clear to me now, in retrospect, that events in my life had been leading me back to my unfinished business with the Iron Man Family Outing project since 2004, but I didn’t know that two years ago today. All I knew was that I woke up on a Sunday morning with a letter in my mind and an undeniable imperative to finish what I’d started all those years ago, to see my original vision for the book through to its completion, even if I had to give away every copy I had to do it.

I don’t know where this process will lead me in the future. Two years ago, I never expected to be where I am with this work today. I hadn’t written a line of poetry in over fifteen years. I was haunted by my failure to find an audience for Iron Man Family Outing and considered myself dead as a writer. Fortunately, things have changed.

Well, not everything has changed. I’m still fighting the battle of “soul versus survival” daily. Some days are harder than others. As I wrote almost a year ago in a blog entry entitled “go crazy or starve”:

Every morning when I wake up and don’t have time to write because some meaningless job is demanding its daily pound of flesh in exchange for a little more survival time, I feel like I’m terminating a pregnancy. It’s absolutely wrenching. I start the day sad, furious, and hopeless.

It’s still happening. It happened yesterday. I could feel something coming and I made some notes, but there was no time to allow it to develop or complete. It may come back to me. It may not.

But I’m fighting to keep the channel open, even if it means suffering the pain of losing all those things I never get to finish, because the last two years have shown me that it matters that I keep trying and do what I can, and because two years ago today I began to remember, for the first time in over fifteen years, who I am and what my life is about.

A meaningless job is going to eat my morning again today, but I woke up about two hours ago at 4 AM, after a couple of hours of restless semi-sleep, and realized I couldn’t let this anniversary go by without observing it in some way. This is my life now. The work drives me, it nags at me, it makes me miserable and keeps me awake until I tend to it.

It’s hard, it’s demanding, it’s draining, it doesn’t leave me much time for anything else, and sometimes it feels like it’s just too much for me. It also keeps me alive. And I’m okay with that.

I’m surprised to discover a published version of my book that is somehow different than the published version I know in waking reality. Either I never knew about this alternate version, or I’d forgotten about it somehow. Sometimes it was published by me and sometimes by someone else. The alternate version of the book typically includes material that didn’t appear in the real book, such as additional poems, different artwork, and/or commentary on the poems with notes for readers.

Each time I’ve had one of these dreams, I’ve puzzled over its meaning without developing any sort of useful conclusions. But about a week ago, I had another dream that followed the same pattern, and this one came to me with something new: a direction I could use to investigate the dream in waking reality.

In this most recent dream, I find two alternate versions of my book that I’d forgotten, one of which contains “some additional ‘lost’ material from the same period that I didn’t include in the original book.” The dream ends as follows:

finding these alternate versions is exciting for me
I’d completely forgotten about them and now I want to go home and
dig out the old imfo archive box
to see what else I’ve forgotten I had.

The “old imfo archive box” to which I refer in the dream is a real physical object in waking reality, a large box in my closet containing everything I’d saved that was produced during the creation and publication of Iron Man Family Outing. I’d packed this stuff up and taped the box shut years ago, and really had no idea what was in there any more. But I felt clearly directed by the dream to pull that box out of the closet and explore its contents, whatever they might be. And I was excited that I finally had something tangible to help me follow up on the information that had been presented to me repeatedly over several years in this ongoing, very puzzling series of dreams.

A few days went by and the dream slipped out of my consciousness as I fell back into the usual “rush to nowhere” routine of the workweek. But as the weekend approached, I remembered the dream, especially the direction I received at the end, and I made a commitment to myself to dig into the closet, find that box, and open it up. I had a strong feeling, though, that I shouldn’t open it on a weeknight. Something told me I needed to wait until I had a nice chunk of free, open time for this job.

I cracked the box open two days ago and what a surprise. I found all kinds of stuff I’d completely forgotten, including early versions of the manuscript for Iron Man Family Outing that are substantially different than the final version that was published. One of these versions (marked V4 Jan 1990) contains original commentary by my friend, the remarkably talented David Jewell.

David had provided one of the original sparks for the book by leading a poetry workshop that I attended. After the workshop ended, I continued to write and he continued to encourage me. As a matter of fact, he was the first person who told me, “You’re writing a book.” After working through several versions of the manuscript, I reached a point at which I felt I had something that was finished, and I asked David to review it for me and give me some editorial guidance.

