Something Like A(nother) Manifesto

In early 2021, as a prelude to The Suburban Abyss, I self-published the “lost” first (and thus far only) issue of Desperation Fanzine, a collection of nonfiction writing documenting a certain self-effacing, self-flagellating state of mind I was in after turning 40, particularly as it related to my lack of “success” as a writer. The setup was a bit of an in-joke (and a nod to a popular trope in music and other creative fields), as the writing contained within Desperation Fanzine No. 1 was never actually lost, it was simply abandoned. But I never stopped thinking about it, or feeling like it had a place in my story – whatever that was and however I would tell it – and when I got serious about The Suburban Abyss, upon revisiting and polishing the Desperation essays, I realized I had planted the seeds for what followed – not only with the podcast but also the individual and collaborative projects that emerged in its wake in 2024 – and where it all has taken me, creatively and spiritually, up to the present moment.

One of the Desperation essays, “The Wall of Rejection,” detailed a failed dalliance with poetry in my early 20s and the lessons learned from that experience: namely, that I should stop trying to write poetry and instead funnel my limited time and energy into nonfiction essay writing. So that’s what I did with The Suburban Abyss, but I never stopped thinking “poetically,” as I have decades of analog and digital scraps scattered about, particularly from the past four years as The Suburban Abyss reactivated creative juices I thought I had long ago squeezed dry. And it convinced me that poetry was worth another go. So here we are.

I would not have arrived “here” were it not for a transformative 2024. It was a year of surrender, and I mean that in the most positive sense of the word. In February, I took long-overdue control of my mental health, and as a little blue pill started releasing the vice grip that, quite privately, had clamped me, emotionally and physically, for years, a strange, unexpected thing happened: my heart opened. Widely. It’s possible that, like the Grinch, it grew three sizes. What started gushing out of it was a surprise – and in some cases, a shock – to myself and those around me who know me intimately enough to recognize the change. Since then, I have channeled that heart energy into personal relationships new and old, into my professional life as a record store owner and, perhaps most visibly, into my writing. And with that, I’m slowly establishing a circle of writers – old friends and new acquaintances – that is helping to further fuel and inspire me, and vice versa. I’m no longer writing in a vacuum; I’m sharing, trading and discussing the craft with multiple people. Writing can be lonely work, especially if you’re the type who finds comfort – even if it’s an uneasy and uncertain comfort – in solitude. It’s nice to have people around, especially people who get me. It makes me feel a little less lonely in this universe.

Starting this week, I am publishing a weekly poem here along with select works from “The Wall of Rejection” era as I reassess (and potentially remix) those abandoned efforts. No doubt some (if not most) are destined for the shredder, but if I find anything worth salvaging, I will share. There may be some occasional essays, too. Just don’t plan on listening to them – this time around, I’m making you read. This is something like a manifesto for The Velveteen Raccoon. (If you’re curious about the parenthetical above, this isn’t the first writing-related quasi-manifesto I’ve declared in the past year. There may be more before I’m done.)

I’m reluctant to call this writing poetry, what with the historical and literary weight that word carries – maybe “fragments of feelings and fragmented feelings” works better for what I’m exploring. Moreover, there’s a hesitation and uncertainty, given my documented failures, to get in the ring knowing what I’m up against, not only with my limitations as a writer but with the centuries-old canon of poetry – we already have Rilke, so what the fuck do I have to offer? But after a friend recently shared a banger Robert Duncan poem and I replied, “THAT’s poetry,” she countered: “Of a type. There is need for so many.” Point taken.

Most of my poems are short (again, fragments of feelings and fragmented feelings). Some have titles, but most don’t. Form-wise, I write in lowercase with minimal punctuation, which may seem like non-choices, but the construction is very deliberate; it’s my way of stripping the poems to the essence of their intent – conveying naked emotions through words – and allowing the reader to read them with their own cadence (they will sound different in your head anyway). Visually, I like the way they look. The calculus makes sense to me, and that overrides any armchair/elbow-patched criticism coming my way.

Lastly, and most importantly, my poetry, in tone and subject matter, is heavily influenced by and indebted to Leonard Cohen. I’ve been listening to and learning from Leonard since my early twenties, and here in middle age, his presence in my life is damn near biblical. Most of the poems in this weekly series were conceived with Leonard’s songs and verse looming over my shoulder as I attempted to distill the matters of the heart and the flesh through the lens of my specific experience, even if, sometimes, I was writing purely from a place of fantasy. It’s pretentious and borderline vulgar to even speak Leonard’s name while discussing my own work, but context is important, and anyway, we share a birthday, and despite the chasm that stands between us as far as our individual talents are concerned, I’ve always felt people born on the same day have an inherent cosmic connection, and any obvious thematic or emotional plagiarism should be viewed as nothing less than infinite respect and admiration. My adult life, in many ways, has been a pursuit of the depth of feeling in Cohen’s work, my aim to feel, understand, interpret, convey and ultimately live the human experience with the profundity and poetic grace that Leonard did. I’m a romantic cynic or a cynical romantic, however you want to cut it, and if there’s any common ground between Leonard and me, that’s where we stand: surveying an existence so beautifully profane and profanely beautiful while laboring to reconcile the mystery.

It’s instructive for you, as reader and interpreter, to avoid the temptation to view these poems as comprehensively autobiographical. I’m in there, of course, but not always in the first person, as I often capture words and phrases that float into my head like falling leaves, then arrange (or rearrange) them on the page, and what often emerges is something closer to fiction. Yet other times, I write very specifically about my internal and external experiences and/or a subject from my present or past. All of which is to say, these poems could be about somebody, anybody or nobody, and I encourage you to decide for yourself what they’re “about,” or apply them to your own specific experience, knowing that wherever you arrive, you’ll be right; what a poem “is,” in the end, is just as much up to the reader as it is to the writer.

In short, and in closing, take this advice from the wild and wise John Keating:

“When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think.”

Thank you for being here. It means more to me than you know.