Projector

I love the idea of a project, some kind of governing plan behind activity. I became consciously aware of it in grad school when my teacher, Janet Holmes, talked about how a book of poems shouldn't just be a random collection of your writing. Instead, a manuscript should have a trajectory, an architecture. Half of her second book of poems, The Green Tuxedo, was a series of poems based on her discovery of her late father's planner/diary/calendar from when he was a young, single journalist working in (I think) Chicago in the 30s or 40s. She wrote this really interesting bunch of poems speculating about his love life, comparing the man she knew and the man that was revealed in the journal, and those sorts of things. She pursued the project of interpreting this discovery about her dad over the course of several years and dozens and dozens of poems.

I fell in love with the thought of having a great idea and pursuing it, especially creatively. There's a great Frank O'Hara poem that touches on this idea that I will now reprint here with absolutely no one's permission at all:

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

I love that poem for a number of reasons. Number one, I would probably rather be a painter than a poet too but I am not. (Of course, these days, I'm not really a poet either.) Number two, the way he describes going from thinking of a color to ending up with a dozen poems that never even mention that color is really interesting and accurate. I think most creative people are driven by ideas and emotions and symbols that are ever present but never fully unearthed. I think projects are ways we try to both kill and feed these subterranean thoughts that follow us around.

Take scrapbooking, for instance. It's this really mainstream, kinda cutesy, folksy activity that a lot of people do but, underneath the die-cuts of sad eyed puppies and metal stamped letters that spell out "Families Are Forever," what is it other than people using creative methods to negotiate their family histories, to give order and sense to their past, to write/edit/revise the events of their lives and create a document for the future? Scrapbooking is as much a project as Janet Holmes' journal poems or Frank O'Hara thinking about the color orange.

What got me thinking about this today in particular was an article in Newsweek about all the recent memoirs about people spending a year following some sort of rules. Again, with no permission whatsoever, I reprint some of Jennie Yabroff's article:

"The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs's forthcoming chronicle of his yearlong quest to follow every mandate in the Bible, is just one of a recent flurry of "year of" books. Sara Bongiorni gave up buying Chinese products for A Year Without 'Made in China'. Judith Levine gave up shopping altogether for Not Buying It. Barbara Kingsolver fed her family with what they could grow or source locally for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Ellen Currey-Wilson banned TV from the house for The Big Turnoff. And Colin Beavan swore off luxuries like toilet paper, disposable cups and air conditioning for his blog No Impact Man."

I think those all sound fascinating and I want to read them all just to see how 21st century people dealt with deprivation.

(On a side note off the topic of projects, there are some great quotes in the Yabroff article about why people would do stuff like this: "'We're such a hyperaffluent society, what else is left for us to do than take things away from our lives?' says Ron Hogan, author of the publishing-industry blog Galleycat.com."

"'Part of the idea of saying no is a little old-fashioned,' says Judy Clain, the Little, Brown editor who bought Julie and Julia, a year-of memoir in which writer Julie Powell made every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 'We are so overwhelmed by technology, we have so much access to so many choices, these books offer a way to deprive or limit ourselves.'"

"Jacobs finds himself longing for the simple, Biblical life once his experiment ends: 'The first day was the worst. I felt unanchored. Too many choices.'")

Anyway, back on the subject of projects, November is National Novel Writing Month. Thousands of people across the country started yesterday with the goal of reaching 50,000 words before the end of the month. I won't be one of them but I think it's so cool that it's being done.

When President Hinckley asked the members of the church to read the Book of Mormon before the end of the year, people loved the feeling of accomplishing an important goal in a limited amount of time.

For about three months I wrote a poem a day. Regardless of whether or not I was in the mood or whether or not the poem was any good, I wrote one every day almost without fail. That produced my book Morning, Noon, and Night which was an anniversary gift for Suzanne way back when.

Obviously, my master's thesis, The Book of Saint Anthony, was a project that I pursued even after I decided I wasn't all that crazy about it.

It goes beyond mere goal setting -- it involves some sort of grander, sometimes self-delusional vision. I don't think you have to be grandiose or crazy to take on a project, but I'll bet it doesn't hurt.

Projects I Would Like To Take On (some feasible, some not):

I would like to go all Kerouac and live somewhere remote for a month. (Jack Keroac lived for 63 days in a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington state.) No tv, no phone, no Internet. Just some books and maybe a radio. I just wonder what it would be like to be quiet for a while. I wonder what I might think, feel, and do if I didn't have e-mail, grad school, and Dancing With The Stars to occupy me. (Thing is, the whole family would have to come along and be part of my project. I couldn't happily go that long without las tres mujeres.)

I would like to create a series of artist trading cards. Artist cards are sort of like personal tarot cards that you decorate with symbols, images, words, etc. that are meaningful to you. I'd like to collaborate with other book artists and trade cards through the mail.

I want to create a book called Cuyahoga. It would be a collection of photos, poems, and small essays about the various places that were meaningful to me as a teenager and young man. The title comes from the REM song of the same name. The lyrics go "This is where we walked, this is where we swam. Take a picture here, take a souvenir."

I want to create my own line of screen printed t-shirts. Shirt number one would simply read "From Mars."

I want to buy the campus of the Albion Normal School in Albion Valley, Idaho, renovate the buildings (and, believe me, that would be no small feat), and turn it into a year-round artist's colony.

I would also (sorta) like to go for a year without soda pop.

What about you, O my loyal 15 readers? What would you like to spend a year (or a month) doing or refraining from doing?