It’s amazing how over-inflated our dollar has become. It’s something of a miracle that people are able to afford to survive at all. Gasoline is at four bucks or more a gallon, bread’s going up, real estate value is going down -- and of course there’s the eternal frenzy of keeping up with the other monthly bills. I wonder just how much I’ll be able to accomplish in the way of real financial independence when I finally move from Massachusetts to North Carolina. We’ll see – though I prefer to remain optimistic.

All this begs the question: If you have a dollar in your pocket, how much can you really accomplish? You can’t even buy a cup of coffee in most chain restaurants for a dollar – and even if you settle for eating a beef patty squished between two flat pieces of bun, you can’t buy a drink. I spent just shy of three dollars on my lunch just recently, when I took myself down to McDonald’s and ordered a double cheeseburger and a small Sprite. On the way back, though, I found a way to make a dollar go a long way.

The most glaring inconsistency I’ve found in my work is its lack of concrete imagery. This is not so much a problem of late – if anything, I’ve been overcompensating and subjecting my poor audience to sensory overload! Nevertheless, my older poems are penned directly from my mind to the page, with little or no thought given to how much the person reading them will be able to understand. This might work for my closest friends, who know me well enough to interpret my meanderings, but it’s “just not gonna fly” for those who’ve never met me. They’re only working with nothing more than words on a computer screen. If I don’t describe in detail, they’re not going to see what I want them to see – and it will be no one’s fault but my own.

When you enter a workshop after almost twenty years of being a reclusive writer, you experience a kind of “culture shock” that can be more than a little painful. It’s one thing to create poetry and little “picture essays” in your bedroom, dreaming of publication and how everyone will love your work. It’s something else altogether to subject your brand-new material to the critical and objective review of total strangers whose goal is more or less to articulate its quality (or lack thereof) in whatever way they deem most appropriate. Some are willing to post longer critiques for those who seem prepared to learn. Others approach critique from a fairly concise standpoint and are even inclined to be somewhat harsh. Yet neither approach is less valid than the other – and of course there are a variety of approaches even besides those I’ve just mentioned.

My first post in a literary blog. Hmm... now I can finally ramble on about writing and expect people to be *interested*.

Yippee!

That's a technical term, by the way. It means, "Wow, I can post what I want to write about and get ideas from other people!"
... or something like that.