What I was up to last month

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.

the future is coming, the future is coming

I think what I need to do is hire a hooker (but not a really skinny weightless one) to just lie on top of me when I get hit with anxiety and insomnia. I read in someone’s blog that this was a trick farmers use with livestock, but I cannot verify this with Google. Either way, it helps me a lot.

I wrote my poem-a-day while socializing last night, an amazing feat of ignoring the sound of giggling and Rachel Maddow long enough to try to get creative about my feelings about immigration law. It’s weird when friends do laptoppy things right next to each other.

On the radio, long discussions about e-books. I don’t think anyone’s going to be challenging my ability to read paper books for as long as I should choose (though I’m betting they will get more expensive, and it might be harder to find particular titles In Paper, unless more services pop up to print & ship books on demand, kind of like Netflix-ish). Anyway, I still get bummed because I think about libraries and bookstores and how many good times I’ve head in them, and I have this Luddite worry that they will all turn into rooms full of people interacting with computer screens and not smell musty at all. And you know some e-readers don’t even paginate? What is a page, anyway, in the digital world? Just an arbitrary division of text into manageable segments. At least when we do that on web pages, we use some kind of logic. But when you quote your favorite author in a research paper, how are you going to cite "52 percent of the way through The Last Unicorn"?

Okay, my friend says, my ancestors used to hang out in vomitoriums and were very attached to them. Okay, I say, I’m 24 and already a dinosaur.

I get excited, too, about the digitization of the world. I’m primarily a words person, but I think about how visual and audio art could synch up more perfectly with the written word to make someone else’s creativity a completely different experience for consumers of art. To the point where we’re going to look at today’s online poetry mags in a museum some day and laugh at how flat and quaint they are in comparison. I hope there’s still a market for people who only know how to write, though. Also, I hope I can eventually have a slim volume of my own work, in paper, before we’re done with dead trees. No one has to buy it, I just want to wave it around.

I also like Joel Brouwer, who this person here is homage-ing.

"So this is what it's like to love a dentist, he says, and quarters
the apple. The fruit has nothing to do with foreplay. The fruit
has nothing to do with foreplay. She imagines neighbors.
Enter ox-cart of desire. A jar of pennies jingles in the corner
while they rehearse their marvelous business on the floor."

- Lindsay Marianna Walker, "opening night" via elimae

more Matthew Rohrer

via notnostrums (more there)

From Mars

We have some sad news
this morning
from Mars
the imagination thinks
in phrases but the universe
is a long sentence
according to our instruments
the oldest songs are
breaking apart
like a puzzle in a
basement every so often
we detect the smell
of marshmallows where
there are none the end
cannot be found
in the middle that’s
a dream someone had
that our lives might
have meaning and not
just pop-up advertisements
but we have sad
news this morning
the dream has no
location or direction
and friends separated
by thousands of miles
are thinking of each
other simultaneously
but they have no idea
and we have no way
to reach them

actually, Matthew Rohrer has joined my list of future husbands

"Famous raindrops:

Obviously, the first one to fall.
The lucky raindrop who fell down the neck of Helen's dress.
The drop that tried to save the library at Alexandria.
The first raindrop to land on the Ark, on the nose of the figurehead
that was Noah's wife.
Edison's favorite raindrop; the one he kept in a test tube.
The last drop Beethoven ever heard."

Matthew Rohrer, "found in the museum of old science."

"The snow spread-eagled on the ground
muffles the sound of falling bodies.
It seems people are leaping from buildings again
like white petals falling from large trees."

- Matthew Rohrer, "to a croatian poet"

Where do poems come from?

I'm working my way towards the Hubble Telescope as a poem series, as of a Science Friday last year when someone got to talking about it. Eventually. It's all a mush of incoherent excitement right now. I am vowing to research.

Prompted by offhand remarks like this from an NPR story today tacked onto the end of an otherwise happy summary of the telescope's accomplishments:

"At some point, the telescope will break down. Eventually, NASA expects to deorbit it and send it crashing down over the Pacific."

THE END

....There are few

Words to speak about distance
Enough. Do you wake at night shaking?
Do you want to, but sit very still

Instead?...

