Samuel Taylor Coleridge:  With feral longing and melancholy (The Nightingale) ST Coleridge paints beautiful dark poems.  They range from esoteric (Kublai Khan) to the downright epic (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner).  His surprising rymes make him a joy to read and his bipolar views that range from perverse to quintessential love make him a perfect read for any occason.

W. H. Auden:  Probably the best poet to ever live (much better than the poet laureates who don the stage now [no offense to those who like Billy Collins or Charles Simic]) he has a way with language which stays with you long after the poem is finished.  His verse is so layered you can re-read many times and come out with something new each time.  Notables are The Shield of Achilles; At the Grave of Henry James; who stands, the crux left of the watershed; Under which Lyre; and In memory of W.B. Yeats.

William Blake:  If you’re interested in dark literature, with a hint iof redemption read Blake.  The nice thing about him is he was also an artist so you can view the horrors he depicted in words and through his own eyes.  If you’ve ever heard of Hannibal Lecter, you’ve serripticiously heard of William Blake.  Does the poem and paiting Red Dragon ring a bell?

John Keats:  The Most read in high school and also the least appreciated.  Everyone knows the classic Ode to a Grecian Urn but what about Ode to a Nightingale, or On the Sea or even On sitting down to read King Lear Once Again?  He has a beautiful and resonant flow, ebbing with emotion and description.  There is a reason high schoolers have to read him, he is one of the best poets at extracting emotion.

Edgar Allan Poe:  Poe has beautifully dark and resonant poems, but with an almost juvenile rhyming scheme and whereas everyone knows The Raven, try out others such as the melancholic (and probably his best) Tamerlane, or such melodic gems as Annabel Lee and The Bells.  If you long for the nostalgia of reading The Raven try out the poem (which is actually much better, though little known) which inspired its creation, Lenore.

Langston Hughes:  You will never find a more melodic human being.  He infuses jazz in everything he writes.  Think slam poetry, but good (you know those annoying people who get up and read at open mike nights and make a bunch of hand gestures and say absolutely nothing.).  Even when his writing is depressing, there is nothing more hopeful or empowering than Hughes.  If you’ve never read him, you’re missing out.

The Book of Antiquity:  This was written as a Teen Fantasy/Adventure, but make no mistake, the theme and some of the events are very adult.  I’ve tried to keep the balance, and I think the second draft will help even more, but because of what I’m interested in and because of the influences I think its a great novel for everyone (although I would think that wouldn’t I?).  Bill is just beginning his teenage years and he and his mother live in a small duchy, which by all intents and purposes could really be called a mining camp.  It’s overseen by a horrible despotic Duke who represses his subjects.  Then one day a man drops a note under their door which asks them to join in a rally against the Duke and ultimately the King.  Bill sneaks out in the night, against his mothers wishes, and in one horrible night is injured and whisked away by this strange man.  In a world where science is prohibited but present and religion is mandatory and prevalent, Bill begins to uncover the King’s, his companion’s, and even his mother’s terrible secrets, and the destruction which made the world the way it is.

Dark:  What would you do if suddenly all light, except for fire, was eliminated?  This horror/adventure novel explores the human psyche under duress.  What would people do when you cant see them.  Burglary?  Rape?  Murder?  A group of seven band together to protect each other from the dark, and one wily stranger traverses it on his own.  The darkness takes them to the limit of what they think is possible…and beyond.

Memoirs of a Hero:  Two men, both in San Francisco and oblivious to the other, have everything taken from them.  Faced with an unknown future and with nothing to their name, the two men set out on two very different paths.  One of them tries to save people and one tries to punish them.  This book is in the same theme line as the previous two, but will not have any classical fantasy or horror aspects, it will focus on why we make the decisions we do and what the consequences of the decisions are.  The whole book centers around the question:  What do you do when all you have is the clothes on your back, you have nothing to lose, and you witness someone being beat up, raped and mugged?

