Ruts? I dunno. (8.28.22)

I am not in a writing rut.  I don't think.

Or maybe I am and I just can't see that I am.

Yes, okay.  I am in one helluva rut.

Maybe I'm in a rut so deep and so wide that it feels like the world.  Maybe I just haven't thought to stand up and take a look at what's outside the rut I'm in.  Maybe nobody else has come along to tell me to stop rolling around in my own mud, to stand up and take a look around . . .

Nah.  Ya think?  Hell, I dunno. 

And that's the problem.  I dunno.  

My W@1 cohorts haven't critiqued my poems very deeply for some time now. That could be because my poems have been perfect and irreproachable.  Ha!  Or it could be because my cohorts, too, are in ruts.  Creative ruts.  Poetic ruts.  Critical ruts.  Talking-about-poems ruts.

How am I supposed to know, really, whether my poems are better today than they were yesterday if nobody challenges what I'm doing?  

You know why I think I may be in a writing rut?  It's all coming too easily to me.  Writing's felt a bit facile over the past few months.  I feel no agon, no struggle with the art when I write a poem.  Give me a topic or a line or a beat and presto digito, a poem!  It looks like a poem.  It sounds like a poem.  Must be a poem.  It's swank and self-confident, too, full of finely turned metaphors, my writing of late.  And it flies out of the laptop like confetti.

And that bothers me, the confetti of it.

Hell, I should set up on a street corner somewhere and busk poems for passersby.  "Tell me yer story, missus, an' I'll write your poem . . . $5, singles accepted, change made."

So.  This past week I resolved, "I am sick and tired and I am not going to take it anymore!"  I beat down the weekly contributions of a couple of writers in the group and put the others on notice that I shall now wield the sword of critique, coldly and objectively, upon every poem shared, going forward.  Mine included.

I. Am. Not. An. Autocrat.  I owe them an apology for the beat down.  But the threat stands.

I shall give credit when it's due, e.g., when one of us has tried something different, innovated, stuck his or her head above the rim of the rut.  Even when the result is not so good, as it's likely to be.

For the thing is this: you've got to know your ruts so you can work your way out of them.  So you can make new ruts.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just blowing a tune up the giraffe's ass here.

Maybe not.