Help Me Decide: What Next?

With the publication of the novel The Event I now have time to turn to my next project.  I continue to write poetry and short stories, and next year I will try my hand at another collection of recent poetry, but beyond that I am considering a couple of projects.

One possibility is to edit and publish another novel; I have three “in the can” or rather in the cloud.  These are all old and I am fearful as to quality and need for editing.  One novel was written (forty-five years ago) about the loss of innocence when a young attorney gets into the business world– not only do they make movies about this but in retrospect I fear it will seem autobiographical and thus make me uncomfortable.  The next was a fictionalization of a trip I took in the late 70s to the then-Soviet Union to visit with “refuseniks” and artists, people struggling (mostly unsuccessfully at the time) to emigrate to the US, to Israel, or to darned near anywhere that was not in the USSR.  The third was written based on my parents having retired to Florida, to a retirement community, where the talk around the pool was all about the four “D’s”: death, disease, divorce (of their children) and dinner.

Another is an idea for a different kind of poetry, suggested by an exhibit this summer in the Paris Museum of Modern Art where the theme was that these artists created new methods of thinking (the exhibit was called “Parallel Worlds”).  An extreme approach that is not just abstraction of subjects but also abstraction of the karma or vibe exuded by the subjects.  A complete divorce of the work from any reference to the form of the putative subject.

The Museum description of the exhibit notes that a parallel world in cosmology is “a universe with its own measures of space and time.  If such worlds existed, they would logically have to be separate from our own and governed by different laws, thus overturning fundamental principles….”  The seven artists who have contributed to this exhibit were all born between 1928 and 1962 and include, strikingly, the film actress (and “sex bomb”) Charlotte Rampling.

In poetry this would work something like: you observe a glass of white wine; and then :

while a mere artistic abstraction  would bend the glass, or put the contents in a different place, or reduce the image to points of light or place the glass in a different context; some effort to represent the glass, albeit molded to evoke chosen characteristics or perceptions;

a parallel  world would take the feeling derived from the glass and paint the feeling alone; and in poetry

the poem might not evoke/could not evoke the glass or the wine, nor use the words “glass” or “wine,” and rather might work with suggested viscosity, or the chemical formula for alcohol, or the last time the poet visited a vineyard or a glass blowing studio.

The above suggests how hard it would be to write in a way that would wholly divorce the prompt (wine glass with wine)  from the poem, but reflect in words the next level of reaction on the part of the writer.

Thoughts?  Let me know at [email protected].