There are two types of goals: process goals and outcome goals.
Outcome goals, for an example, not my goal, to lead writers on a cruise retreat so that you travel is free. To have 10,000 followers. To sell 5000 copies of your book. To have one of the big companies publish your book.
Process goals come from practice, exploration, learning outside this particular poem how effects are created. It is about the habit of writing, the muscle memory of sitting down and bum-in-chair-time. It’s literary culture, community, history. It’s showing up, revising, submitting, participating, developing a critical eye, developing a loving eye, developing a curious mind. The process is to stay engaged. As Max Ehrmann put it, “Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.”
The main distinction is process goals and outcome goals is that the former are within your agency. Outcome goals out of your control. They rely on magazines, publishers, audiences, zeitgeist beyond the elbow grease of your process.
Poetry in part is a way to impose order, or find and highlight order or patterns. It is skill of finding significance and meaning, but if you try too hard, are too attached, remember that meaning isn’t hard to confer randomly. Try “he’s such a ___” and add a random noun. {cucumber, cummerbund, paper cut}. Meaning isn’t hard. It’s near unavoidable with our meaning-addled brains.
The danger in poetry is to hard-close, to soothe too soon, to give a satisfying shape before the work. It is to speak like a bland or witty horoscope containing no actual thought, but flattering appearance of it, thereby manufacturing a patronizing poet voice of authority.
A risk is to make the work the packaging words and poetic devices, the hook and the resolution, instead of the deeper work of changing self, disturbing system defaults, growth, depth, letting chaos turn to genuine insight into systems or witness the discomfiting.
As hard as it can be to be published, with 1% to 3% acceptance rates, the hard part of writing, the most active time is the making, the improving, the shaking up your own practice, the expanding or leaning into the weirdness of your brain. The sporadic hurry-scurry of pitching poems is work but is not The Work.
