I Suck at Guitar Hero...

Running affords more scenery, but not deeply seeing what is there. More deeply than driving or riding a bike, but not as deeply as walking. Or stopping.

Sometimes seeing more is the thing. Sometimes seeing deeply. I need both, in turns, and maybe even at the same time.

The act of running, walking, stopping--the form and shape and substance of a run, journey, trek, is like the act of writing, of what form and shape writing takes. Whether prose, poetry, prose poem, fragment, meditation, essay, or if it includes all these components depends on what it has to say and how it needs to be said.

I suck at Guitar Hero. And I am cool with that. I see how I might get better at it if I spent some time playing it over and again and then think about the waste of time that would be versus spending on the things I want to focus on (don't worry, I've got plenty of other things to waste my time doing ;)

C.D. Wright, Gary Snyder, William Bronk, and Robert Hass regularly amaze, inspire, and confound me. Forrest Gander is starting to do the same as I read more of him.

I think about how to take/push my writing to the next level (whatever that may mean). How to make my words and thoughts worthy of the page, worthy of the canon, worthy of their (the words') readers and the time they give to reading them. I think how cool it would be to be taught by my writing models, by those whose words inspire me, provoke me, make me want to write, to be a part of that tradition, that expression. To have an audience with them. But also to have that time to dedicate. To writing.

And then I think that by finding them (the writers); by reading and re-reading; by studying and talking about them; they are already teaching me.

What I need to write the way and stuff I want to write is to commit. Again. Each day. To commit to myself. To commit to the writing. Commit to the time, commit to the study. Commit to putting word to paper or screen. To let fly. To revise. To throw away and start again and continue until things properly kick ass.

Get to the odd rhythm. The unpredictable line. The song that surprises,
circumscribes a rhombus in place of a box step.

Snare the word in the corner that nobody else saw, or wanted. Marley's refused builder's stone.

Plumb the deep for symbols. The ones that wash the soul in recognition, that speak the names and mind and image.