Malinda Markham, Just Past This Road Lives a Figure Imprisoned in a Tower

4 Reasons Why I love Margaret Atwood

1. The Handmaid's Tale
2. Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture (excerpt)

The torture chamber is not like anything
you would have expected.
No opera set or sexy chains and
leather-goods from the glossy
porno magazines, no thirties horror
dungeon with gauzy cobwebs; nor is it
the bare cold-lighted
chrome space of the future
we think we fear.
More like one of the seedier
British Railways stations, with scratched green
walls and spilled tea,
crumpled papers, and a stooped man
who is always cleaning the floor.

3. Her 10 rules for writing fiction, courtesy of The Guardian

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book."

4. How to be a better hockey goalie

I have a crush on office supplies

It's too bad really good notebooks are also extremely pretentious.

I just found several copies of a chapbook I made in high school. It's hilariously emo, but I'm considering scanning the cover and throwing a couple sample poems on a page somewhere and inviting you to send me a couple bucks for it. You know, for laughs.

Featuring! one poem in high school French about lobsters.
Featuring! two poems about Odysseus.
Featuring! a lot of heavily veiled "love poems" for that boy I was "in love with."

I blame work and a social thing that could not be put off until May for diverting me from writing any poems at all yesterday. But I saw ten short films and one of them really amazed me and the rest are piled up in my head whirring their wheels in the air.

faster, faster

Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, and stayed until 1847. He then spent the next seven years polishing his manuscript. Today, he would have been expected to tweet the whole time: "Pulled bean field weeds, thought of great line about hearing/stepping to different drummer, need Indian meal 4 bread, pond looks nice today." - Bill Leuders

I think there's a place for the rapidfire communication we're evolving into. One of the big drivers of innovation is the exchange of ideas, the introduction of novel thoughts and problems into your sphere of understanding. This could mean reading books, but it could also mean reading your friend's Facebook status, or an offhand comment in an e-mail. Or a meandering Gchat that turns into an idea for a short film. Isn't that how it happens in most movies? Someone is conversing about something completely unrelated to their problems, and then, AHA, problem solved, they run off excitedly to their chalkboard full of numbers. I can never find anything I'm missing until the moment after I've asked someone else if they've seen it.

But I agree that any trend toward valuing the immediate at the expense of slow, thoughtful ideachewing and factverifying (when you are in a field that requires factverifying) is not just sad, but frightening. I shudder at how many asinine political slogans are being ReTweeted as absolute truth, with a "word, sister" tacked on at the end. Republican or Democrat, I don't care. And the Thoreaus of the world (writers or inventors or chemists) all need time to be alone with the creative energy they've gained from communication, to turn fodder into fuel.

Even poem-a-day-writers will be spending the next four months on revisions.

Here is a good day off:

Not pictured: sunshine, bicycle, cats, fresh coffee, Baraboo River, birdsong, crabapple blossoms, a couple decent rough drafts, a good, good friend I will soon be seeing.

Hop on the motivation train, it leaves the station daily, is 66 cars long and counting.

parasites as poemfodder

America is too clean. Once, when I was a kid playing in the sandbox, my dad told me if I wasn't careful, tiny worms would burrow under my fingernails and dig inside of me. I assumed he was making it up. Actually, he was being kind of mean. Below, RadioLab reports on a guy who cured his awful awful allergies with parasites. Fast forward to the 10 minute mark. This amazing (gross amazing) story via friend/poet/symbiote Amelia.



Also, "the T-Rex of leeches" found in Amazon swimmers' noses.

Not to be confused with metaphors for romantic love.

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.

Iranianradio.com (you can stream it from iTunes) provides some of the best concentration aid I've found for writing.
On the right kind of day, Bulleit is also good.
So is a clean apartment.

Gerald Stern makes me so happy. I want to write rip-roaring grief poem the way he does in the example I'm about to quote. I want to have the rights to that kind of sorrow.

...I'm kissing Stieglitz

goodbye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we're walking down Fifth Avenue;
we're looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall—I'm shaking now

when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

- Gerald Stern, Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye

let's talk originality (shorter than the last)

Birds: "like the poets' LOLcats" says Carrie, currently in South Korea, who Tumblrs here, and who is publishing a 'zine As We Speak, and who is going to be featured in a publication with Tao Lin and other great things.

Another good talk. This time I took the time to cut out random "nod" and "heehee" and some bullshit no one cares about. What remains, bullshit four people maybe care about.

