She Oughta Be Committed!

Or, to put that more responsibly, I ought to be committed.  To my promises to myself.  As a worker bee I met the commitments I made to the systems that rewarded me:  as a student I did not take incompletes; as a teacher I graded and returned most assignments within a week or less; as a colleague and friend, I generally do what I say I will do.  In other words, I score pretty darn high in conscientiousness.  But not when I'm the person to whom I'm making promises.  My first year of retirement accentuated this particular problem.  I kept making plans for myself and kept reneging.

But a few weeks ago I got a healthy kick in the butt from a human potential workshop called the Wings Personal Effectiveness Seminar.  It put a bright light on the way I show less respect to myself than I do to other people.  So I decided to start keeping some of the commitments I've made to myself.

Finally -- self published

One such commitment was to make sure my collection of poems about Wayne Lonergan got published.  After a couple of years trying to place the book with small poetry presses, I gave up on finding a spot in that world.  But I couldn't put it in the drawer of forgetfulness with all the half-finished novels.  So I decided to self-publish it in the easiest way possible:  through Create Space, an arm of the monster, Amazon.  

Why should I still care about this collection of poems, written a decade ago?  I'm certainly a different person now than I was then.  The rage that infuses these poems has little place in my current life.  But it was once the core engine that drove me and that I thought may have driven Wayne. 

I was drawn to his story as early as 1992 when I first saw it in an old Life Magazine I was perusing for my dissertation research.  In 1999 I visited the archives of the City of New York, photocopied all the trial documents and began work only to find myself scooped a few months later by a much better and better known writer.  Then I tried a novel about the murder but couldn't complete it.  (And besides, that had been done too.) Finally, in 2004, I took two weeks on my own on the Oregon and Washington coasts and wrote poems inspired by Wayne's life, pushing myself to create at least four poems a day by hand on notebook paper.  Later I edited them a bit, but not much.  Thus, although these may not be excellent poems, I'll say that the collection was truly "inspired" -- the words and thoughts that pushed through me in Wayne's voice were only partially mine, only partially the fruit of my unconscious dancing through my cerebral cortex.   Many of these words and images are blown through the breath of the Muse.

The voice in Murderous Glamour is angry, wounded and broken.  The work imagines an abused child who became a hustler and a killer.  In my vision of his story, Wayne is full of furious justification.  He defends himself relentlessly and clearly, claiming the need to survive.  The language is often coarse and sometimes beautiful.  In my vision, Wayne both loves and hates the God that his mother worshipped.   His story is one of pleasure and suffering. 

Like so many of our stories.