Errors in the pre-flight stage

Hello blog.

My poems are condensing into thin, tight little clumps of words.

I blame technical writing.

Also feelings of spareness and economy that the world seems to encourage. The fat, rolling lyrics of Richard Siken seem like a relic of the 90s.

Note that this generalization is based on one example.

At work today I found a poem:



Everything is going so well for the personal lives of people I know. It's hard to believe, some days when the peepers chirp chirp in the wetlands, that the political landscape is so fraught, that there is so much misery in the public discourse.

Then I stumble back onto the news and my eyes are full of laserbeams.

Oh, spring.

No fooling.

Just in time for poem-a-day month, Praxilla has published a couple of mine. The table of contents can't find me, though, so here is a link. My poem is holding hands with David Lehman, which causes this odd squiggle of famethrill.

Finding a home for this poem took more than 4 years, so I'm happy it is in such a lovely place.

But also, I regret conflating eating meat with good sex, because that is such a cliche.

I know, poems shouldn't have disclaimers.

November is over, and with it poem-a-day month. Usually I like to print all the rough drafts I write (26, in this case), but I'll give up that satisfying stack to save paper until I can decide exactly what merits pen-and-paper editing/scribbling. I've yet to develop a real strategy for revising things, anyway, and sometimes it seems type works best. And sometimes not.

I'm pretty happy with all the new Word files in my "needs work" folder, though.

As a writer, I want us to have a gender-neutral pronoun to stand in for "generic human being." My only solution is to write in the second person when I want to dodge all the assumptions people make about gender. It's true - I don't trust readers to not make these assumptions. Perhaps one day I will. Meanwhile, "you" has a nice genderless intimacy about it, true. But what about when I want to pull my voice back, be deliberately distant, speak less to you and more about you?

You see what I mean.

I also want this pronoun for political reasons, but that's for someone else to argue more eloquently.

This happened

My eye doctor said I was farsighted and should wear reading glasses at work so I would stop having days in which I feel like my eyes are whole miles apart and will never focus again. Now the whole world is going to know I like Battlestar Galactica.

Also, I cut my bangs myself. Then Robin fixed them for me (results not pictured). But only a little. Self reliance +.5.

I'm behind on everything important, but slowly making progress.

I'm fighting November's 4:30 sunsets with vitamin D and strict dental hygiene. Routine is soothing. So far, okay. My poems are all lists dancing around a telephone pole.

Snowfall against the streetlights last night, wet, radiant, too brief. Is this a metaphor, blog? Choose your own adventure.

it was after the fire but before the flood
after the ashes, the dust, similar sordid particulates
before fifty words for water-needle

November is looking to be productive. I just have to get through this week.

The state of things

Carrie: POETRY MONTH TOMORROW
I: AH I AM NOT READY
I: MUST HIDE SEVERAL DOZEN ROUGH DRAFTS IN THE ATTIC

"This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city."

This summer's poetry letter-writing collaboration, a preview. Pretend we made a trailer like for a movie, and there is a viola playing something mournful and a rumbling voice speaks vaguely of the fantastical things to come.

Delusions are characterized by three things

Your mistake was trying to prove me wrong. Just because I am not, now, a little matchstick, burning up my sulfur ‘til I’m black and hurt your fingers – just because this is not what you see now doesn’t mean it won’t become true. I have dreams. I have seen my face in the newspapers. One eye witness saw me kiss a boy before he threw me. Another swears he fell upon me in the elevator shaft, my hands ribboned by the cable and broken glass. I don’t remember how it will go.

...

Chemistry. What is chemistry? On the ninth floor, we stitched together the smell of cherries. The Bunsen burners flicked their wily tongues. I saw the whole thing explode all over again. Do you see now why I had to?


More from the man who paints pictures in the eyes of needles.

& Antelopenvelope has a pretty graphic with all our names on it.

What I learned from National Poetry Month

This is something I just sent Carrie, because she's compiling a post eventually about our class trip to poem-a-day month.

1. Writing every day is terribly exciting. It makes you feel like you've accomplished something important even when your laundry is piling up and the dishes are crusty and you are eating oatmeal out of a peanutbutter jar and you keep waking up 10 minutes before you have to leave for work.
2. Habit can be formed! This is reassuring. Holy cow is it reassuring.
3. For someone like me, someone who has been in a nonwriting slump for months, waking up the poetry muscles is kind of a dramatic process. I see a progression in my style from day 1 to day 30.
4. Holy cow, did I get desperate sometimes. Lacking an idea but still having homework led me to playing with formats, like meeting agendas and Google search protocols. This made me grateful for my desperation. I want to be desperate all the time.
5. I am still very bad at accomplishing anything non-mandatory in my before-work time. This is because I do not wake up earlier than I need to ("need" as defined by work, doctor's appointments, or yoga classes), like, ever. But for some reason, I got a lot of writing done while at work, sort of between phonecalls. I don't know if this is because I could let things simmer in other parts of my brain, or if I just wasn't paying enough attention to my job at that particular moment.
6. 26 poems, bitches!
7. But not 30. I only failed on days when work dragged longer than expected and my brain died on the drive home, though, so I feel okay about it.
8. Sitting upright at a desk is way more productive than slumping on a bed.
9. I read a lot, too, which was kind of a motivational kick in the pants. And it made me feel more like I was doing something worthwhile, arranging words together that had nothing to do with the price of gas.
10. Sweatshoppe was brills. I felt accountable even when no one said anything about the days I missed. You guys were like motivationfood. And reading first drafts is way more exciting, on some level, than seeing everything polished-up and in a book. It was kind of like touring a poem factory. Or, you know, sweat shop. On your left, the poems before they are pasturized and bottled up and given hand-sewn labels. On your left, the poet being fattened up for slaughter.

tired of poetry yet? revisit this blog in May.

* Someone with an e-zine wants to write a mini-review of six sentences I wrote for another e-zine. Tickled pink with the loveliness of her e-mail. I can't decide if I like the attention, or the flattery, or the sense of having created something and tossed it into a pond and caused a tiny ripple. THUNK.

* Write-a-poem-a-day and ongoing dialogue with other writers (Mahaney calls us "Sweatshoppe") is helping me a lot with, if not being more creative, then channeling it in the ways I find useful and satisfying. And being excited about writing. But after April I kind of want to retreat back to ignoring what other people might think for a while.

* Here is an easy way to make rice more interesting without spending time on it:

Cook rice (I like brown)
Add soy sauce (depending on salt preferences)
Add sunflower seeds (depending on crunch, protein preferences)
Serve hot or cold.

I call it brown brown rice.