I’ve been thinking a bit about creative cycles lately. Memorial Day weekend tends to be a productive time every year for me. I don’t know if it has something to do with it being a three day weekend, the first since February, and so my mind is desperate and ready to write, or the proximity to my birthday at the beginning of June with its generative birth vibe. I’ve been writing again the past two months, a new sequence of poems centered on the main colors ROY G BIV and B&W. They’re the final layer for the Impossible Gotham manuscript, which uses primers as a bit of an organizing device.
In my anally-organized way, I keep spreadsheets about my poems. When they were written, when they get revised, where they get published. I decided to look back over the past ten years to see what my output has been. Here’s some fun facts:
2000: 22 poems. A June burst (the Bucknell Younger Poets Seminar) and a September-October burst (first major relationship; sigh, love poems, and the earliest poems now in The Erotic Postulate).
2001: 23 poems. Pretty much equally distributed across each month (mostly poems now in The Erotic Postulate), with a Memorial Day Weekend/early summer burst (when most of Pear Slip was written).
2002: 23 poems. Highly concentrated in September and October (first semester of MFA time at Michigan; mostly poems that are in The Erotic Postulate and a few that wound up in Skin Shift, though I had no sense of manuscripts at this time and was just writing poems).
2003: 19 poems. Pretty much equally distributed across the year (more poems for The Erotic Postulate as it was taking shape and coming together, and the Narcissus Resists sequence).
2004: 20 poems. The Erotic Postulate‘s first incarnation was done in January, so there was some down time before a May burst (Platos de Sal and other stand-alone poems that wind up in Skin Shift, first sense that I had a second mss underway), an early August burst (poems for my shelved comic-book-poem-opera Fire and Fog), and a late September-October burst (all poems that would become the first section of Skin Shift).
2005: 10 poems. Post-MFA drifter year. A miracle I wrote at all. The main blitz was in late May (Memorial Day again!) and June when I wrote the first book of Fire and Fog titled The Melete Project of Los Alamos, which is part poetry, part comic book (and currently shelved as a weird hybrid text I have no idea how to market). And a couple stand-alones for Skin Shift.
2006: 38 poems. The year I moved to NYC! Written primarily in July, August, and September (the beginning of the Impossible Gotham manuscript). Also started putting Skin Shift together that fall, realizing Narcissus and Platos were sections in it.
2007: 31 poems. Written primarily during the months of July and August (Jamaica and another major relationship all chronicled in the slim Smite & Spoon manuscript).
2008: 21 poems. Written primarily over Memorial Day Weekend (mainly for Impossible Gotham; 5/25 was a magic day!).
2009: 9 poems written one a month until August, and then nothing (mainly poems to flesh out Skin Shift). Slow year.
2010: 9 poems written about two a month since March (color series to flesh out Impossible Gotham). And there’s a longer project in the works called The Book of M which I’ve only just begun, and is going to take some time to write.
One thing that struck me about my output is how concentrated it can be: in the space of a couple months I can draft most of the poems that will be in a manuscript, and then write nothing for six months or more. While some years I’m steady at the helm, hammering out about two new poems a month for the whole year, I more often work via sponge cycle, where I absorb lots of material and experiences and sources, and then once supersaturated it all overflows and comes out in a concentrated rush of work.
I tend to not write many new poems in late Fall, the Winter or early Spring, but I revise a lot during those months. New work tends to strike in late Spring/Summer and early Fall. I’m not surprised given my favorite months of the year are May through early June, and all of October.
I’m also struck by my ability to work on very different manuscripts at the same time. Pear Slip overlaps with The Erotic Postulate which overlaps with Skin Shift which overlaps with Impossible Gotham and Smite & Spoon which are somewhat contemporaneous in composition. Throw in a hybrid comic book poem in the middle of it, and you get a snapshot of my imagination the past decade. To me, the poems are very different for each project, in very different styles and center on different questions to investigate. I guess all these imaginative places co-exist inside me, so it’s easy to tap into the wells for each at will.
The funny thing is, I never feel like I’m writing or have written enough, but typing this up, and knowing my friends often label me a “prolific” writer, I think I can see how it might appear as such…