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Poetry emergence 2013

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"emerge" by Rick Belden.

Last year at this time, I published a post called “20 in 2012″ in which I shared a list of the twenty new poems I’d written in 2012. In introducing that list, I said:

Twenty poems doesn’t seem like much for a whole year. I’ve struggled with two extended periods of severe writer’s block since the beginning of 2012 (first from January into early June, then again from early September onward). For most of this year, writing anything at all has felt like trying to crush coal into diamonds in my bare hands, Superman style. I’d like to have written more poetry this year, if only because I don’t feel fully connected with myself when weeks and months pass without writing any. But given the circumstances, I’m happy with the quality of what I’ve written and feel fortunate to have produced as much as I did.

A year later, I have a much different story to tell. Creatively speaking, 2012 was like foraging for water in the desert while 2013 was like surfing the Big Wave.

What follows is the full list of titles for poems I’ve written in 2013, all 108 of them. Titles for poems posted on this blog are shown in italics with links to the associated poems. As you’ll see, the vast majority of the poems I’ve written this year (87 of the 108) have yet to be shared publicly.

Poems Written in 2013

23 am I bad angel skin animal dreamers
apostate back in the booth bad blood bats
between two worlds blue winter born guilty buried truth
cannon people cathos chaos girls chased
choke on love cloud revolution collapse crazysex possession
crooked zen dead man tears devil skin ebb
el self-destructo empty bed exit from easylove fading
fallen horse fist flower forever in blood
fountain gemini kitten gift of pain gratitude lesson
halo happy worker heart astronomy hold me raw
hourglass hungry mother in spite of all in the hive
in the tail of the comet into atoms job light is fed up with love
looking for the perfect curve losing self love or nothing love scavenger
luv gun makeup monsters marked man metamorph
moment of her motherspace my father’s body off the pussy
opportunity original wound parade of pandoras passionflash
poetry is useless poisonous cure promethean heart pussy trap
quicksand pit raindrop red queen red swan
regret roulette reset sacred ache shake this curse
shelter shoreline skin palace sky sailor
slut someday they’ll both be gone stripper46 (falling) stripper46 (landing)
sugar handshake suit of lights sun engine sunlit
supplicant temporary heaven temporary stars the escape artist
the grief I will not let myself feel the old king next door the only show in town thief of life
tinderbox tiny mammal torn out of eden tornado song
tumble underworld unsown vandal
virtual modern ways to go out why should I world of money

What’s really incredible to me about the list of titles above, aside from the sheer volume of work produced, is that most of that work (76 of 108 poems) was written in only three months (May, June, July). That’s roughly the same number of poems that appears in each of my two previous books, both of which were written (in terms of core material) in similar 3-4 month bursts of blazing creative energy. That May-June-July stretch wasn’t what I’d call an optimal three months of writing time by any stretch of the imagination either: it also happened to be my first three months on a new job. Based on previous experience, I would’ve expected that to be the worst possible scenario for writing anything, much less a book’s worth of new poems.

Not included above is a set of eight poems I wrote as companion content to artwork posted here on the blog between March 26 and April 9. That was a very brief but very creative run that preceded (and no doubt helped open the channels for) the surge of poetry that began shortly thereafter. Here are those eight titles with links:

Inclusion of the eight poems listed above brings my total of new poems completed in 2013 to 116, with 75% of them still yet to be published on this blog or anywhere else.

I never expected a year like this. I’ve never had a year like this. Seventy-six poems in three months is nearly a poem a day. That would be a blistering pace for me under just about any circumstances; it’s positively miraculous that it happened when I was dealing with the demands of a day job. In reality, there were a number of days when I didn’t get to write anything, but they were balanced out by days like May 18 when I wrote six new poems in about twelve hours. I’ve never even approached speed like that before. Material was coming so fast that I had very little time or opportunity to fully appreciate or comprehend I was doing. It took everything I had just to keep up.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with all this new work. My history as a writer would strongly suggest that there’s a third book in there somewhere, but it has yet to reveal itself to me. I also have a fairly large backlog of poetry (about 70 titles) that’s never appeared in either of my books, including outtakes from both Iron Man Family Outing and Scapegoat’s Cross as well as additional poems written from 2009 through 2012, that would serve as potential source material for a third book.

I’ve never had this much unused content available. It can actually feel a bit overwhelming at times. But it is, as the saying goes, a great problem to have.

What will 2014 bring? There’s no telling. I’d still dearly love to get my second book, Scapegoat’s Cross, published. The manuscript was completed more than four years ago and has been sitting in stasis ever since. Meanwhile, my first book, Iron Man Family Outing, continues to gain visibility even as it edges ever closer to going out of print.

Given that I’ve got one book still unpublished four years after completion and another one about to go out of print, it seems a bit outlandish to me to think about putting together a third. But writing the equivalent of a whole new book in the first three months of a new job would’ve seemed equally outlandish (if not downright impossible) to me as well before I did it. The fact is that I simply don’t know where this process is going to take me in the next year. What I do know is that 2013, even with all its difficulties, has been one of the most dynamically creative years of my life, and for that I’m very thankful.


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