Pulling a muscle on poetry

Damn.

I just pried out about forty words for a poem I'm working on - and destroyed twenty others in the process, and I feel like I've been breaking boulders with my bare hands and grinding gravel with my teeth.

There's the popular expression, generally attributed to Hemingway, but not original with him, to the effect that's it's easy to write - just sit down at a typewriter, open a vein and bleed onto the paper.

I do feel that.  I know the sensation.  I've had many days and hours of that visceral self-rendering and surrendering that writing fiction requires.  But as wrenching as that is sometimes, there's still no comparison - for me, anyway - between fiction and poetry.

By poetry, I don't mean rosey-posey fluff that's never seen dressed in anything but a rhyme scheme.  I mean big-shouldered, bitter cold, lead-gift-in-the-twilight, Buffalo Bill, ballsy, back-from-the-edge, slouching toward Bethlehem, climb the cross of the moment, because I do not hope to turn again, defeated by greater and greater things poetry.  I mean poetry that  kicks you repeatedly in the ass, rattling your teeth, until you set it down on paper - and set it down right, or as right as you can make it.

I mean poetry that always sends itself back to you time after time after time, insisting you make it more lean, more pure, more real, more elemental.  Poetry that whispers in your ear that, only by saying one single thing that's absolutely true can you open a door to all the true things.

Writing great fiction may be scaling a Fourteener in Colorado - or a string of Fourteeners - but writing a great poem is scaling Denali, and sometimes scaling it on your knees.

To be fair, though, the more completely a novel or short story is its own universe, the closer to poetry it is, and the closer to Denali the writing gets.

To be even more fair, there's plenty of good light verse, and I've even written my share of light poems, but even when I'm in the middle of one, the hammer sits in the corner in case the poem decides it needs forging into something more substantial.

Ok, I'll shut up now.  So many spurious words - bla-bla-bla bla-bla-de-bla.  Such fucking noise.