Monday, December 21, 2009

A new realization [Yet Again!!!]

I've had a couple realizations and gradual shifts regarding the work and my perspective to the work. Not long ago I started writing a 'study guide' of sorts, and that's obliged me to focus my attention on what I'm trying to communicate and accomplish. Which is fine.
Also I've come to see that since I've been writing the epic itself into the void (meaning that I still don't have much of a readership, and yet that fact hasn't kept me from working on it; 2009 saw a lot of progress on the work! And for that reason alone I should think of it as a very good year, even though the previous one had been much better for my bug business) I might as well do the same thing with this blog.
Therefore I'm pushing forward, starting off with a small excerpt from the notes. {publishing notes instead of text is much easier, since although I'd like to include the best pieces of RW itself, I do want to start sending them off to journals -- yes, really -- and I don't want to disqualify myself from that}

Still on the fence regarding whether to write and/or post the Notes in the first or third person. Overall I find it a little easier to write them in third; somehow simpler to write ridiculous things about myself that way...



The Beginning and The End.


In early December 2009, around the time he started this study guide, he started realizing that he had fallen in love with some pieces of his own work; in fact he’d been in love with them for a good deal before that. It’s probably not such a healthy thing. In any case, the start and the ending of RW are prime examples of places where he detected his own genius.


The first line of the entire work is


Won’t someone tell me, please, the narrative


which features several of the special and powerful elements of the work. It starts with a contraction, which is a particularly modern typographical construction, therefore sending a message about the author's attitude about sacrosanct flowery language. Maybe. It's also a way to throw extra emphasis onto whatever syllable follows. Also the line is a sly promise: the first line suggests that the rest of the poem will be this particular narrative asked for. And since no one else can tell the narrator the story, Dave has had to write it himself, which means he’s telling himself the story even though he’s asked someone to tell it to him. This offers a window into Dave’s yearning for either an answer or for someone else to talk with – someone who knows something he hasn’t found. This is baldly state with the use of “me,” though direct expression of the narrator’s presence is very limited in the work: there's no knowing just yet how many there are of them, but probably less than ten references.


Friday, May 8, 2009

Getting more critiques from the world

The new happenings include my increased courage: gettin' out there and asking some poets if they grok what I'm doing. I submitted both the first and last shards at three different forums. The mixed results are below, though some site administrator might well cull these threads at some point.

At each site I started by critiquing roughly ten poems as required [in fact one was required to post only one crit, but I was generous. ]


The first forum was Freewrights. I went by Dagra there and a little friction ensued between myself and another poet, not so much in the critique of my work as on other threads, where I'd critiqued someone else's work.
The last shard got no feedback at all.


Next was "401: Songs of Despair," on the poets.org site. There I was DaveDave, and yeah, there was more friction. Lots more, and I THREW DOWN. The carnage is there to be witnessed -- it's relatively polite carnage. http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18647 and http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18667

Condensed version: Someone whose work I'd critiqued responded in kind. We had a brief discussion. No-one else contributed, so I eventually posted gentle challenges. This brought some other replies; I responded, and then an administrator reminded me of the rules. Upon which she felt I'd trespassed. Though I didn't agree I was most civil.


Then came Scribophile, and life became better. I'd found them serendipitously, through a Google alert for "epic poem." They had an epic poem contest, requiring iambic pentameter in heroic couplets with a 2,000 word limit. I don't want to confirm that I'm a total epic poetry snob, so I'll just leave it alone. What matters is that I both gave and GOT some good critiques: they said nice things about the work, and more importantly were insightful and appeared to grasp what I was trying to do.

http://www.scribophile.com/authors/dave-gracer/works/shard-twenty-five/

I'm not certain there's much point in posting all of this, but this blog concerns my efforts to complete the poem and to communicate my work to the rest of the world. In the last few weeks I've gotten new determination to do both.

More Stuff Coming.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

New Life

Hard to believe that it's been less than a month since the last post -- feels like a year has passed.

On second thought, NO this blog is not dead. My renaissance of interest in the poem is expanding, and part of that rebirth (I'm committed to finishing it, as best I can) is to keep trying to communicate what I'm doing. This blog is an important part of that, even if no one's reading it, and there's no indication that anyone has.

But it's fine if my work on the poem and in this blog is like standing in the wilderness, cupping my hands around my mouth, and shouting. It's cool if the work will never be as good in the real world as it is in my internal vision of it. It's even okay if this blog lacks dynamic presentation, like images and stuff. Maybe someone will come along and read about what I'm trying to do.

Onward.

Friday, April 3, 2009

I guess I'm done with this after all

I'd meant to keep this blog as a record of the creative process. I posted a couple interesting things about what I'm trying to do with the epic, but it's time to stop kidding myself.

After neglecting the work for a long time, I'm busy with it. The noble Sachio of Philadelphia is reading it (it's roughly 450 single-spaced pages and about 9700 lines). Some friends of his are interested in the work, so there will be some sharing. I've posted two excerpts on poetry forums, which I hadn't done before. No one replied with anything useful; in fact there have been extremely few responses at all, even though I'd critiqued other poems previously, as etiquette requires.

There's no point in maintaining this blog, but I'll leave it up: a cairn and a beacon.