4/23/15

Non-cliched expression

I seem to be in the midst of this phase lately in which I'm wondering what defines me and what is important to me and why.

I know poetry and art are very important and meaningful to me (and whether or not they're important and meaningful to others doesn't matter all that much to me) and I also know that even others who ARE into poetry and art are not all going to relate to mine (which is fine). 

For years, I thought that poetry and art AND communication were very important and meaningful to me, but lately I seem to be questioning the communication part of the matter more than usual.

I mean, on one hand, I like expressing myself and hearing others express themselves, BUT casual conversation tends to annoy me and lately, I seem to be having more annoyed streaks and feeling like I don't relate to all that many people and wondering what is the point of spending my time communicating with people I don't even relate to very much, when I could be spending that time reading, writing, thinking, and communicating more with myself.

I think communication with oneself is meaningful. Exploring one's own mind is relevant. I think too many people just stick with their minds basics and go with the flow and those are the type of people I'm tired of wasting my time communicating with.
 

I'll gladly continue to communicate with other people who are driven to thinking, feeling, creating, and expressing, but those who are prone to rambling out cliches without even thinking about it? Maybe they should ramble their cliches in someone else's direction instead of mine.

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About me and nonfiction writing (other than communication via emailing,  blogging, and "social networking" - realms in which I'm sometimes quite prolific and sometimes not),  I don't read much nonfiction at all (other than book reviews and nonfictional commentary by or about poets), in part because of serious memory issues and also because I have serious trouble organizing/arranging/revising longer work. Heck, even turning some of my poetry into a full-length manuscript is quite a lengthy undertaking, but...I guess that would be different with fiction or nonfiction, since it wouldn't involve deciding how to order the poems, and since the content would have some sort of more standard order, but...

Then that brings me to the whole, how in the hell can my content be positioned in a standard order?  I'm not standard, I'm not logically ordered, and I'm pretty OCD with my own ordering and positioning.

It did cross my mind a few years ago, when a few people were suggesting to me that perhaps I should consider writing a nonfiction book about my carotid artery dissection/aneurysm/stroke/divorce etc... but I don't know how I'd arrange such a manuscript. I have a lot of files on my computer and on paper on that subject matter (personal notes, journal entries, notes to others, notes from others, video of me trying to read, etc...), but the thing is, the re-reading, revising, arranging, organizing process would have to be my full focus for a few years and do I really want to set aside all other writing (including poetry, which is very expressively important to me) and art and submitting and publishing in order to focus on assembling a nonfiction book about my stroke? 

Sometimes I wish my reading and writing and creative process was a little faster and more multi-task prone, but it's not. 

Half my computer is masses of unorganized notes of expression and communication that I saved for valid reasons, but there's so many that I'll never be able to organize them, unless organization is most of what I focus on in life - and who wants to focus on organizing the old and not creating any new?

Not long ago though (i.e. sometime last year), I did finally finish working a personal nonfiction story into a prose poem (I called it that, because I wasn't sure what to call it - it was poetic language in prose form) that got published and then nominated for a Best of the Net in nonfiction. It was based on something that had happened well over ten years ago, that I finally managed to work into a piece of creative writing that I actually liked (when I first started trying to work on it, it made me feel like puking and was WAY over the top, so I finally just had to set the content aside for years, until I could re-work it from a somewhat less emotional trauma puke-fest). I'm glad I finally finished that piece, but like I said, it was based on something that happened over ten years ago and it just ended up being a three page piece.

So who knows how long it might take me to even really dive into book length nonfiction based on the stroke/divorce stuff that happened five years ago.

And also, what is with the speed racing of time?!? AAAH!


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