Thursday, July 30, 2020

A month or so ago I told you I'd just learned I was a finalist for a major poetry prize, to be announced early this fall. No news, as far as that goes: I still don't know the results of the competition. What has struck me as odd, however, is that for most of this summer I have forgotten to think about this contest. Till the other day, I more or less forgot I was in the running.

Given that this is the biggest competition I've ever placed in, such a lapse in awareness puzzles but also intrigues me. I could chalk it up to the increasing craziness of our daily lives, the ceaseless bombardment of insanity and fear. I could link it to the struggles in my creative life, a life that seems to be too busy floundering in its private time-space quagmire to acknowledge any success beyond grabbing the occasional vine or root. I suppose the trigger for forgetting doesn't much matter, but in some way the very fact of inadvertent indifference makes me wonder, again, about the purpose of art to the artist--not my present-tense need to communicate but the purpose of my art over the long haul . . . the past-to-future road.

It's not a road that's easy to see.


2 comments:

nancy said...

It seems to me that we spend half of our lives accumulating and the other half shedding. We wear our clothes more lightly, knowing their relative worth.

David X. Novak said...

That sums it up, nancy. We are shedding now, both physically and metaphorically, and I only wish, when I was younger, that I knew better how lightly things could be cast off.