I’ve known all along that David played a critical part in the creation of the book, but until I read through his commentary on the V4 Jan 1990 manuscript this weekend, I must say that I’d forgotten what a valuable role he played as an editor. His feedback was wise and honest, sometimes cutting, sometimes humorous, but always generous and always pointed in the direction of improving the manuscript. He commented on what worked for him and what didn’t, suggested I restore some things from previous manuscripts that I’d deleted, and pulled me back from going over the edge with pieces that were too raw, too alienating, poorly centered, or underdeveloped.

I didn’t agree with everything he said, and I didn’t follow every recommendation he made, but the difference between the V4 Jan 1990 manuscript David reviewed and the book I published is substantial. As a result of David’s feedback, I cut, rearranged, and restored some things, and I wrote a whole lot more new stuff.

Probably about a third of the final book was written after David’s feedback. I also made some major revisions to a poem called “fused at the wound” which has turned out to be one of the most popular pieces in the book. In its original incarnation, it was about twice as long, and David’s comments motivated me to tighten it up, which was obviously the right thing to do. I can say without any reservation that Iron Man Family Outing, in its present form, would not have existed without David Jewell’s input. So, thank you again, David.

Another amazing discovery was an envelope containing all of the notes and sketches produced in the course of my work with another extraordinarily talented contributor to the project, Austin artist John Dolley. (I wish John had a web site so I could link to it, but I can’t find one for him.) My collaboration with John was perhaps the most purely fun aspect of the whole project, and seeing all that material from the time we spent working together really brought a smile to my face.

I’d met John a couple of years prior to writing my book and seen a magnificent sketch he’d made of a scene from a dream he’d had. Little did I know that this was just the tip of the iceberg as far as John’s talent as an artist, but even so, that sketch made a big impression on me. When I needed an artist to develop some illustrations for my new book, I remembered John and contacted him. I gave him a copy of the finished manuscript and a few pages of notes about my ideas regarding artwork for the book. I remember being anxious, wondering what he’d come up with, wondering if it would be a good match for what I’d written.

I needn’t have worried. John’s first set of sketches showed me immediately that he got it, that he understood what I was saying with the book and what it meant. I was amazed at the resonance and sensitivity toward the material that his drawings demonstrated, and I knew this partnership was going to work … not just work, but elevate what I’d written to a whole new level that I’d never foreseen.

About half of John’s original concept illustrations were right on the mark. He nailed them the first time, right out of the box. The other half didn’t work so well for me, but I had some ideas of my own. John was completely open to my suggestions and feedback. Not a trace of ego in this guy. He used my notes and very crude drawings to rework the portions of his presentation that I didn’t like, and he did everything, down to the finest detail, right to my specifications.

It was such a joy to work with John. And he worked hard, drawing numerous thorough renditions of the Iron Man … from the front, from the back, details of various parts of the armor. He’d show me what he had, I’d give him some feedback based on my vision of how things should look, then he’d revise until I was happy. Amazing. Probably the best experience I’ve ever had working with anyone, on anything.

John also took Polaroids of all sorts of things as references for what he was illustrating … trees, clouds, buildings, furniture, and numerous poses of me, standing in for the Iron Man. John was a total blast to work with, and seeing all those notes, drawings, Polaroids, and all the rest brought it all back to me. Thanks again, John. Your work really made the book.

I found all sorts of other things as well in my journey through the archive box, including a nearly final version of the manuscript that included my notes from the dozen or so early readers from whom I’d solicited feedback. These folks also made essential contributions to the book, as it was their feedback that helped me determine the ultimate shape of the book with regard to the final set of poems and the sequence in which they appeared. There are too many names to list here, and many of them have moved out of my life and on to places unknown, but I send my thanks out to each of them for their generosity and their help.

Among my other discoveries in the big box was perhaps the biggest surprise of all: a folder containing about fifty unpublished poems I’d written during the development of the book that I’d chosen not to include in the final version. I was stunned. I’d been under the impression for as long as I can remember that I’d used just about everything I’d written. I knew there were some pieces I hadn’t used, but not fifty!