Elsinore:  This is a comic book that I’ve been working on for years.  The story centers around Frank and Christy Harvey.  They are suspect characters who are feeling something which happened in Pensacola, Florida and end up crashing their car in a remote Texas town called Elsinore.   There is some force which keeps the couple in the town which they come to realize is in the midst of a civil war.  The two sides, a congregation of staunch Catholics led by a suspect Priest and a group of monstrous freaks led by an enigmatic cripple, fight constantly between each other for the right to be in charge because both sides feel they think they have the “right” way to do things.  The battle began because of a prophesy that the town was at the door way to Hell and there is an army of demons coming…and soon.  Now Frank and Christy are stuck in the town and must decide which side to choose.

The Island of His Mind (working title):  This story follows a young reporter who is sent from New York to Hawaii to cover a rash of murders which break out.  Along the way she meets up with a old homeless man who is suffering from both PTSD and Alzheimers disease, she befriends him and together they try and solve the mystery.  This book is about humanity and the dark places the mind can take us, but it’s also about hope and friendship.

Often when I’m writing a specific type of story I like to get other materials which help me in my creative process, other writings or movies to get the creative juices flowing.  For example in writing “The Book of Antiquity” I have read both Joseph Campbell and Books like K.J. Parker’s “Engineer Trilogy” (This is a fantastic trilogy by the way, you should read it).  Most recently I have gone out and purchased “The Lord of the Rings” on Blu-ray.  I thought the depth and breath of the movies was going to bring me into the perfect frame of mind to finish the novel.  Give me inspiration for the final battle in my novel. 

I watched all three and a half hours of the extendo version of “Fellowship” and was again amazed at the job they pulled off in creating this movie, and I felt inspired to write, so I sat down in front of my computer and poised my hands above the key board…then I saw my hand made pipe and the small bag of tobacco sitting next to it and thought about all the pipe smoking in the movie and how relaxed they all seemed and I picked up my pipe, packed the Burlingame Tabacconists custom blend “Black & Gold” Tobacco into it, lit it and averted my gaze from the computer screen back to the hills leading to the Pacific and made sure to take my time and enjoy the smoke, instead of powering through it, just to finish, as I’m prone to do.

Then I was hit with a beautiful and possibly horrible epiphany.  I anchored the pipe in my teeth and moved it to the right side of my mouth so I could see my computer screen unobstructed and I wrote a line:

How do we recompense the love of nature versus the march of technology after we have already made the decision to join step?

I also watched the special features of “Fellowship” and Peter Jackson said in one of them that J.R.R. Tolkien loathed technology and loved the simplicity of nature.  This showed through in scenes where Saruman had his Goblins tear down the ancient trees to build a factory for evil.

I looked back up at the tree covered hillside beyond the buildings and cars and streetlamps.  I pulled the pipe from my mouth, realizing that I was puffing away and getting no pleasure from the smoking, I was again smoking for the satisfaction of completion and not for satisfaction of the act.  I put the pipe down.  I stared at my computer where I had my entire novel open in Microsoft Word and the internet open with stereomood.com playing music while I wrote, my phone was in the background telling me that I had a text message.

The march of technology and the distraction of consumerism had absorbed me.  I was having trouble focusing enough to finish my novel and I was using distractions such as other novels and other movies, possibly even music to try and help me focus on my writing.  Then, because life harmonizes, I distinctly heard a lyric of a song playing through my computer:  “Ouch, I have lost myself again.”

Why did I think these distractions would help me concentrate when I’ve always known that the best way to concentrate is to clear one’s mind of distractions?  I picked my pipe back up and stared at it.  I spent $100 dollars on the pipe, because it reminded me of a simpler time and I thought it would bring me relaxation.  I looked at the Blu-ray (Which I purchased in Blu-ray because I knew it would be much more lush and beautiful than the regular DVD) and shook my head, ashamed.

I was ashamed not because I had purchased these things, but because I had lost my sense of myself.  I had lost all moderation.  I had leaned too far to the consumer/technology obsession and started to lose my personal/naturalist sensibility.  Even the idea that I was finishing my novel instead of just writing it was indicative of how far my mentality had shifted.  I need solitude and nature to feel peace and to clear my head of the everyday clutter, but I need the trappings of a hand made pipe, of a blu-ray player, of a computer to collect my thoughts and to soothe me with music.  To be even more stark, I need nature and solitude to create something which takes technology to produce and that I hoped people would purchase for their own edification.

