Teacher: I have several questions. What is the highest technique you hope to achieve?

Me (not me): To have no technique.

Teacher: Very good… so continue.

Me (not me): A good poem should be like a small play but played seriously. A good poet does not become tense but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the poem expands, I contract. When it contracts, I expand. When there is an opportunity, I do not hit. It hits all by itself.

***

More of Everything

Whelp. It looks like it’s just about 2025, so I should write something. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I’ve somehow managed to do more of everything this year. I wrote at least 100 more poems than any other year, ran 500 more miles, set a personal record in the marathon, read more books, finished a novel, published more work than every other year of my life combined, and worked more hours at a real job. I’ve also probably eaten more junk food, wasted more money, and watched an impossible amount of TV. I’ve had some of the greatest weeks of my life and some of the worst. I’ve made a ton of progress, wiped it away with self-destructive behavior, and made it back up. I’ve bought a house, found a new job, and filled the bibliography on this website with poems and stories yet find myself in a similar place to where I was at the beginning of the year. There’s something scary yet beautiful about it.

A Finger Pointing at the Moon: Poetry

It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of that heavenly glory.

— Also not me

***

My goal as a writer has always been to create works that couldn’t be written by anyone else in the history of the world. I want to write without thinking in the same way that when I play basketball, my mind just turns off. I feel like I’ve been getting closer to that goal, writing poetry that’s full of life without cramming in a bunch of nonsense that might appeal to the folks working at literary journals. I never sit down and tell myself that I’m going to write a good poem. All I can do is try to make myself into the place where writing happens, trusting that what flows through me will be truly singular, instead of having my work vandalized by my own ego and desire.

When I wrote my last post, I talked about how my hot streak of publishing poems had continued, and since then, not much has happened in terms of publishing. They say that most writers have 1 submission accepted for every 10 or 15 that they send out. For a while, I was getting 1 accepted for every 2 or 3 rejections, so I’m trying to get back to that higher ratio of rejections, as counterintuitive as that may sound. I need to swallow my pride, learn to be patient, and wait months and months for rejections from high profile journals. Hopefully, this will allow me to get my name out there.

Another way to make a splash with poetry (and to make a little money) is to publish a collection of poetry. I had a collection in English that I spent about a year trying to publish while I continued to write poems for my next collection. However, over the course of the year, I read a ton of award-winning collections, and it became clear that there was no space for weak poems in my collections. I think all of the poems in that first collection were good, don’t get me wrong, but some of my earlier work lacked the intricacy of my newer work. The idea or image that would have been stretched into the entirety of one of my poems five or six years ago would just be one or two lines in one of my recent poems. So, while the rejections kept pouring in for my first collection, I kept writing. Now, I decided to do a poetry Thunderdome with the new poems and the old ones to make a new collection, one where there isn’t a single poem that I feel uncertain about or hope editors skip over.

As for my Spanish-language poetry, I recently accumulated enough of what I consider high-quality work to make into a collection. Over a long weekend, I reviewed all of the poems, put them together, and sent them off to a contest. I didn’t win, but I was shocked to see that my collection was among the favorites, with the rejection email containing paragraph after paragraph of praise for my work. This initial collection had the bare minimum number of pages to be considered, and in the two months since, I’ve written more poems to be included. I just sent an updated manuscript into a second publisher, so we’ll see what they think!

Overall, the amount of poetry I’ve written and my focus have both grown by an entire order of magnitude, making it necessary to streamline a few things. When I first started writing poetry, I only wrote when I felt a burst of inspiration. All of the other days, I focused on revising my existing work, so I kept a printed version of every draft of every poem in a binder so that I could see the evolution of each poem. When I started submitting my work to journals, I had hand-written tables on each poem saying where I sent that poem and when. Up until lately, I typed and printed every single poem that I had written in my notebooks. This created huge backlogs of poetry that needed to be typed and printed, making me reluctant to put effort into my daily poems because I was already so far behind with everything else. Now, I’m putting more attention into writing poems in English and Spanish each day with a higher level of detail, and only typing the poems I think are worth publishing. This has allowed me to improve the quality of my “bad poems” and to put more focus on revising the best of the best.

Prose and Cons

I hate that in movies and TV shows, you see a character sit at their type writer with a crystal tumbler full of glistening amber hooch, a song comes on, and then they’ve written an entire novel. They send it off to agencies, find an agent the next day, spend a weekend making revisions, find a publisher, and become famous over the course of like two weeks. I’m at nearly 11 months of waiting to hear back from a few agents who expressed some degree of interest in my latest English-language novel before I start sending the manuscript into some smaller publishers for consideration.

 Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a couple of sample chapters of another novel in English going. I think it has a lot of potential so far, but I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself without meaning to. This has prevented me from writing freely, which is usually when I’m at my best.

Finally, I just finished my second novel in Spanish. This novel puts me in a weird position. It’s technically a sequel to the first novel I published, but I think this new novel is clearly superior. With that being the case, I need to decide if it’s worth trying to publish with a bigger publisher or to stay with the same publisher for the sake of consistency. I have an idea for another novel in Spanish, too, but I’m going to wait a while before I open that can of gusanos.

Next Year

For next year, I really don’t know how to even go about setting goals. I feel like I’ve found the formula this year to just keep writing, submitting, and waiting. I trust that if I do the same thing next year and the year after and the year after, I’ll either find that success that I’ve been looking for or I’ll spend my whole life too busy focusing on the process of becoming to get overwhelmed by existential dread. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get the big news in the next couple of months. Maybe it won’t ever happen for me. Who cares? I write for the same reason people on sinking ships frantically toss buckets of water overboard. The buried treasure that may or may not be waiting for me on the shore is the furthest thing from my mind most of the time… At least, that’s what I’m trying to brainwash myself into believing.