New Years Bullshit
by Ana

In which the author, with a hop, skip and a jump, quits flogging the chinese child laborer within for not being a gal of letters

Let me tell you of my stubbornness, my obstinacy, a certain kind of artistic denial and blindness that relishes covering its face quickly before the photo is snapped. It's a Dali painting that won't or can't obey algebraic rules. the concept of a creative writing class was always distasteful to me; it was too dirty, too cluttered with ideas. I've never gotten flashes of creative insight that organize themselves into plots or characters- or even concepts themselves. I've only written one real poem in my life. There are word nuggets out there, celestial trash orbiting the productive ideal, just registering as blips on my celebral radar. But I feel poems- and I don't mean emotional teenage angst prattle that makes frequent use of the phrase "dark shroud over the soul". Some great sleeping body in my mind starts to stir. i can almost physically feel out a shape- some quivering neo-atomic disturbance I wonder that it doesn't get picked up by sensitive earthquake instruments. A raised edge that I can only perceive with touch- thats the great trick in the translation. One early summer evening at the beach, I was playing in the water. So were dolphins, this being the time of day they chased fish in close to the shore. I didn't have my contacts in, so I couldn't see the silvery body that neared me. But I sensed the dolphin with some intuitive peepers. And that's how I sense poems. I don't "get" ideas, I become aware of an excitable animation. A sculptor delights in a block of marble because he can see the future sculpture within. I delight in the block of marble because I will never cut it. it exists in infinite possibility. Maybe its tragic that a piece of sculpture never got realized, but its that tragedy that sends shocks of shivers through me. I've already left boundless volumes of psychic hemorrhages throughout the stratosphere. So what if none are bound to paper? I used to think my unborn zygote words never got written because they had stagefright, but now I realize they're more ephemeral than that. maybe they're the quick inhalation the actress takes before making her entrance that the audience never sees. Maybe they're an unseen bug that flies into the playwright's coffee. Maybe they're a missed light cue because the technician is opening a bag of pretzels. the point is I don't know, nobody knows but in that singular knowledge, and infinite possibility, everything knows.

and i'm not trying to say I'm a rare bird- i think the artistic translation barricade is the most common disease/blessing in the world