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.

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

If the world is really ending in 2012

More people should read books with science fiction and fantasy and any other word for "alternative version of life as we know it" involved. The world is a strange place, and the likely future seems in many ways sadder and more wilted, but it is stranger and harder to cope with if you've never mentally visited the "what ifs."

I think, if we are parachuting into a new universe, and it is in one way or another dystopian, at least those who have read The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx&Crake, Pastwatch, The Player Piano, etc etc etc, will not be shocked that such things can exist. We have visited that country in our minds. It's grim country, but we will not be flattened by shock. Maybe we'll get our sleeves rolled up and get started on whatever meager repairs we can that much sooner. I like to think, anyway.

I also have this theory about zombies. Because we've incorporated them so smoothly into our pop culture mythos, we're more likely to survive them because we already know what they are and have a set of possible survival strategies to start out with. They may be completely wrong, but at least we won't be paralyzed. I like to think, anyway.

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.

The Nerve presents sex advice from poets today. Though mostly it's relationship advice.

Except this - "If the Ezra Pound was a sex position, what would it be?"

David Lehman:

The step-over toe hold.

Mark Bibbins:

It would last longer than it should, you’d never know what’s going on, and it would get you thrown in an asylum.

Jill Alexander Essbaum:

It would be less shuddering than the Shakespeare, less taboo than the Dickinson, more euphemistic than the Anne Sexton, cleaner than the E.E. Cummings, less coy than the Sara Teasdale, more flaccid than the Thomas Hardy. Something like doing your chick pressed against the shower wall under lukewarm water.

You do not have to be good.

Mary visits and we speculate that Mary Oliver is, perhaps, like your mother. Full of sage truisms that you embrace in your early years, reject as you learn more about the world and then return to, at last, weary (poetry says "weary" but no one else does), accepting.

She was the first contemporary poet I read, 10th grade maybe? Wild Geese was the first poem another person had written that got me truly excited about poetry as a still-relevant form of writing. She plugs in well to a teenager's unremarkable catastrophes, with her, "You do not have to be good," and "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Now, I've been rebelling against such elegant simplicities for years, but thinking more and more about them anyway. My internal monologue is along the lines of: "Fine. I won't walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. Fine. Whatever."

Then we intersect with Carrie and fume about the reduction of Kurt Vonnegut to a "so it goes" tattoo on your wrist.

And so.

Sometimes repetition isn't boring:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I listen to this on loop and I feel optimistic.

I haven't figured out how to fix the way this site chops off photos and videos that are too wide for it.

Justin Taylor on Ted Berrigan:

"He makes a great muse for aspiring hipsters who want to move to New York and
get laid and never work and write all day and steal from bookstores and be poor
all the time but not care too much and stay up all night collaborating on rad
projects with their awesome friends--but who don't want to do all of this under
the aegis of Jack Kerouac, like their lame-ass parents (and Ted Berrigan) did."

More "Letters from a Young Poet"

Texts from last night

"Is there a verb 4 what flashlights do?"

dispatches

The circus was in town again last night.

---

Dear C,

At the reading last night, your idol just read some porn he wrote for a freelancing gig. It was actually pretty funny, and I'm sure he was trying to do something like, make us reconsider the assumptions we make about what is "Art," but I really just wanted to hear him read something he felt serious about and maybe which would help me consider whether to buy his book. The other giant of the evening was difficult to follow. Overall, I want to say, you will probably be just fine without this particular experience, especially when you consider all the other experiences you are having instead.

The best was Lindsay Hunter, who read a piece using the perspective of a sort of Humbert Humbert. "Look at the moon, it's a drop of paint. See that moon? It's a rolled-back eye." It was eerie. It was damn good. But her choice to use a thick, fake Southern accent to represent this awful man made me go, "oh?"

