The writing life--a fantasy

At a certain age I woke up and realized that I was a journalist covering a story I'd never get to the bottom of. And that I could affix almost any headline to the story I was writing, pre-write the 'lede', and then build a small rhetorical structure made out of words to arrive at a place--THE END--that would be acceptable to my readers, to the editor and, most importantly, to the publisher of the paper, a small, devious, mean-spirited little oink of a man who could be seen smiling as he read my prose.

Disgusted with journalism I tried poetry, though my poems were rejected by the greatest publications in the land, including Poetry Magazine. I knew how important Poetry Magazine (Founded iin 1912 by Harriet Monroe) was to the greater poetic landscape; I read Poetry religiously and was rejected enough to know how important Poetry is and was. I was told by others that my poems were as good, if not better than many of the poems in Poetry, though comparasions are odious. And yet still the rejections piled up, one rejection after another; though I tried I simply could not reach the level of banality, the Twaddle, Poetry seemed to increasingly favor, and often featured on the back cover, excerpting a line or two from a poem published in the monthly edition of Poetry. The June 2020 backcover excerpt from a poem by a poet named Rita Dove is more or less representative--

There are spaces for living

and spaces for forgetting.

Sometimes they're the same.

After I crushed all my sour grapes, coming to believe that Poetry Magazine was in no way effected when it received the $200 million Lilly Grant in 2003, it became clear to me I could not compete, that poetry was simply beyond my ken, and so I retreated once again into prose, following the money, the big story of our time. A freelancer by now, I covered the Supreme Court decision of 2010, Citizens United, a brilliant piece of corporate legislation, and in my free time wrote 3 novels under an assumed name.

I've since retired from journalism, a 9 to 5 job, and am busy writing poetry again, ready to submit again to Poetry Magazine. Here's one--whether it's a poem or not a poem doesn't seem to matter- I'm working on at the moment:

At almost seventy

I saw my first tartantula.

He was middle-aged, a psychiatrist.

He looked at me

like he didn't know

what he was seeing.

I'm also working on another novel. The plot: the writer, who has written 3 previous novels under an assumed name, is in the midst of writing his 4th novel and is murdered, mysteriously, toward the end of the book. 

 'Petals on a white composite countertop' (After Ezra Pound), accidental composition, photo by author, June 1, 2020.