I’d become a juxtaposed mirror image of myself.  And that’s what led me to understand that the beauty of life comes from that delicate balance.  The hardest part is to keep that balance and be wary of tilting too far in either direction.  It’s human nature to try and make things easier for ourselves, but we need to be wary of over simplification and “losing ourselves” of becoming too lazy and letting technology direct our lives, or leaning too far in the other direction and stagnating our development as a race.

So how do we recompense?  We need to create and innovate using nature as a muse.  There is such natural complexity to nature, which is what gives the world its beauty, if we lose that innovation will stop and Science Fiction will prove true.  Our creations will rule our lives.  Our danger is that we cannot stop looking at the wonder of nature since we have now followed technology’s march too far to ever truly fall in the opposite direction.

Whatever the reason Poetry, though not my favorite form, can create beautiful spectrum’s of emotion in a more succinct and visceral manner than anything written out in prose or text.  So the next time you sit in front of the TV think about picking up the latest Billy Collins for a quick poem.  It wont take you more than 2 or 3 minutes to absorb and let settle into your brain and heart.  It might start to change your opinion of its worth.

(by the way Gluck, Collins and Levine are all Poet Laureates from the last decade)

In honor, here are a few of my own:

The bright white flash of the city

Exploding paper is hilarious
more so than deconstructing
drinks.  The flow of time makes
for illuminous revelations with
exposition that makes no sense
and dialogue which is trite.
What better way to celebrate the
night than to discuss diatribes
of normalcy and illusions of delusion.

Sunday at the bar

Sycophantic rotoscum
devouring thier hoppy
indifference with the
order of benevolence.
Smiles as big as a
Chrysler grill.  Loose
immoral bodies thrusting
and grinding to the
Deferential beat.
Thud thud thud
Powerful aphrodisiac
That music
That driving
power these people
live by.
How is happiness so
complete?
How can this cause so much
joy?
At home squalor,
ignoring the fugus which
grows on thier month
old dishes.  Who is accountable?
Living a college life;
living paycheck to
paycheck?

“The Heavy Metal Bands” was a story of how a few friends got together and formed a heavy metal band, then because of their strong personalities they also became a gang.  Somehow this worked in my pre-teen mind.  That story spurned four more stories, ending with the lads saving the world.  All told, all five of those stories filled out about 4 pages worth of text.

Then I moved onto other things (Like the Marty Brothers, based on myself and my brother Steve; an echo of the Hardy Boys), but length was always an issue.  I couldn’t seem to write anything longer than four or five pages.  I got so disturbed by this that most of the things I wrote were bulbous unwieldy ten page stories, with more filler than a Twinkies.

I hadn’t yet found out what I was doing, but I thought the point would be length, the story had to be longer for anyone to read it.  I started to read a lot at this point, trying to see how people did it and getting lost in their stories in the process.  Then my senior year in high school I took a creative writing class, and where almost everything I did during that class was horrible, but I got to see how others wrote and what their process was.  I hated the class but it did give me more perspective and a deeper desire to write more.

It’s been a challenge.  My whole life I’ve struggled with the juxtaposition of the desire to write and the lack of writing talent.  how many people in the world are like this?  how many people who strive to actors love the craft, but have no skill?  What about painters?  What give these people success when only one out of a million people are born talents at what they desire to do.