---

I had my first Madison couch surfer last night. Of course my toilet decided to start spurting water the moment there was a guest around. I have given up on assuming technology will "just work" for me. I have a large stock of towels and laundry quarters, and the neighbors downstairs were not flooded.

the church of poetry

"the heart,
which, when caught in certain lights,
combusts and flies apart,
like rhubarb, or the night's

remains; like bear traps rusted open long,
like song"

- excerpt from Ander Monson, "At Night My Armless Brother's Heart
Sounds Like This: Systole and Diastole"

I saw Ander Monson and the amazing Nick Lantz at a reading last week. The youthful "Monsters of Poetry" series, less than a year old, is already routinely providing the best poetry in town. It was so crowded that latecomers were forced to sit on the floor, right up front at the
foot of the stage, and it was kind of churchy, sitting all uncomfortably sore-assed, staring up (or sometimes across the floor, at the patterns of the wood grain, the poet's shoes, whatever) in silence while the works were read. Another day where I wanted to say "Mmmm yeah, sir, sing it" at key lines, not just chuckle or murmur the way people do when they like a line in a poem but it's not time to applaud yet. I get frustrated with the so-called distinction between High Art and Low Art and the way you cannot shout out your love of a phrase at poetry "readings" but can at poetry "slams." It's true that there are poems that take a lot of attention, quiet meditative
woodgrain-staring, yes, where a well-placed wolf whistle would distract other audience members. But those aren't the ones where I find myself wanting to be loudly appreciative anyway. Sometimes words, bare words, unadorned by rhythm or music, still are worth getting up and dancing to.

But then you have to start talking about what a reading "should" be anyway, which is a huge discussion and I'd rather just say, "Art is art and not actually my professional field and I'm just going to go back to my corner and write some poems in my free time and let other people argue about what things 'should' be."

We practiced safe sex that was our practice

Why is the internet so great? Because the arts can keep up with current events, because there are journals that can publish things while they are still relevant.

From the July elimae, excerpts from Domefail by Patrick Lucy.

Members of congress began swimming down to inspect the oil leak for themselves this Tuesday. Aides to Senator John McCain, R-Az, credit the former presidential nominee with the idea, saying he "double-dared" Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo, to "touch the bottom."
"It's really a savvy political move," added one beltway pundit, "the American people want a proactive response, they want their reps to take action -- that's exactly what the republican delegation did during their visit. This wasn't just another political photo-op."
Upon returning to the surface, the delegation had to be scrubbed clean by volunteers from the Audubon Society before being released back to the senate. "The poor things," said one volunteer, "they struggled at first, but then their eyes just kind of rolled back into their heads and they relaxed. I think they knew we were trying to help them."

Plus more.

The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

From Pastwatch, a most excellent science fiction work by Orson Scott Card, 1996

Some people called it "the time of undoing"; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed, and now it was coming back to life.

This was the work of the world in those days: Nutrients were put back in the soil of the great rain forests of the world, so the trees could grow tall again. Grazing was banished from the edges of the great deserts of Africa and Asia, and grass was planted so that steppe and then savanna could slowly reconquer territory they had lost to the stone and sand...In great preserves the surviving animals learned how to live again in the wild. All the nations of the world had an equal claim on food, and no one feared hunger anymore...

It should have been a happy time, with humanity pressing forward into a future in which the world would be healed, in which a comfortable life could be lived without the shame of knowing that it came at someone else's expense. And for many...it was. But many others could not turn their faces from the shadows of the past. Too many creatures were missing, never to be restored. Too many people, too many nations now lay buried in the soil of the past. Once the world had teemed with seven billion human lives. Now a tenth that number tended the gardens of Earth. The survivors could not easily forget the century of war and plaque, of drought and flood and famine, of desperate fury leading to despair. Every step of every living man and woman trod on someone's grave, or so it seemed.

I first read this book when I was 14-15-16ish and think of it often. In that story, though, the world is saved from catastrophic climate change (you know, the one everyone's still afraid of) because some people go back in time and divert the mission of Christopher Columbus just enough to save the indigenous Americans and alter the course of the United States dramatically.

Hey, have I been talking about all of the same things lately? Yes, it is true. I'm chewing my way toward finding something productive to do with my "desperate fury leading to despair." Apologies, maybe, for dragging you through the process with me.

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.

Happy Bloomsday

Yes I said yes I will yes.

I had a professor who once called Tony Hoagland "kind of an asshole"

I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room

and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

- I Have News For You, Tony Hoagland

But he's actually pretty okay sometimes.

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.