Tosa Mitsuoki:
Autumn Maples with Poem Slips (c. 1675)

"I suspect Santa experiences a similar reveal …"

For each holiday season for at least the last twenty years, I have created a poem cycle instead of buying presents. A poem cycle amounts to a small collection of poems written on more or less the same subject, this cycle's topic: the Winter holidays. I give the resulting poems to family and close friends instead of giving them something I've purchased. I devised this strategy after many years of disatisfying effort attempting to guess what gift might please which recipient. I was always a lousy guesser, and I suspected that I usually guessed wrong, though few ever confirmed my suspicion. Feigned delight resulted in gracious acceptance being the exchange's only redeeming element. In the first few years, the poems seemed an even lamer excuse for gifts, but over time, recipients grew to expect them and transferred their feigned acceptance to this new medium. Don't get me wrong, these were rarely James Whitcomb Riley-quality works. They were, by and large, lame poems exhibiting, above all, just how much it might be the underlying thought that actually counts.

I initially held myself to producing these works between midafternoon Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning. This strategy guaranteed that I'd pull an all-nighter on one of the shorter nights of the year. It also infringed on The Muse's Christmas Eve festivities, and I tended to be a wreck for Christmas, but I was creating a tradition. No price seemed too great to pay. She eventually convinced me that creating my poems between Solstice and Christmas might be okay, reserving a four-day window where I'd attempt to produce my requisite dozen fresh works. Even that's a stretch most years.

Poetry amounts to a unique form of talking to myself. It dresses up prose by adding constraints: meter and rhyme, among other possible elements. Poetry seems more intricate, and if prose never precisely flows out the ends of my typing fingers, that goes at least quadruple for poems. Those evolve from raw ideas into finished work only through focused iteration. The first pass does resemble a mumbled mantra, a stream of consciousness exploring the premise. I propose a title for an image, then jam out a pageful of responses to see what might stick or at least seem sticky-ish. Then, I confront the resulting mess, pulling promising phrases while deleting detritus. I repeat this winnowing effort until some shape emerges, and then I finish that. The whole effort seems distinctly unpromising until it’s finished. Once done, it might not be a masterpiece, but at least it's behind me until I revisit it as my deadline nears.

I'm going for volume as well as quality. I've employed shortcuts some years. One year, I used the same picture to illustrate all the poems and stuck to the theme: Catching Snowflakes On My Tongue. I was amazed at how much variety lurked within that lone concept. In other years, I mostly stuck to concise works, fewer than a dozen lines. For others, I went full limerick on myself, producing stanzas for most. "There once was a snowflake from Nantucket …" However I approach this effort, I seem to need to make myself miserable doing it. Then, perhaps as a direct result of this induced suffering, the resulting poems seem satisfying. My PoemCycling belongs in that class of things that feel much better when it's over than it ever does in process.

This pattern replicates the general pattern for Christmas gift-giving behavior. Before I adopted my PoemCycling cure, I'd thought it somehow wrong that Christmas shopping tended to leave me feeling miserable. Now that I have successfully replaced that misery with my PoemCycling, I understand that misery may be the defining feature of such efforts. Giving gifts might naturally be an unpleasant experience for which merely changing tactics resolves nothing. It just displaces the native misery into another medium. Believe me, creating my annual PoemCycling induces profound misery in me, so deep that completing the effort reliably produces an epiphany. My Christmas comes when my PoemCycling finishes. I suspect Santa experiences a similar reveal after once again surviving his Christmas Eve ordeal.

©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz