Postcards from the Imagination

'Despicable' was how someone at AWP characterized blogging, no? Well, kick despicable up a few notches and you've got Postcards from the Imagination. For better or worse, my blog is a kind of diary—the diary of someone whose intellectual life matters to her as much as her emotional life, but a diary nonetheless. I've kept an actual diary only sporadically, entering anecdotes here and there or using it as an outlet when I've been upset. But it's never been satisfying enough to sustain my interest. It's like thinking on paper as opposed to speaking, which is what I do in this space.

I started the blog fourteen months ago because I was going through extended bout of writer's block. I thought that if I gave myself a space to write where there were no rules, but neither was I merely talking to myself, maybe the poetry would start to happen. And it has! It certainly has. Slowly at first, but over the past six months I've written a chapbook's worth of more or less finished poems. I don't know exactly why it has worked, but I suspect it may have less to do with anything *I've* written here, than with all the little charges I've gotten from my blogroll.

In any event, NO RULES was the mandate going in and it still is today. That doesn't mean I don't edit my posts or worry over grammar. I do. But the content is a free-for-all — poem drafts next to internet quizzes next to political action alerts next to autobiography. In terms of intellectual heft, literary brilliance, and even pure entertainment there are better bloggers out there. All I can say is thank heavens someone's using the internet responsibly! I, however, have very little desire to be competitive in this arena. My personal achievement gene gets all the work-out it needs striving for good grades, good poems, and a good magazine.

As to my lack of reserve, it's a risk and I know that. I have a theory that if we show ourselves as weak, fallible, silly, and downright limited more often, each of us might feel less insecure. Instead of having to imagine that other people's lives are as complicated and dizzying as our own we'd know.

I'll tell you a little anecdote about how this really hit home for me several years ago. I was standing in line at K-mart with my heart breaking over some relationship issue. Now, you'll see from my profile pic that I inherited 'pretty' from my mother, and what's more I was younger and thinner then. On line in front of me was a couple that few people would call photogenic, but they were as tender and affectionate toward on another as two people could possibly be. To my left, on the other hand, were racks full of women's magazines hawking physical beauty as the key to happiness. I realized then, quite viscerally, that if people could mistake me for being luckier in love because of my face, I was probably making a similar mistake with regard to other people all the time. The universe doesn't perfect itself for anyone just because they happen to have won a Pulitzer or been blessed with a trust fund or have boatloads of personal charm.

And while all of us know this is true, it's quite another thing to feel it.

I can't help but wonder if the reserve we cultivate publicly—a reserve that may in fact be necessary sometimes—doesn't have the unintended consequence of making us feel terribly singular in our imperfections. "To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet," is how Eliot put it, letting slip a reality of which Prufrock himself was unaware. That it's all faces. No one is the genuine article.

And while I don't believe we'd be better off letting it all hang out all the time—sometimes we need to pull back in order to make room for others—it might not hurt to let our guards down more often—to let our warts, and our weakness, and our limitations show. That's my theory at least. And it's the guiding philosophy behind this blog.