I’m still in the process of reviewing and evaluating this cache of forgotten work. If you’ve ever listened to a CD reissue with extra tracks that weren’t included at the time the original recording was released, or checked out the deleted scenes from a movie on DVD, what I’m about to say won’t come as a surprise. There’s a reason why some of those fifty or so pieces were forgotten in that box for all those years: they’re not very good. Some are underdeveloped. Some are little more than glorified journal entries. Some are nonsense word streams that say nothing and go nowhere. Some are aimed at targets that don’t matter to me any more. And some are just so over-the-top raw that it’s simply not reasonable for me to expect another person to read them. I can barely read them myself.

But, as is often the case with the extra tracks on the CD or the deleted movie scenes, I also see some pieces that may have some potential, maybe a dozen or so. Some of them might need a little tweak or two. I couldn’t see myself writing most of them now, but I’m finding some things I like, that still make sense in the time and the context in which I wrote them, and I may release some of these forgotten pieces, my “Iron Man Family Outtakes,” in some form one of these days, perhaps here on the blog.

As anyone who knows me can attest, the process of taking Iron Man Family Outing from conception to completion was quick and easy compared to the challenges I’ve faced in the years that followed trying to get it out to readers. In the last eighteen months, this project, dormant for so long, has undergone an incredible and completely unexpected resurrection, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s contributed to that process. Eighteen months ago, with boxes and boxes of my books sitting unread and useless in my closet, it would have been incredibly painful for me to open the “old imfo archive box” and see all those artifacts of a time when my book felt so alive and full of potential.

But now, with so many copies of the book out in the world, in the hands of so many people, I have a greater sense of completion with regard to the project and to many of the original experiences that motivated it. Helping others move forward through their own issues is a great source of satisfaction and validates my original vision for the book. Consequently, I can explore these long-forgotten keepsakes, remember my good fortune in having been blessed with such talented, generous creative partners, and enjoy my memories of that extraordinary time in my life.

And once again, I have to thank my dreams. The Iron Man Family Outing project began for me with a series of dreams, so it seems only fitting that a series of dreams would call me back to the artifacts of its creation, and at the right time. I wonder if my dream series about alternate versions of the book has reached its end, now that I’ve opened the box of long-forgotten artifacts. I guess that, as in all things in life, time will tell.

“All powerful writing is hypnotic — it is engendered in an altered (hypnotic) state and then engenders a similar state in its receivers. The more hypnotic the writing is in its genesis, the more likely it will alter, expand the awareness of the listener or reader.

“Being fully present in the NOW is the writer’s gateway into this altered state, where the writing seems to write itself, where the writer seems to be no more than a unique filter for a flow of material generated beyond the personality. When the writer is thus entranced, this state is altar-ed, serving as a mystical, spiritual foundation for the word made flesh, for incarnation into the world of time.”

- Dr. Joseph Mancini, Jr. from “Hypnosis, the Writer & Writing”

“The way I write stuff, for me, it’s kind of like invocation in a magical sense. I’m trying to summon characters from the ‘imaginal’ world and allow them to speak through me, so in most cases that requires a kind of complete surrender to the spirit of the character that’s close to a possession. Which means things can come as a surprise even to me as the writer.”

- Grant Morrison from “ALL STAR MORRISON III: Superman” by Jeffrey Renaud

Writing, for me, has always had the qualities of a trance, a charm, a spell. It requires a suspension of disbelief on my part: the suspension of my disbelief in myself. It requires me to believe that what I have to say, and how I’m going to say it, will be meaningful and interesting to others. This is a fragile state, magical and mysterious, that can last for moments or months, in which every word matters and every thought or feeling might last forever, if only I’m quick enough to catch it.

At some point, the trance always ends; the charm fades; the spell is broken. My words, thoughts, and feelings seem ordinary again, and there’s nothing left to write.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry, something I haven’t done in years. As in the past, it’s taken me completely by surprise. I’d concluded long ago that my well was dry. I’d also forgotten how much work it can be to finish a piece once it’s started.

The core of anything I write usually flies out of me quickly, without any direct intention on my part, and I prefer to stay as close as possible to whatever first emerges. “First thought, best thought” as the well-known Zen saying goes. But very few pieces emerge fully intact, coherent, and complete on the first pass. Some do; most don’t. Even the ones that do usually require that I sit with them for a few days to make sure they’re really done.

At the other end of the spectrum are the pieces that are not so easy. They might take hours or they might take days. They might wake me up at 4 AM with changes. I might think I’m done with them more than once, only to find new words coming and the words that already came moving around, trading positions, or morphing into something else entirely. Sometimes a piece will split into two pieces. Sometimes two pieces will merge into one. Anything can happen.

