World Class Poetry Blog

A Glimpse Into Future Projects
24 May 2008, the poet @ 10:16 pm

Prologue
A professor at Dickinson College was denied tenure for promoting “flarf” poetry.

What David Pogue thinks about free distribution.

What the Granta staff reads.

A Glimpse Into Future Projects
As I near the completion of my book of poems titled Rumsfeld’s Sandbox I begin to reflect on what to do next. I haven’t talked about it much on this blog but I have been revising poems that I wrote while in Iraq in 2005. Between working on these poems, writing this blog, publishing Hyperbole, and maintaining my website, World Class Poetry, I haven’t had time for much of anything else - except my “day job.”

Some ideas that I have for future projects include:

• A memoiric story based on my experiences in Iraq - This is my most pressing concern and I haven’t decide yet how to proceed. I have options, one of which is to tell a straight memoir, but I’m not sure it’s my real interest. Another option is to go by way of Norman Mailer and write a fictional story based on my experiences. I’m not real hip on that either. The option most appealing to me is to write an honest telling of a James Frey-like mixture of fiction and memoir, the difference being that readers will know right up front that certain parts of the story are made up even if they don’t know which parts. The reason this appeals to me is because certain parts of my real experience would be too boring to put into any story, but also because some events that make for a good story really did happen. They just didn’t happen to me, or involve me, but they would fit into the theme of the story that I want to tell, which is, namely, the story of a NG officer who was opposed to the war on religious and moral grounds but decided to go anyway despite leaving behind a wife of six months and harboring emotional and moral misgivings about his mission.

  People I’ve talked to about this all say they find it more interesting to know about my real experiences in Iraq rather than any fictional telling. But I often wonder how many of them would read it anyway and, more importantly for my own conscience, it pisses me off that people want to know what it’s like over there but aren’t willing to go themselves. I figure if you really want to know, you can find it in Google Maps.

  At any rate, that’s something that has been on my mind for two years and I’ve already had an agent express interest.

• Book of poems based on Anglican liturgy - Another idea I have, and this could germinate for years, is to write a book of poems that follows the Anglican liturgy. They may not necessarily be religious poems or liturgical in the traditional sense, but the form and structure would follow the Anglican liturgy as found in the Book of Common Prayer.
• Poems of portraits - Another project I’ve considered is to write a book of poems based on portraits of people and businesses within a specific geographic region. This would be similar to Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, but I would write poems about specific people and places, even businesses, within the geographic region of choice. The idea would be to take volunteers in the area and interview them about their lives, visit the businesses I’d write about (small businesses only) and write literary-quality poetry based on the interviews and profiles of the people and businesses I discover.
• Fiction - My first love was fiction. Over the years I’ve had ideas, but have rarely pursued them. In college I actually wrote some short stories that were pretty good, but I never published them. I’ve had this nagging story of fiction based on the idea of a man starting his own country and the challenges he encounters while doing so and I’d like to explore that idea.
• Another fiction idea - I’ve also had this idea to write a story in which I appear as a minor character and introduce myself to the other characters as the Author. Throughout the story the characters debate among themselves about whether or not the Author exists. The remarkable aspect of the story would be that even though I prove to all the characters that I am the Author of the novel in which they are cast as characters some of them still choose not to believe that I exist. I think the point is obvious about this exercise and it’s probably been done before, but I can’t think of a time when it has been done worth any note. I still think it is a sublime idea.

I’m the type of writer who likes to see where a story takes me. I’m not one to follow a strict plot outline. I’d rather the story write itself. Will I follow through on any of these ideas? Probably. But which ones, I have no clue. Of course, there is always the possibility that I will have other ideas by the time I get to any of these and pursue those more aggressively.

What kind of ideas for future projects to you have?

1 Comment a “A Glimpse Into Future Projects”

1. Jim Murdoch — May 25, 2008 @ 1:18 pm
   

   Of all your projects the Poems of portraits sounds the most interesting I have to say. As for me, I don’t tend to plan projects. I have this damn novel which I’m trying to make work but everything else is small stuff, the odd poem or story. I’m too involved with promoting my first book at the moment to really think about anything else. The next big job though will be editing the sequel.

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