Carrie: hey if wisco got maya angelou to come talk to us about poetry which you being angry sad indifferent happy?
me: oh, I would be pretty happy, I think.
even though I've never read her poetry.
I liked her book
I think it was one of the first things I ever read about child molestation or homelessness, so the shock sort of cements it a bit in my head.
Carrie: my friends were asking me who was actually famous in poetry
and how we felt about it
me: hmm. well that's different
Carrie: it is but i sort of responded by saying that even though maya angelou is maybe the most famous living one or one of them a lot of younger writers might prefer someone else
to have as a speaker
me: Maya Angelou is exciting for a lot of reasons, but if I had to pick just one
and never speak to another poet again
it would not be her
Carrie: i think i'm thinking in terms of my own head too much again. i told them i thought most of us probably didn't identify a great deal with the more famous poets in terms of style and content
me: definitely
though sometimes occasionally I like billy collins, I mostly don't understand why people adore him.
Litany is pretty good
that famous one about the neighbor's dog is okay.
Carrie: ha i was just about to mention him.
even poor li young lee
who i like to pick on
me: he doesn't set me on fire
he's very pretty
Carrie: i'm sick of pretty
i'm trying to stop the pretty or at least twist it's ankle
everything i read is good. it's always good. but there really are lots of birds
and twilights
which i am equally guilty of
me: heh
I like birds myself.
Carrie: me too!
esp. teh cranes
birds are like the poets LOLcats
me: oh god. cranes
Carrie: we just can't get enough of them
me: I almost wrote something about cranes when I saw them in BRB the other day
I was all "swoon! sandhills! making crane noises and flying!"
then I was like WAIT.
no can has
so, I'm not sure how I feel about taking a strict anti-fancy/anti-metaphor approach the way Noah Cicero and the rest of Bear Parade advocates.
Carrie: word
i agree with that
me: like, I agree language is about communication
Carrie: too much
me: and I enjoy poems that don't mess around
but, the game of it and all the stretching and transposing and making things be other things
that's just too much fun.
Carrie: they have so many copy hipstercats too
me: yeah
Carrie: plus the sincerity feels endangered
tao is sincere
but not all of his followers are
me: they probably just see it as the cool new thing
I mean, movements are movements
Tao's famous for a good reason
but just because one person does that particular thing really well doesn't mean everybody should just start doing the exact same thing
Carrie: movements are fine with there is communication and more importantly conversation
wee yes
me: yeah. and I don't know. someone's always gotta be doing something new and exciting, but I feel like once they're doing it, there's no point in imitating just for imitation's sake.
just take it as Something Else You Can Play With and keep doing your own thing
Carrie: truthbomb
me: pow
that's just how I feel, anyway. but I'm more prone to thinking writers shouldn't give a damn about what other writers are writing just because I'm not in academia and have never read any criticism and am supremely lazy about the idea that maybe I should read some criticism and know more about how other people think things work.
and by "not give a damn" I mean "be in communication and share things and support each other, but still do what you want"
but see above about being all non-academic and lazy about that shit.
Carrie: i agree with that. i like to pay attention to what people are saying
cuz they tend to say smart things
but i poke what i find interesting
me: good word
agreement sandwich
Carrie: agreement sandwich on rye
me: extra vegan mayo
Carrie: SLEEP TIME
me: BYE
GOOD TALK

Let us talk Process (long)

Something awesome today is courtesy of a Gchat with poet Mary Chen, an upcoming MFA student in Minneapolis, about how her mind works when she’s writing and the power of poetry to take established things and mess with them. Gchat editing is tedious and I'm kind of busy today, so I didn't.

