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.

October

I am making my kitchen table less boring.


And I very intently watch my cat eat. He is not doing it so much. I am like Hansel & Gretel's witch, trying to fatten him up with tricks. Like following him around and setting his food dish next to him a lot.



Mostly he's not impressed.


Also I leave my apartment sometimes.

self promotion

What did I do on my vacation beside go to Florida, look at apartments, hang out at art fairs and vaudeville shows, wash my dishes and put my books in boxes and NOT make progress on the Triangle Shirtwaist poems? Write about going to Florida for Dane101. I get paid per page view, so if you're curious about what south Florida is like post-BP, following the link would be totally awesome and maybe in a few weeks I can buy a milkshake to celebrate.

Excerpt to tantalize: "It’s Independence Day and I’m seven miles off the coast of Key West, Florida, right on the cusp of the southernmost point in the contiguous United States. I’m having my first ever look at a shallow water coral reef through the clear glass of a snorkel mask. Two hours earlier my friends and I had stumbled, bleary-eyed, from a 95-degree tent at the KOA campground where we’d spent the night, in order to spend our holiday here, first snorkeling and then, after hours of sweaty wandering, watching fireworks from a beach filled with hundreds of people while rows of boats drifted just offshore, their lights bobbing like stars." Here's the link again.

Bloomsday, too, might be literature self-fetishizing.

Another day, another brand new pretentious $17 notebook to fill up. The last one took me more than 2 years, starting with a bullet point outline of a poem I never wrote, ending today with "we change our names and order pizzas / to be sent to the neighbors" so you see I started out with a much more finicky standard for what I wrote in it. Only solid ideas and words already by-my-standards perfect. Now I slosh anything remotely interesting (and many dull things that might eventually be made interesting) onto the pages like a 3 a.m. drunkard. I buy the expensive notebooks for my creative writings with the idea that I'll want to be able to flip through and re-read and re-use ideas for years. But there is no guarantee. It's possible the act of writing on acid-free pages is all just exercise. Words you expel like a long exhale, never to be considered again. I'm all for fetishizing the printed word, I'm all for bound books and the smell of rich mahogany. I still can't quite feel something is real unless I can see it without the help of electricity. Take it camping with me. Set it on fire.

The new notebook gleams with unrealized amazement. Blank pages still recall the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil, and that moment as a child when you first realize that a word is more than just an assortment of squiggles. Before you learn that a word is still not quite omnipotent. I think I am fair when I say many people who write do so because they believe (even if they do not admit this to themselves) that if they can just get The Most Perfect/Sharp/Lovely/Breathless/otherwise ideal arrangement of words to the right people's eyes, they can put the oil back in the well and raise the dead pelicans like feathered Christs. Or cure unkindness. Or rub the world's metaphorical feet on carpet until we spark at doorknobs and keyboards and become, all of us, electrical superheroes capable of incredible feats and glowing-eyed awesomeness. I don't think this can happen anymore, but the wish is still one horse in the team pulling my motivation stagecoach.

"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.

Space case

Today I've been thinking about

1. Baraboo schools
2. special education
3. oil
4. the Triangle Shirtwaist fire
5. the metaphorical capacity of phospholipids, back-to-back in neat rows to protect each other's hydrophobic tails from water. Though really fear has nothing to do with it, nor hostility. Just a lack of interest in / capacity for bonding with the surrounding water molecules.

This day is all right.

hey little bear,

I'm attempting to start a summer collaborative poetic project...

Hurray hurray hurray.

For antelopenvelope, which we're still holding together with our teeth, debating what kind of additional organization we might want to eventually impose. Right now it's mostly discrete letters with no continuing story. I think Mary's the only one who refers back to herself. Do we need self-reference and long-term organization? We'll figure it out.

Dear Phil,

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. You may have seen me leave early. You may have seen me lingering across the street, hunting your women, haunting the empty bottles in front of the bars, granting wishes. Who wishes for riches? Who wishes for fame? Who wishes for a breathing apparatus when they dive deep into the past, a straw, a reed, a metal tube that spits fire? Will tell all the guys back home about your excellence as a host and aptitude for trouble. I look forward already to next year.

Salaciously,

Humphrey

---
I'm looking for writing exercises that will help me get back into the knack of long, complex poems. I scatter too easily, lately, I'm losing track of technique and finesse and all the intention it was so easy to pay attention to when there were weekly workshops to fall back on. My long-form muscles are going to seed. One stray puff of air and I go all dandelion seeds and fragments. I enjoy the fragments, but I want something that arcs and has shape and takes me places.

