Directions--Translating the Dictionary Into Poems, Consistency, and About that Cake

Often, after I write something, its cadences and sentences will run through my head for some time. I lie awake at night tinkering with lines of poems and making sure my changes are committed to memory so I can write them down in the morning. After publishing a blog post, I often go back and add a sentence here, adjust a sentence there, several times over. This time, I realized that my "Goals and Intentions" post of yesterday left enough things unspecific to merit another post. The spirit of my goal for 2011 putting in an appearance, perhaps: the spirit of paying attention, revising, reviewing.

I'm not about to give up paying attention, revising, reviewing because it's 2012! And that's the major point I feel I need to make: my goals, both in the rest of life and on the blog, are for more, better, deeper of the same general directions rather than branching off into something surprising and new.

James Altucher's blog today has a wonderful graphic illustrating the concept of "focus." Seriously, check it out: I'm a non-visual person and even I was struck by it! All these psychedelic circles appear to be in constant motion, until you focus on the black point at the center, at which point, all becomes still.
I take this not as a message simply to tune out the black dots, but in fact, to find ways to integrate the distractions into the points of focus, perhaps even use them as bridges to connect the dots. For example, in some ways, teaching Linguistics 101 feels like something of a distraction in my goal of becoming the best writer I can be. But on the other hand, as I spend all this time preparing the course, I find myself constantly using examples from poetry, or thinking how a topic in theoretical Linguistics is interesting from the poetic standpoint. I'm going to need to get better and better at written communication, since it's a web-based course, and at "knowing my audience" and giving them what they need. In that way, the moving circles are centered around the "point" and contribute to it.

Similarly, for one of my other jobs, I translate dictionary entries from Italian into English, referring to Ancient Greek. I adore this job. I adore it because it has me working right there in the guts of language, and also constantly dipping into fragments of Greek Literature for examples. I want to do more in my own poetry in terms of bringing in themes from Classical Literature, and I'm endlessly fascinated by words. So, another "interconnection between points" is that one of the first poem drafts I've been working on is a meditation on the concept of "equal" (a very complex adjective I translated a while back) interwoven with the story of Sisyphus. I don't even have a complete first draft yet, but it's one of those that keeps me awake at night.

I do best when I don't lie awake all night, though, and I think I blew off the "consistency" concept a bit last time. I do have some resistance to it, and mostly because I'm afraid of losing my crazed flair or something, but even if my sole motivation is being a better writer, I have to admit that I'm not much of a writer when I'm psychotic or suicidal, and that consistency in certain areas helps me to avoid spending too much time in either of those places.

And on the theme of continuity, as Mindy pointed out, my series posting "food as pleasure" has kind of fallen by the wayside, but is not totally forgotten. That cake I made on New Year's Eve was supposed to fall under that rubric, so I should say more about it in the near future too. A hint: zucchini!

I mentioned feeling less "connected" to food writing of late. It's partly because, although I was commissioned to make food several times last year, it's getting on for four years since I actually worked as a chef! How time passes!

But nonetheless, when I made my smoothie this lunchtime, I caught myself composing a post, or several, about how smoothies are so much more than the sum of their parts, how you can pretty much make a smoothie version of your favorite "anything," and other enthusiastic tidbits.

So, building on last year and aiming to do everything better, and to use the psychedelic circles to join the dots--that gives a fuller picture of what's to come. "A new day's never a blank page..."
How are you building on last year?