Five Questions with Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken and Autumnal Doldrums

First of all:
A short interview with Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken is now up at my Redmond Poet Laureate Blog here:
http://redmondpoetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/five-questions-with-washington-state.html
Go read all about Kathleen and her new book, Plume (which I reviewed a little while ago for The Rumpus…) as well as her duties as a State Poet Laureate. It’s very inspiring!

So, I’ve been in a serious case of autumnal discouragement, which is odd, because usually September and October are my GO! times, when I’m full of energy and ready to move forward. Part of this has been because of some difficulties at work, some discouragement with the poetry world in general (so much work, so little reward…I know I’ve been doing this for over ten years now, but sometimes writing the checks and submission packets over and over and doing the balance sheets…) and the many little things like cars breaking down, encounters with unpleasant humans doing unpleasant things, long cases of unremitting flu, then the cell phone and refrigerator breaking – I mean, none of these things are tragedies, but all taken together, they certainly have taken the wind out of my normally (I think) perky sails.

The weird thing is that a lot of my friends have reported similar feelings. I mean, we are in the middle of a pretty darn terrible economy, the worst and longest I’ve ever lived through, and that financial woe can be wearing. The elections this year also seem tinged with ill-will and weariness (although I just filled my voter sheet out and felt very American and empowered.) The poetry world is full of stories of presses and magazines folding, universities cutting back, grants shrinking and opportunities overall less frequent. I mean, I still enjoy reading poetry as much as ever, but my own writing has definitely suffered in terms of time and energy in the wake of all the Poet Laureate work, and sometimes I feel like I’m making Herculean effort and ending up with very little to show for it. Is that a poet’s world, after all? Karen Weyant talked on her blog about starting to write short stories, and I admit that I too have been dabbling in prose, flash fiction and essays and non-poetry-book reviews, etc. The question I keep coming back to is: in the current world, is anyone paying attention to poetry? Should we keep at it or try to get our art out in a different medium? The current Poets & Writers talks about the future of poetry. I do believe in a future for poetry, but I’ll admit I’m not sure at this point what it looks like. Twitter haikus and e-books and textual poetry on Tumblr?

Monday I’m visiting a local high school to talk to kids about poetry, and then Wednesday running a book group at Redmond Library to talk about Kathleen’s fantastic Plume. I better get my energy up!

If you’re a poet and feeling discouraged, leave a comment! We should at least try to cheer each other on, right? I hope it’s okay to talk on the blog a little about the bad times as well as the good. At least it’s honest.