I’m struck by creative paralysis. I curl up with coffee and a notebook and nothing. At all. I am suddenly consumed with what I’m doing and frozen by the impossibility of it all. Right now I’m the cartoon character who has run a long way past the edge of the cliff only to suddenly realize what is happening and fall like a stone.

Poetry blogland, the post-avants, the SOQs and the SONs, the Atlanteans– it’s all got me down. I’m pretty open-minded (if I might say so myself). I don’t look down on my friends who love Thomas Kinkade, for instance. But deep inside I know what good art is, and Thomas Kinkade isn’t it. When I talk about art and someone else talks abouot Kinkade, It makes about as much sense as giving a lengthy discourse on engine repair when asked what my favorite jazz standard is. They are different projects entirely.

Tonight, today, yesterday– as of Friday late in the afternoon I don’t even know what poetry is anymore, much less how to write any of it. I’ve started paying too much attention to the mechanics of my swing and now I’d be lucky to connect with one of Jim Behrle’s whiffle-balls.

Am I the Kinkade-lover of the weblog circuit? The visitor from the stix wearing tennis shoes to the symphony and clapping at every quiet interval? My time, passion and enjoyment is for naught if I just don’t get the simple things about the work I have loved up until now. What does it mean if I don’t see the fundamental dishonesty in Levine, if I don’t recognize Merwin’s complacency or Pinsky’s smugness… if I continue to be deeply moved by William Matthews and Raymond Carver?

Deep down inside I feel just a little bit sorry for someone who doesn’t (or doesn’t want to) get “literature”. Not because I begrudge them Grisham or whoever else (more power to them and their enjoyment… I enjoy the hell out of cheesy sci-fi and the occasional spy thriller), but because that’s all they have. I enjoy candy bars and bacon cheese burgers too, but I’m glad I’m not afraid of Thai food or a good lobster bisque.

When it comes to writing, I’ve either become that which I feel sorry for or somewhere along the line I lost the courage of my convictions. Suddenly it’s all Greek. I grew up with the shame that comes from being poor and from a family that wasn’t well educated. I well remember (and I should because it still happens to me on a regular basis) the self-consciousness when I am in situations where I fear my “redneck past” (as Ben Folds so aptly put it) will be easily discernable by others around me and I’ll find myself guilty of the social equivalent of sipping from the finger bowl. I don’t want to be the guy who asks for Budweiser in the can at a black-tie affair, but when I see so much “post-avant” writing that leaves me cold, which seems devoid of passion, artless, and guilty of the same range of crimes and misdemeanors that “my” writers are being charged of, it leaves me bewildered.

At this moment in blogland, I’m unsure which would be better. Sip the water from the finger bowl and try to make a joke of it or just drink the Kool Aid that’s being offered?