pssst: about that dark little room off the aisle

It’s a broom closet.

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For background on this week’s confessional, you’ll have to go to Read Write Poem where I announce I am stepping away from managing that wonderful poetry site.

It makes me sad to admit I won’t have my fingers on the pulse of the RWP community after June 1. But I also realized a few months ago that it was time to walk away from the delicious distraction of details and move into the empty page of my own writing.

I want, and need,  to read more and write more. Not care-taking RWP will free time that I hope to channel into my own work. Not managing the site also means the poetic-self-worth I gave myself from tending it will need to be furnished by creative work. (This is the thing I am most worried about. Can I/Will I? But I supposed that is everyone’s biggest concern, outside fulfilling one’s basic needs.)

I also wanted to give up RWP while I still loved it. End on a high note, knowing all things must change, for that is the stuff of life. RWP is not a museum. It’s a laboratory, it’s a cheering squad, it’s a portal.

Something else I realized is that I am not actually involved much in the RWP community. I was the innkeeper. I knew who was coming and going and what needed to be tidied and maintained. But I didn’t get much chance to go to people’s blogs and read them. Even spending just a few hours a week to catch up on other participants’ projects wasn’t happening 95% of the time.

I hope the new ideas Dana and the new management team at RWP can foster community. They are a creative bunch, so we’ll see. It’s all a grand experiment in revitalizing an online creative community — an all-volunteer ephemeral bit of 0′s & 1′s and flesh & blood — to keep it vibrant.

* * *

I got one submission out this last week. Revisions are in process for another. New work is slow but steady. Deadlines are looming. Next weekend’s weather looks clear, so that means more gardening/hiking/puppy time and less writing time. Yikes. I am not turning the sun down.

* * *
I have put aside “The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English” by Henry Hitchings. It is just too hard to read. Interesting, but the kind of book I’d like to read over time, not on a renewed 3-week library loan basis. It’s the kind of book I’d like to savor and brush up on some history at the same time. (I adore tangents. Love them, love them I do. I want to follow those threads.)  Maybe I will find a good used copy someday and add it to my library. But not right now.

Here’s one gem before I send it back to Multnomah County Library:

For as long as language has existed, particular individuals or social groups have been in the vanguard of linguistic innovation: today’s specialist term or snippet of arcana is tomorrow’s buzzword or common parlance, and we, as speakers and writers, are the conduit between the language of today and that of tomorrow. Chaucer is one of those individuals whose use of language looks, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, radical. (81)

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2. Confession Tuesday (deb) NaPoWriNoMo
3. Scenes from a dream
4. Li-Young Lee and the dying breath
5. already, another Tuesday