December

"Let me tell you a story about war. A fisherman's son and his dead brother sat on the shore. 'That is my country and this is your country and the line in the sand is the threshold between them,' said the dead brother. 'Yes,' said the fisherman's son.'

You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

Bird 1: This is the wrong story.
Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient."

Richard Siken - War of the Foxes

The words to the writer

It's November again, I am writing a poem a day. Or rather, I am purposefully typing words every day. So far, I have some promising beginnings. It's not elation, but I feel satisfaction that I am trying a thing that is hard for me. I regret that it's hard for me. I am dismayed when I forget the word for internal rhymes. Assonance.

I'm re-reading Richard Hugo's, "The Triggering Town," because I remember it being a book that warped my mind where poetry was concerned.

He writes in chapter 2:

"In the news article the relation of the words to the subject (triggering subject since there is no other unless you can provide it) is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is so weak that for our purposes it isn't worth consideration.

Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way. When you write a poem, these relations must reverse themselves. That is, the relation of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.

This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems."

I have essentially lived inside news articles for so many years. It explains a lot that this would be my problem. Unearthing 'I' is a bewildering business. 'I' feels forbidden to put to print. I have no trouble finding myself in ordinary life. But writing it down is another swamp entirely.

Try this—close / your eyes. No, wait, when—if—we see each other / again the first thing we should do is close our eyes—no, / first we should tie our hands to something / solid—bedpost, doorknob— otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake. Are we forgetting something? What about that / warehouse, the one beside the airport, that room / of black boxes, a man in each box? I hear / if you bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead. Turn up / the heat, turn up the song. First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.

Nick Flynn - Forgetting Something

Exciting mail we receive sometimes

I am spending my tax refund on books I read and loved but never managed to buy and have craved often to re-read.

Today's arrival, Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red, the homoerotic love story of Herakles and Geryon set in pseudo-modern times in blank verse. Or something like that.

Things we flip to randomly:

"His mother was sitting at the kitchen table when Geryon opened the screen door.
---
He had taken the local bus from Hades. Seven-hour trip. He wept most of the way.
Wanted to go straight to his room
and shut the door but when he saw her he sat down. Hands in his jacket.
She smoked in silence a moment
then rested her chin against her hand. Eyes on his chest. Nice T-shirt, she said.
It was a red singlet with white letters
that read TENDER
LOIN. Herakles gave it--and here Geryon had meant
to slide the name past coolly
but such a cloud of agony poured up his soul he couldn't remember
what he was saying.
He sat forward. She exhaled. She was watching his hands so he unclenched them
from the edge
of the table and began spinning the fruit bowl slowly. He spun it clockwise.
Counterclockwise. Clockwise.
Why is this fruit bowl always here? He stopped and held it by the rims.
It's always here and it never
has any fruit in it. Been here all my life never had fruit in it yet. Doesn't
that bother you? How do we even
know it's a fruit bowl? She regarded him through smoke. How do you think it feels
growing up in a house full
of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high. His eyes met hers and they began
to laugh. They laughed
until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back
to opposite walls.
They spoke of a number of things, laundry, Geryon's brother doing drugs,
the light in the bathroom.
At one point she took out a cigarette, looked at it, put it back. Geryone laid
his head on his arms on the table.
He was very sleepy, finally they rose and went their ways. The fruit bowl
stayed there. Yes empty."

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.

Technobot

Praxilla will run some poems of mine soon. I should "market" my writing better but one of the two is not a good reflection of how I usually write and I feel discomfort about it parading around on a website with my name attached. How the mind changes in the lag between April submission and January acceptance.

Discomfort is a place for growth, though, I guess. The other one was a lot of fun to write and I'm glad it found a home.

I spent my last freelancing paycheck on a widescreen monitor to hook up to my laptop, and it feels like I upgraded my attention span hardware. A nagging guilt - shouldn't every writer be able to write by hand? I really can't. Notebooks are for scribbles, wisps, outlines, to-do lists, & sketchy outlines of fixed biographical details and my feelings thereabout. In the end, though, everything coheres by type.

Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica

Everything that has died in large numbers recently starts with B: birds, bees, bats, bastardfish.

I finished a TV show I've been watching since August. Getting through all four seasons this fast required (though no one really required) that I have at least several undignified evenings of solo TV: TV while washing dishes, TV while doing yoga, TV while putting plastic on the windows. I feel like someone I love has gotten married and moved far away and taken several good friends along with.

I cried a few times in those last scenes. There were things I didn't like, too, but part of love, even TV love, is agreeing to it. And I agreed months ago I was going to see this through to the end.

Now I am covering my TV with a blanket. I want to put together a chapbook manuscript this year.

New poem, new endeavors

My Brahe/Kepler poem is up on For Every Year today. Thanks to Crispin Best!

Also I'm doing recreational level roller derby starting next weekend until I either break my legs or run out of steam/time. I will learn how to fall on my ass without fear. This is good, because I will fall on my ass a lot.

Fragments, fractals, relevance

I write a lot of things that I don't know what to "do" with. Homeless fragments stacked up in Word documents with names like "drivel written on the bus" and "ongoing drivel" that pile up in my "needs work" folder without ever really "going anywhere." (The scare quotes are because I question still what "doing" something with a piece of writing means, and what it means to "go somewhere" beyond the obsessive stringing together of images and words. I question what "finished art" really is. I am often confused when I think about writing in the big picture.)