Sometimes I have to abandon a piece that’s not working. I’m always reluctant to do so, but abandoned pieces will often reemerge later, either as direct reincarnations of themselves, or as components or elements of something completely new. Sometimes a word or a phrase or a few lines will sit around with me doing nothing for months or years, incomplete, waiting for the rest to come.

Eventually, everything either finishes or falls away from me for good. Most of the pieces that start do finish, generally within two to three days of first emergence. I seldom make any major changes after that. Each piece is a snapshot of a moment in time and feeling. It is what it is, and I have to respect it as it is.

Every piece I finish gives me something, and takes something in return. Every piece is a gift and a sacrifice. Every piece I write is a piece of me, and it takes a piece of me to write it. If you’re gonna write like a demon, something’s gotta burn. If you’re gonna wrestle with angels, you’ve gotta pay the price. And it’s gonna leave a mark.

(PDF version)

“My dream is made in my body.”

- Eugene Gendlin, Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams

I first discovered the relationship between poetry, dreams, and the body in the process of writing my book, Iron Man Family Outing. In fact, the book was the direct result of my exploration of that relationship. I was having a lot of important dreams at the time, filled with detail and information that required my attention and action, and I was finding it harder and harder to get everything down in my journals each morning. One day I got the idea that maybe I could record my dreams more concisely as poetry rather than as prose, and it worked pretty well for me. So well, in fact, that after a few months, I found that I was writing a book … a book with a title that came to me in one of my dreams.

I was also, at that time, coming into a new form of relationship with my body. I’d been treating my body like a mechanism for most of my life, a strange and mysterious other that felt external and separate from what I thought of as myself, an unreliable machine that suffered from all sorts of inconvenient problems and breakdowns that no doctor I’d seen could explain. I know now that this sort of separation and dissociation from the body is very common among men and boys in my culture. I also know now that it’s common to another demographic group of which I am also a member: adult survivors of childhood abuse.

Somehow, and I honestly can’t say how this came about, I found that my body was, like my dreams, another rich source of imagery and information that expressed itself well in poetic language. I believe this discovery was largely stimulated by the emotional processing work I was doing at the time, in which I was taught to tune into my body as a way to locate and unlock the psychological and emotional energy I’d been forced to repress as a child. As time went on, I gradually began to see my body as a partner rather than as an adversary. I also found that my body had something to say. I only had to give it the time and the space to speak.

In a poem called “body memory” from Iron Man Family Outing, I said:

time passes but nothing is lost
I can’t fool myself
my body remembers everything.

Poetry is the language of my dreams and my body. In my experience, in life and as well as in writing, poetry, dreams, and the body are intertwined and inseparable.

“I find that in order to write songs the way I did, I have to have an unlimited amount of time to just stare out of the window, to go and do whatever I needed to do.”

- Nick Lowe, from Distinguished Crooner Nick Lowe, in Solo Concert

“If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

- The Gospel of Thomas, v.70, quoted from The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

In a previous post, I said that my writing process demands a certain amount of open time and open space, without which I simply can’t do the work properly. But that’s not the whole story. The creative energy that expresses itself in my writing process is very strong. In many ways, it defines me. I can’t just turn it off or ignore it. There are consequences.

I also have to provide for myself financially, and while my writing process has produced some well-received results, it has yet to provide any significant financial support for me. As a consequence, my life feels like a constant tug-of-war, with a huge horse pulling on each end of the rope. One horse is a writing process that demands lots of time but produces no income, and the other is an income process (i.e., job) that demands lots of time but produces no writing. And I’m the rope.

A while back, a friend told me in an email that she was envious of my writing ability. In my reply, I said:

“Don’t be too envious. A lot of the time it feels more like a curse than a blessing to me because I want and need to be writing and creating daily, but have almost no opportunity to do so. I have to sink the best part of myself into making a living five days a week because the system in which we live considers my real work to be essentially valueless. I’m tortured, miserable, angry, and creatively stifled most of the time as a result. It’s not a fun way to live.”

Now I have to admit that my friend happened to catch me on a particularly frustrating day near the end of one of those maddening workweeks that was taking just about everything I had to get through it. On a lot of days, I would have thanked her for the compliment and left it at that. But the essence of what I said in my reply to her was true.