Stephen King was born with drive and talent, and he’s successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.  I have drive, I wonder where I’ll end up…

I saw my life for the first time without success and I wondered if it would ever be possible.  In fact I even began to fear it, because it would mean I would have to continue and for the first time in my life I couldn’t visualize the story in my head.  How can you write other books if you’re bored when you sit down to write?  I would be a manager for the rest of my life.  I could proceed and I could make decent money at it, but I would be  a manager.  My traveling would be limited, devoid of scheduling flexibility and every woman I would meet would hate my dedication portrayed through long hours.  I saw the road leading down that hill towards the setting sun and I stopped and took a deep breath.  The easy road, the one that led down and towards the beautiful sunset was appealing, but then I turned and saw up the mountain and realized that I have not yet proved that I could do it.  So I sat down at the computer and I vomited on the keyboard (metaphorically), then I sat down the next day and did it again, and again.  Eventually visualization of people and locations materialized and my vocabulary began to return and my heart relaxed.  It’s 12:31AM…

The anachronism that is my writing life

 It’s 2:44AM.  My cat is lying asleep in bed and I’m sitting in front of my computer, my dyspepsia blaring and my eyes blurring.  I gaze past the empty Coke cans, from my artist’s model hand to my book of Twilight Zone stories (lit only by the soft glow of the monitor) and wonder what I’m doing.  Why am I awake?  Why did I drink that Coke at 2:00AM?  Why cant I slow my mind down and just relax?  Why do I force this on myself?
In my day job I manage a bookstore.  I have 45 employees and I’m a corporate whore.  My daytime language is all business parlance.  Learning Plans.  Store Manager Action Plans.  Business Acumen.  Performance Management.  I stride through the store giving my direct reports thier priorities for the day.  I look at the employees and I contemplate thier personalities and thier strengths and I fit them into little boxes on my succession map.
When I’m home and alone, I’m in front of the computer creating lives.  Specific personality attributes collide in my head and I see a character.  I see them in a snapshot or a Polaroid, if you please.  I see men and women as they are, without thier protective shells.  I hear thier voices and read thier thoughts.  There’s a man sitting in a room.  The room is dark and he’s alone.  There is a small crease in his brow, indicating consternation.  The room is spartan with only one book lying on the floor behind the simple wooden chair he’s sitting in.  That book is “The Bell Jar.”  Do you know what he’s thinking?  That’s the greatest part about writing.  You can layer on infinite articles or events and you’re the only one who knows what’s happening.
So why do I deal with Corporate Initiatives, Selling Culture and SMART Goals while burning my nights in front of the computer in a portentious insomniatic glaze?  I love the romanticism of it.  The glorification of the struggling artist.  My office is covered in books, tomes of introspection, entertainment and knowledge and as I look around I feel both solace and restlessness.  I want more.  I want to know more.  I want people to know that if you need to know something Sean’s the one to ask.  When people think of me I want them to think of me as a writer erudite enough to facilitate that other life.  So why do I push myself to odd hours and split my attentions to the point where I’m spead thin, when I can imagine other people and every possible outcome of their situation?  The answer is; I cant help myself.  My brain wont stop.  When a new challange presents itself I have to take it, just to prove to myself that I can do it (and maybe everyone else in the process).  I’m going to make it.  I’m going to facilitate my desires.  I can adapt and succeed on my own terms and I can live the American Dream.

Who Wins?

I spend my time pining

while your attention

goes to him.

I fantasize about our embrace

The warm clasp that seems

to brighten the spirit.

A cold realization.

A Dream.

You’re dreaming too…

beside him.

I hold onto delusion

like a climber with no carabiner.

I’m at risk.

It feels good.

Danger and infatuation

go hand in hand.

You revel in the peace

and ease he creates.

Who am I to kid?

Who am i to compete?

Against convenience and memory?

I must have lost.

It’s hard to chase the horizon,

The empathetic myth of love,

When cold fronts pervade.

I see his smile

I feel sick

He knows he won.

But what is the prize?

A fake idea of property?

But…

Who am I to kid?

Who am I to compete?

Against convenience and memory?

I must have lost.

Fake contrivance of belief.

Falsehoods once held true.

Facades of love.

Your relaxed smile,

his lazy arm around your shoulders.

So who am I to kid?

Who am I to compete?

Compete for love

and absolution to grief?

Against convenience and memory?

Fuck it, I lost!

