Wilder today posts on Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away:
I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine. The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot. The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday. Comfortable, yes.
Ya know, the first of my recent poems (the one I finished six years ago has the first line “I’m living my life like I’m driving in the rain” and the one that I mentioned I was working on last month about estate sales has a similar theme.
That, plus trees and drought, are the themes of the fifteen poems I’m currently circulating amongst the literary magazines.
I actually finished up the first draft of the estate sale poem this morning at a coffee shop. Given that every time I go to a coffee shop, I spend ten dollars on coffee and a pastry, and completing the poem has required three trips to the coffee shop in the last month, poetry might be my most expensive hobby. Well, no, martial arts and the gym membership eclipse it, but I am not sure I attend them enough to count them as hobbies these days.
It would get really expensive if I were writing more frequently.
At any rate, in other poetry news, I just received a rejection from a major literary magazine which had been sitting on four of my poems for fifty weeks. I’d like to think that’s because they were seriously, seriously considering them, but most likely they just cleared the database queue before the end of their reading year. You know, in college and thereafter, when I was churning out poems all the time, I didn’t mind long lead times on submissions, but now, I’m starting to think “How many more times in my life will I be able to submit these poems if it takes a year to get rejected?” Because, gentle reader, that number is not very large. Which first the themes of my contemporary poetry, ainna?
