The banana peel is still on the windowsill. Every now and then the trees outside my window shake and the leaf shadows paint splatter dark /bright shapes on my face and torso. The next-door neighbor stops macheteing or otherwise striking down the Denver jungle that has overtaken his back yard. I know what I’m talking about. I wondered into it before in a pink silk robe and flip-flops one morning. Completely impenetrable, or at least, unpleasant. Metal clanks and things get chopped and slashed down. Tearing. Like paper. Fibers in trauma, like my sentences.
Dear David Buuck,
I did not have enough time to write a good book, but I wrote a book. Thank you for your encouragement.
Love,
-Bajo
My thought is that the manuscript needs work, but part of the reason I didn’t work on it as much as I now think I ought to have, is because of this rejection that my poems have to be polished and only show the intended rupture. What happened to failure? In the Buuckian sense? What happened to indecency? Femininity lures us into a precise placement of our bodies, as does masculinity for those who ascribe… In the erotic play or the strip tease, we delicately reveal, but what is revealed is strategic. Not accidental, not human and therefore it is a shape assumed. What is more interesting to me is/are the default gestures. I can always go back to the text and chop down, hack branches mercilessly, then assume triumph as a shape.
1 comments:
What matters is that you finished it, I think. Put an end and sent it in. Every finished piece gives you a greater sense of self-as-writer. Don't let any rejections get you down!
I have faith in that shard of identity in you - the writer shard. I also know what rejection feels like and it sucks. One of the reasons I write for a living now is so I am forced to write every day, because otherwise rejection would hammer and wrench my will to forge words and then what would I be? Not a writer. I'm still so young and I don't want to lose my spark because of my sensitivities. I would rather be a writer of failures, right now, than not a writer at all.
Failure is a necessary byproduct maybe, not necessarily an aimed-for end. But an aimed-for byproduct, if that makes sense. What is an end, anyway? The end = becoming established? The verb "to become" doesn't constitute an end, just another byproduct, perhaps more desirable than failure but just as indicative of the life as a writer.
So keep on going! I got your belief and your back.
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