me: I am really digging your (series of poems about monkey king Sun Wu Kong of Chinese folklore).
how did the idea come to be?
let us talk Process.
pretend I am interviewing you about your famous book
Mary: i think i just really like the idea of mutilated mythology
i like taking something that is deeply familiar and doing something strange to it
and i grew up with sun wu kong
me: nods solemnly
Mary: the monkey king. and in middle school i did a project on him... and i made an illustrated book and everything
me: so in some ways, then, you are channeling the understanding your younger self might have had?
Mary: so i think i was secretly obsessed, and i didn't know it
hm, i don't know
i don't think i had any understanding at all
me: i see
Mary: and I still don't
which is why I have to write about him
so I can understand it
me: has writing added anything to your picture of him?
so far?
Mary: hehehe
um
I don't think it has added to it. I think I just made a whole new one. it really has nothing to do with sun wu kong
he's just a shell
and he allows me to do strange, surreal things that I think is difficult to get away with nowadays. I can't just make up a story about a monkey king, but people will listen if I'm just doing something bad to their beloved fable
me: nod
do you feel using something that is "real" to go in your own direction adds any limits? in comparison to using a made-up monkey king?
Mary: I guess it does. But very limited limits!
me: how so!
Mary: like, it's a monkey
so I can't be like: sun wu kong was a dog
But... even so. I have written a poem in which Grendel was a woman
me: (which was a big hit for you!)
Mary: I don't have to keep to the actual story of Journey to the West, but I like to tangentially reference it, and I like the pre-made character names
lol
yes, surprisingly so
me: has anyone come forward and objected to your use of Sun Wu Kong for your own purposes?
Mary: not yet. because only 4 people know about it
and they're poets. so they know it's ok to steal
me: nod of course.
Mary: i feel like people let poets get away with things. since we're the ones who made up the epics in the first place
so it's like a club in which we make up myths in a pot
me: special invention club
Mary: yeah, the SIC
me: I like this interpretation.
Mary: me too
me: sometimes, and now I am dropping my fake interview, I also like the poet's role as interpreter of true things.
but pure description bores me.
Mary: i agree
that's when i put a poem down
me: I'm struggling through a book right now that is like that
Mary: poetry?
me: unfortunately, I have sufficient OCD that I can't not finish it.
yeah
(name)
$1 at Barnes'n'Noble
COMPULSION
Mary: isn't that a dude from UW
me: possibly?
boring
Mary: lol
superficial poems suck
me: he had one line I liked
in 46 pages
Mary: the potential problem with using mythical characters is it can come off very superficial. like you're just using it to add a zing of epicness
me: nod
Mary: you're a cute interviewer
me: I think it can be tempting to just drop the name and run away

me: which is lazy
fidget, blush
er, um, maybe
um
Mary: cool
me: back to myth, though.
Mary: anyway it depends on how you drop it
me: right
you can't just say "zeus" and run away
Mary: hehe
me: because Zeus invokes a lot of things
and you either need to support that
Mary: yeah. i used Zeus in an earlier poem this week
me: or make the decision to twist it
it's all about making decisions, I think
Mary: interesting
i have a very nebulous sense of creating
me: it doesn't have to be a firm, three-page-essay decision, I guess
Mary: :)
I think i just stumble around stubbornly
that's what I do
me: I don't see your work as being random, though
like, in high school, I'd say, "I need a sense of grandiosity" and add a random grandiose word and be done.
Mary: well, I have a very dense idea of what I want to express, but it's hard to find words
teehee
so it's like i stumble around, but with a definite pattern
i also like narrative. but not too much
me: I noticed that!
Mary: because narrative poems that don't do anything interesting should be fiction
me: I envy your lack of narrative
Mary: oh, i usually feel like i have too much
me: do you think there's even a small place for narratives that do nothing but use poetic line breaks?
Mary: yes
me: like the line breaks themselves can be interesting enough in banal words
Mary: i think line breaks are special if you do it right
me: right
yes
emphatic nod
Mary: it makes you look closer
and it makes you think about what is happening
also it adds subtext, depending on where you break it
i usually think about it after the fact
that is how i approach life
Mary: i just break mine whenever it pauses in my brain
and then change it later
maybe
me: thanks for your insights, Ms. Chen
Mary: it was a pleasure talking to you
me: I am really thrilled to read your upcoming collection
Mary: i'm thrilled that you are
me: do you have anything else you would like to tell the readers of Some Magazine?
Mary: Calm down
everything will be ok
even though it might suck
for a long time
me: wise words from a talented young poet!
thanks again, Ms. Chen
Mary: thank YOU
Mary: i'm enjoying this april
me: me too
I feel really positive about writing and ideas and art and community
Mary: i like the variety of poetry we're exchanging
me: YES
Mary: yeah me too
Mary: what is your process? do you jot down ideas and then use them?
Me: so I do a lot of jotting, but in the past have been poor about going back through my notebook and acting on them
my back burner is so back burnery that everything gets cold
this month has been a good exercise in acting on ideas rapidly
so far
Mary: cooool
me: otherwise, my gmail & notebook is full of emails to myself with half-poems and phrases and images/ideas I want to convey Somehow.
and newspaper articles I've sent myself that seem Exciting and Poetic Possibly
so I need to go through and harvest those too
before they rot
Mary: i like your speech imagery
me: thanks. :)
Mary: it would be fun to do an entire series of article poems

(we digress into discussions of particular narrative poets)

Thanks, SixSentences!