When Titans Pass

I’ve been writing poetry for something like 20 years now.  I started writing as a young boy in Hawaii and continued as I traveled the U.S. with my parents as my father hopped from job to job. It helped me express the loneliness and what comes with moving around a lot. These days, though, I feel like it’s much more of a struggle to come up with something of a particular quality. As I’m growing, I’m raising my standards. I’m also defining the direction I want my art as a whole to move in; what I want it to say.

Direction isn’t something that I thought about much when I was younger. Because I was never really involved in any kind of artistic community, I feel like I missed out on a lot honing of my thought process. No one ever passed on any tribal knowledge.

That aside, what I really wanted to say: In my opinion, the internet is flooded with people who are scabbing onto more prominent creators for a few likes. That’s a painfully cliche statement, and the practice started long before the internet, of course. That doesn’t make it wrong. I think that it stems from my taste in other art forms. Look at Kubrick and Lynch. There are many who imitate their styles, but since Kubrick died, and once Lynch cashes in, we’re losing two of the most original film makers of all time. It’s the same for music when someone like Lou Reed died. There are only a few heavy hitters out there. They only got there and will only leave such enormous holes in our world because they were able to get in touch with their art on a higher level than the majority of us creators.

I’m don’t want this to be misconstrued as shit talking about other artists. More than ninety percent of what I write is garbage. This “mission” of mine is something that I felt like talking about. My main goal in life is to create as much as possible that only I could create. If it turns out in the end that I’ve only made one poem that is truly something only I could have put on Earth, that’s an amazing thing. Also, most likely impossible, right? Here I sit, with less than ten regular readers on my blog. Live streaming my writing sessions to an even smaller audience. Selling even fewer books, still. Yet, you don’t need a large audience to create something meaningful.

Anyway, I know this post is preachy. I really just wanted to write something about how sad it is to lose the really original artists. Of course I look up to them and aspire to be like them. That’s why they’re known. So whatever. I’m going to take a notebook out to the woods for a few days and see what comes of it. If I’m lucky, I’ll have thirty new poems that don’t suck. I’ll definitely be chewing on this train of thought throughout the weekend.

Leave a comment letting me know what you think about what you just read. Is the topic exhausted, or is there a discussion hidden somewhere in here? Is it an important factor important for a writer to think about, or should we ignore this kind of stuff and trek forward?