I'm considering that either 2011 should be a year to try earnestly to publish more, or to take a break from "trying to make it" and just burrow into deciding what I want from my writing. But does this need to be decided? Resolve, unresolve. Pace. I feel like I am wearing circles in the worddirt.

M. and I were talking about "relevance" and the thirst to be "relevant," and where it takes us. This is an idea for more thought.

Why I do not like The New Yorker/or top 10 lists

This is from Dan Chiasson's list of top 11 poetry books from 2010, in the New Yorker blog last week.

The Changing Times

There is not much to say now, though of course there never was. Whatever was said was just a repetition, perhaps a slight rephrasing, of something someone already said, as this is, and as whatever is said after this will be. No one is fooling anyone, though that does not stop most people from pretending they're fooled, because pretending feels much better. Even if no one now feels much better than anyone ever did. It's not even hard for anyone to think things are different. In fact, the most amazing thing is just how easy it is to think anything at all.

- Craig Morgan Teicher, from Cradle Book

I have read 3 other books from this list and barring Nox (my opinion: fistful of paper hearts rolled in black glitter and dropped into the ocean) they are 75% of the time very boring (Sorry Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon). Anyone who doesn't have Nox on a top 10 list this year is going to look like they have been living in a cave, so I feel like at some point it will just be on every list just out of posterity. I have also seen good reviews of Cloud Corporation from people I share tastes with, I know I like Terrance Hayes already, and I'm curious about the rest, most of which I have on hold at the library right now. So I don't want to dismiss everything there. Just 4 of the 11 (Muldoon is there twice).

Anyway, my reaction to the list pretty much sums up how I feel about the magazine in general. I generally suspect they just have a scheduled rotation of Big Names like Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, and "someone diverse like Ann Carson or maybe someone who is not white for a change." This is surely not what they think they are doing, but even when they run Ann Carson's stuff, it is not her best work.

A writhing multitude of "blah."

For a while I thought I was the dragon

Amazon e-mailed me the other day.

"C.T., sell back 'Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets),'" Amazon pleaded in the subject line. So I read the rest of the e-mail, a bit aghast.

Then Amazon said I should be pleased to know I can trade in my used copies at the Book Buyback store.

I suspect this is a tool for reminding students they can get rid of their unwanted textbooks, even if they bought them used, but why, Amazon, would you come after a book which I am mentally clutching tightly and ferociously for fear that you would actually want it back from me? Is a booknapping imminent?

"Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup."

- Richard Siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out

Acceptance

New Wave Vomit published some of my poems. Hooray!

& Crispin Best's For Every Year project will feature me for the year 1601.

Now all I need is a lunar eclipse and to finish my shopping and this holiday season is complete.

examples of the crap I write these days

One thing I do a lot lately, writing-wise, is write poems that are really letters. My lines grow long and sloppy. The more I write, the more I realize I need 40 years in a hole writing to get anywhere close to the people I want to write like.

Tycho Brahe to Johannes Kepler:

I do not miss the smell of autumn ambling toward me. I do not miss my father or the enfolding shorelines of that first observatory. When I die, let the shadow of the moon wheel along my face slow enough to measure.

Yes, we will falter in our orbits. Retrace our footsteps. Err predictably.

Calypso to Penelope:

I had a pet bird for a few years. She sang Wagner and the hymns of extinct peoples. But then a storm blew up and Zeus sent her away. She spent forty days and nights searching for land for some jerks in an Ark. Her heart gave out when she finally succeeded, and she died in my palm, warbling que sera sera.

Have you ever been alone on an island? I mean really alone.

Humphrey Bogart to Philip Marlowe:

Thanks again for the invite to your office Christmas party. Enjoyed meeting your assortment of solitudes, the whiskey, the slant trajectory between sorrow and a point unknown. Found it awkward to be the only actual guest, chewed noisily on ice cubes and made small talk with the venetian blinds whenever you wandered off to paw at a question.

A person has a project collecting poems for every year since 1400. I'm submitting one soon for 1601. I was going to aim for something nonWestern, but then I remembered 1601 was the year Tycho Brahe died. And so.

Sue Miller wrote this for 1577 (a comet, also Tycho Brahe):

(excerpt from "Superlunary")

Imagine a race, today, run without
a stopwatch. Imagine a scientific observation
that waits on the day's catch.
Imagine a future unfurling
beyond capacity
at a pace navigated,
stargazing.

Postcards received by e-mail

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.

That poetry is made of “words” and not “ideas” makes for a good line, but it misses the point. That a poem is made of words puts too much emphasis on getting the “best words” in the “best order.” That’s only part of the case. It makes people want to create apt similes. This spoon is just like my mother. When I look into it, I see myself reflected back upside down. And on and on.

- John Gallaher

"So write...Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker."

Ketchup ketchup ketchingup.

My name is not "Writer"

"Dear Writer:

Thanks for submitting your work to (publication). We're sorry this submission wasn't right for us. We appreciate your interest in our magazine, and wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors
(publication name)"

I need to go back to submitting poetry by mail. These e-mail rejections are flimsy, brittle things.

I like little pieces of paper that I can put in a folder. All different colors, sizes. I want a physical mountain of rejection. I'm going to decoupage something with all those scraps eventually and place it somewhere prominent.