Notes toward a theory of messiness.

I suggest, nay implore, my students to write off the cuff when just getting started, to write whatever comes to mind, to get messy, to not worry about the rules which normally hang them up. Yet how often do I let myself go, even partially?

Messiness is scary, a time-suck, a waste of time. Yet it's no more a waste than staring at a blank screen or piece of paper.

I thought I knew where I was going with a current poem I'm working on, and at the end of my writing yesterday, I was in a stuck place. Words piled up on themselves like the police cars in The Blues Brothers.

I'm working toward some mysterious messiness in this poem, by fits and starts. Not randomness, but messiness--emotional messiness, I suppose, and that old messiness (interesting to me, anyway) about art being partial, always failing to capture reality but (weirdly) sometimes more whole than reality. As Thomas Lux would call it, a "made thing."

I thought the poem was about watching Game Show Network but it's about something hazier and more undefinable. It's the same feeling I get when I'm on YouTube and Facebook.

If anyone ever asks what this poem is about, I'll say I don't know. Grasping, reaching for something long gone, even as it persists. Trying to step on your shadow. The idea of "subject" is moot.

The messiness is partly of juxtaposition, placing Johnny Olson next to Bert and Ernie next to an orange velour lounge chair. It's also of memory, of selectivity. All I can say for sure is that Match Game used to be on TV, and there was your announcer. All that I fancy was there is a cipher.

It's somewhat Derridean, this move which I'm interested in (and have, in hindsight, pursued for a while), away from the center. It's all a riff on "I don't know. I never knew." Hopefully it's not a concession of defeat.

We look back at the past, which isn't there and wasn't much there even when we thought we were there. We look backward, but the past is always eating itself in forward motion. That dude I was when I'm tagged in a Facebook photo ain't there anymore. Come to think of it, he's not here either.

Messiness can be truer, if more difficult. Messiness needs time to marinate. But what I have in front of me now--longer, more tangled lines, confusing moves from past to present to past--is more fun.