]]> http://seanmmcbride.com/2012/03/10/who-wins/feed/ 0 seanmmcbride http://seanmmcbride.com/2012/03/10/who-wins/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SeanMcbride/~3/TSf7OTPqZpY/ http://seanmmcbride.com/2012/03/02/the-sweetness-of-love/#comments Sat, 03 Mar 2012 01:09:17 +0000 edrobinsonactor@gmail.com (Sean McBride) http://seanmmcbride.com/?p=262 ]]> This is a special poem for me.  It was written stream of consciousness style, on a beautiful day with the sun beating down on my face while I sat at a cafe by the beach.  I had just heard my Grandmother died.  I wrote it for her and I guess, a little for myself as release.

The Sweetness of Love

Sleep so deep

Let the warm glow

Bless your plight.

Dressing your inhibitions in a wooden box;

expressed ruminations hung so low,

desperate cries for your life,

depressed beneath.

Suppressed by urges of superfluous testosterone.

Do you still believe?

Do you remember the dream?

Your un-arching faith in me?

What was the motivation,

for love in this pedantic narcissist?

A poem so greatfully

dedicated to you,

now confusingly about me-

Perhaps this convoluted

search for meaning

is encapsulated by the words

you once said to me:

“I love you honey,

Never give up.”

An Epiphany

There seem to be three types of people in the writing/reading world.  Those with Talent, those with potential and those who’re ignorant.  This fact causes great distraction and great despair.  I think I could be a good if not a great writer, I think I could have talent, but there is something in my brain which seems to block that switch.  I merely have potential.

It’s such a difficult process and yet for so many people it just flows…as if their body were an extension of their mind and their fingers were a conduit for their art.  They are the talented.  They can sit and let the vision flow through them for hours on end.  They see the course in front of them and they don’t think twice about it; they just go.

I have potential.  The majority of the populace has potential.  This is the ability to see something, to want to create something, but to lack the necessary drive, or vision.  This is the collection of people who like to write, like to paint, like to create with their hands, but employ their creativity as a hobby for all the aforementioned reasons.

Then there are those who have no potential.  The ignorant.  The people who read a piece of literature and don’t understand it; who see a work of art and see it as colors on canvas.  There are the people who just don’t care.  The reasons are irrelevant, schooling, culture, drive, class, it ultimately comes down to what is the interest.  These people would much rather catch a midnight matinee of the new Michael Bay movie.  Why would this be?  How can anyone look at a piece of art and not enjoy it?  Because it’s work.

I study art, but I’m no artist.  I contemplate it.  I assimilate it.  I gorge on it, then I fake it.  To people with talent it’s a drive.  It’s ever present and forceful.  It becomes deleterious to them in it’s absence.  The ignorant don’t understand at all.  They need to be told what the meaning is, it needs to be spelled out.  They don’t want to exert or do the necessary work.

But I have potential.  I love art in all it’s forms.  I see it, I study it, I embrace it, but I’m not artistically inclined.  I don’t have talent, I have potential.  I have become a student, I love the idea so much that i want to become it.  I crave talent, but it’s work.  It’s hard and it takes major effort, but there is a voice somewhere deep down that knows that talent is something you’re born with, it isn’t something you can develop.  So I keep telling myself to work harder, to try harder.  I have potential, I tell myself.

So I drive and hope people will mistake me for what I truly am.  I am a person with potential and I’m a fanatic and I’m trying to fool people into believing that I have talent; that I know what I’m doing.  But I’m still learning.  I’m still pushing myself forward, forcing the creative side to mesh with the analytic side and create something beautiful.  I have potential, but If I work hard enough I hope to fool the world.

—————-

And here’s a brand new poem that I think goes fairly well with the essay.  I’ve been having some writer’s block while working on my novel and have made very little progress in the last two months.  Then one day I sat down and for some reason the creative juices were just there and this poem was the result.  I’m still struggling a little, but at least there is some work happening now…

The Drifter

My fingers tell the story, of the broken trumped up glory
when my mind refused to listen, drowned out by broken pistons
the silence beating louder than my heart…

The darkened frozen night glows, and the turgid sky just bellows
of my time examining seams, on the boulevard of broken dreams
as words flow down as kindling for my hearth…

But through those wounds of empty pages, who speak louder than the ages
as the clock runs down to zero, I’m not a battered, broken hero,
just a man who wont give up until he wins…