My situation for the last 20 years has been, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski, “go crazy or starve.” I take the least heinous soul-crushing job I can find to support myself. I work as long as I can, going more and more crazy day by day, until I can’t stand it anymore. Then I quit and go into starve mode and do the things that make my life worth living for as long as I can without actually starving (although I’ve come pretty close a number of times).

Every morning when I wake up and don’t have time to write because some meaningless job is demanding its daily pound of flesh in exchange for a little more survival time, I feel like I’m terminating a pregnancy. It’s absolutely wrenching. I start the day sad, furious, and hopeless. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped writing, or even thinking about writing, for years. I just couldn’t stand being so distraught and angry every single day. It wore me down and turned me inside out. So I blocked the energy and stayed depressed all the time. I felt like a zombie and a traitor to my own life. But I got through the day. And I didn’t starve.

About a year ago, a convergence of important events in my life reignited my creative process, and I’m grateful for that. I feel alive again in ways that I haven’t felt for years, yet I still have the same old problem: most of my days belong to someone else. I have to give myself a creativity abortion every morning to keep food in my belly and a roof over my head. My life is not my own.

The one and only reason I was able to write Iron Man Family Outing is that I hit the “go crazy or starve” point in my job at IBM and I chose starve. I had no thoughts of writing a book; I just knew that I was hours away from a major breakdown and I was going to lose my mind, literally, if I didn’t walk away from that situation, then and there. I’ve been at that point several more times since then and I’ve hit the starve button again to save myself each time.

I’m fifty now and I don’t have the hot skills that used to set me up with jobs whenever I needed money. I might not have wanted those jobs, but I could get ‘em. And the economy is … well, I was gonna say weak, but I think weak is too weak a word for what’s going on right now. So I’m trying to do my writing work and hang on to my income-producing work while somehow keeping my sanity from leaking outta my ears and my soul from fleeing my body in frustration.

I took a one-week break from the job this week in an effort to take some of the edge off the crazy, and it helped. But I also found myself trying to cram as much writing as I could into this tiny little one-week window of open time, so I can’t say it’s been a relaxing week. I finished a couple of pieces (I think … I keep nibbling at them) but it was hard work and I felt like I was on the clock the whole damn time.

No matter. I’m just thankful I had a little time and space to write. And I’m thankful I didn’t have to starve to get it this time.

“When you get a great idea for a lyric, just push people out of the way, throw yourself on the floor, and write it down, because it only makes sense in the moment.”

- Joe Strummer, from Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

“I don’t feel the need to write a song. It’s not like that. It’s almost like the song feels the need for me to write it and I’m just there.”

- Neil Young, from Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography

Each of the above quotes articulates important elements of my own experience as a writer, especially as a writer of poetry. Joe Strummer expresses the immediacy, the fragility, the almost brutal ephemerality of the moment, and the urgent need to try to capture whatever is coming before it slips back into the unconscious, like a forgotten dream. Neil Young describes writing as serving a process that seems to have its own life and its own needs. Taken together, these two remarks provide a pretty good summary of what the writing process is like for me.

I’ve completed three major writing projects in my life. In all three cases, I didn’t plan or expect the writing to come. It started all by itself. Something inside me, or something somewhere, or some combination of both, began to express itself and I simply went along for the ride. When I’m in that state, I can’t do anything else. I have to devote myself completely to whatever is coming, whenever it wants to come, or the process doesn’t work. When the writing comes, it comes in waves, and I have to stop whatever I’m doing to attend to it, or it’s lost forever.

For that reason, I need a lot of open time and open space in my life in order to write effectively and develop material properly. I’m not one of those folks who can sit down and write for an hour a day and produce something worthwhile. It’s like trying to get an airplane off the ground by pushing it down the runway a couple of feet every day. It’s never gonna work.

The necessary time and space are both crucial, but there’s an X factor that’s also critical for me. My writing (when it happens) is truly the result of a whole life experience. There’s something very organic (to use an abused and overused word) about it. Some sort of union of inner and outer worlds over which I have no control.

There’s a mystery element to the writing process for me, and when it begins, I have to serve it or I have to let it pass, because if I choose to serve that process, everything else has to stop. Writing really is a sort of altered state for me, I believe, and I have to make a broad, deep, sacred space for it, or it just can’t happen.