Charles Jensen | Writer

“Monomania” was one of the words of the day on my Google start page yesterday. It means “obsession with a single subject.” I knew it was talking about me.

I’ve written here before how when I get involved in a project, I suffer from extensive monomania. In my lived life, too, I suffer from the same affliction in the form of (mild) obsessive-compulsive disorder. For a period of time I will become possessed—which is how I prefer to think of obsession—with something, and generally it gets repeated for some time.

I will sometimes eat the same food for multiple meals—and I’m talking here like four consecutive meals minimum—or use every spare minute I have to engage in some kind of obsessive activitiy: blogging, Nofriendo (what a friend of mine used to call Nintendo), even cleaning and reading.

Robert Hass says there are two kinds of poets: obsessives and hysterics. Hysterics draw the world toward their poems, but obsessives make the poem their world.