Poetry misc

I have a couple poems that will be appearing in Actual Publications soon, one any day now. In the meantime, here is another thing I have written recently (hi, antelopenvelope) and proof that the Greeks will never quite leave me.

artichoke heart attack 1.31.10

Hippomenes,

we are out of golden apples, boy, Herakles took the last batch and we saw no point in making more. times are hard, boy, materials are dear, the gold is better spent on toothpicks and letter openers. no one wants an apple that you cannot eat.

so to win a fast huntswoman, there are a few things you may do for under $10. braid her hair. whip her dogs. feed her to the giraffe at the zoo (suggested donation $4). gum will sticky up the track, but your jaws will ache from chewing it.

another thought. have you ever had an artichoke? related to the thistle. it will sting sharp through her sandles, and such a queer-looking flower! she may chase it anyway, though it is just green. $4 or 5 for $15. a real bargain. (discount miracles not guaranteed successful) but you can steam for an hour and dip in butter and scrape apart each leaf.

& some women react favorably to being compared to choke-smothered hearts.

cheers, and let us know how it goes. will make a great story for the web site if you succeed. vegetables unite worthy suitor and king's daughter in failing economy. take lots of pictures!

all the best,
the Hesperides

antelope envelope, or introducing night vegetables

Oh, p.s., my friends MaryAmeliaMyself started a kind of online 'zine or something back in the fall but kept it to ourselves because we were like, "We want to do a collaborative project involving correspondence between fictional things, but we're not sure how to shape it so let's just see what happens for a while."

Now we're kind of telling our friends in case they want to submit something. antelopenvelope, pass it on.

Amelia's doing something cool with pass-along poems, too, in this little hand-made book I sometimes receive in the mail.

What I'm saying is, collaboration is a good way to stay in touch with the big, "Why write?" question, which I will probably be asking a lot next month because it is National Poetry Month and, like last year, I'm planning on writing a poem a day even if I die of loneliness or hunger or arterial thrombosis.

Science-itis

Things I'm trying to work into poems right now and have been researching using only Wikipedia and YouTube
- V838 Monocerotis and "light echoes"
- The Hubble Telescope, the Mars Rover, and all those Voyager craft that are slowly making their way beyond the edge of the solar system.
- Gyroscopes
- Bigfoot
- Geomagnetic reversal

I don't actually spend as much time on non-work writing as I spend thinking up ideas for it and then prowling around the internet until research turns into timewasting until my "okay write now" block of time is all used up. I have a friend whose dedication to making time to write every day is so strong that it was (one of the reasons) we didn't manage to date for very long. I keep attempting to mimic, but so far, my leisure-time attention span seems to unravel further as every month passes.

The work of living

I've been fighting illness by smashing secondhand china and gluing it to a secondhand mirror and painting between the cracks. I am learning that mosaic requires grout, but may skip it for this particular project. I like that jagged, dangerous look.

My check came, too, for the poetry workshops I facilitated at Whitewater in November. This would be my first non-contest-related poetry income. $80. SUCKERS. Also, it turns out I will be the "featured reader" for the aforementioned "p.s. Annie wants you to read in January" I forgot to aforemention! Bookstore owner wanted me to read in January, following definitely aforementioned "that reporter is sometimes a poet!" event, and I'm frantically compiling 25-30 minutes' worth of writing that won't compromise my professional life.

Let us say we throw our words behind us like bodies from a train.

Some friends and I are starting a project involving fake correspondence and making things up and creating dialogue between fictional persons with no regard for plausibility. Based somewhat on Hikikomori. There is a strong vegetable undercurrent at the moment.

One of us wrote:

"Ophelia,

This time I want to be the one wilting in the cow pond. What fun! Was it very hard to hold your breath until they thought you dead? Let us say I am a limp stalk of celery left too long in the sun. Let us say my navel drifts slowly with the current and HE finally cannot bear to touch me. I'll roll down my socks all slovenly. You'll be waiting with the coroner and a butterfly net to fish me out. Make sure he doesn't try to sneak "Lolita" on the death certificate. Try not to giggle! Look solemn! Say your name is Sofia and you're from the Hague and we'll have the most marvellous picnic when I am done corpsing.

Love and lollipops!
Dolores."

And another:

"Alice,

Give me some of that shrinking potion. I’m desperate. I went to the store and bought three boxes of Oreos, the Halloween kind, and ate it all. My teeth were orange, my tongue orange, my lips, my face, my insides orange. Orange and black. What is the color of shame? Orange. Caution. Stay away. And black is the burned spirit. What do you get for staying alive for thousands of years only to realize that loneliness is never ending, and that your real friends are fictional? Oreo comas. I never realized what a beautiful word “oreo” was until today. It makes me want to die.

...

Thanks for the postcard!

-Grendel."

The internet is so exciting when it comes to allowing quick interchanges of ideas and collaboration and the shucking of names and ownership when it becomes too cumbersome. I'm excited to see where this goes. Or fails to go. Or where it sits limply in its own randomness until the three of us lose interest. Either one.