tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86455961082704900052024-03-14T10:00:35.840-07:00The White Space Inside the PoemUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-70873713103788927312019-05-15T10:35:00.001-07:002019-05-15T10:42:15.983-07:00There is Nothing like a List to Get You Going or My Imaginary Desk<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-4f7868ed-7fff-a2fa-0bed-37a107db4525" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">New poem-work</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">1. I’d like to assemble a manuscript and see what it’s saying. I have a feeling that </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">there’s a fleeting sense of bodily wrongness before I get to the illness/recovery </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">poems. How weird is that. An anticipation because you don’t know what it is but</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">you know it’s coming.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">2. Press on illness/recovery poems. Are there more? I should have a time where</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> I just try to riff on the places and feelings and stick figure me in the midst. If I </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">cannot think. If I cannot walk.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">3. Just a little while ago I had the idea of the word “Beggar.” I think it’s related to</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> illness/recovery. Have a focus-day session on that. What I am to you. See what </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">birds land in the field.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">4. Poems of joy which seem to be more easily had than poems of happiness. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">5. I would like to read through all my poems again. Chapbook book chapbook </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">(book) (book) (book) (now about to be book). </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">6. Get the work out both small and large. Really push on this. Make up a summer</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">list of things to do.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">7. Do I want to have some kind of public appearance after the reading in June? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">8. I was quite put out when it seemed I was terribly whacked yesterday by being </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">outside and on my feet for 40 minutes. In honor of my stamina deficiency, I’m going </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to try to do things in 20-30 minute increments in May and June. This will include </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">writing (although I think I’ve successfully written for a couple of hours once at least</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">lately). But anyway maybe I must write every morning at work for 20 minutes. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Maybe it can only be freewriting (which may address many things but must be a </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">scallop of riffs, a flounce). </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">9. I want to have poem ideas and write poems whether they’re planned or </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">unplanned, thought of or unthought of. Write write write with or without punctuation.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-61723100646822326992018-01-31T09:54:00.000-08:002018-01-31T10:06:00.776-08:00Winter Retreat<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhskzqT6k18j3-ctI0ltXOnXaTVWP04eV20QmkKbKxfP1_A2TBW5cv6vvmZ9v79gLSnvSsF_1sjTRjMjDeQZFj_A9-F0T-uMe0Dl5GTMJN-KfdqK_x9O_r7x5z1ehILEnoF2-Zysiu8IoQ/s1600/Ravenna+Pond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="912" data-original-width="960" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhskzqT6k18j3-ctI0ltXOnXaTVWP04eV20QmkKbKxfP1_A2TBW5cv6vvmZ9v79gLSnvSsF_1sjTRjMjDeQZFj_A9-F0T-uMe0Dl5GTMJN-KfdqK_x9O_r7x5z1ehILEnoF2-Zysiu8IoQ/s400/Ravenna+Pond.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
I am at the retreat and I want to write about the retreat and I want to write but I also want to take a walk while it's still 51 degrees and little pieces of ice are crunching and returning to a runny state and really I want to read all the poems I've brought with me to see who I am now which I don't precisely mean because I know who I am but my moorings are different and I'm floating on bigger waves almost tipping over but there are also all the little notes the little dribs and drabs although they are not drab--where does that come from--little pieces or things that fly through my brain and I've been paying attention and writing them down to wit<br />
<ul>
<li>labelling everything in the house</li>
<li>Aunt M and her bundle of hair</li>
<li>"It's all around us"</li>
<li>lump sum</li>
<li>like a slack drumhead</li>
</ul>
and I'm waiting for them to commune on the page to writhe like worms to find their best selves without a lot of bother from me. Sunshine. Wind chime. Pond path in January. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-27697781614907985972017-09-04T08:22:00.001-07:002017-09-04T08:22:29.209-07:00Process NotesI was thinking of asking my students to journal about the process of writing one of their poems later in the semester. So I ask it of myself now with a recent poem titled (at this point) "I Never Dreamt of Trees." It began with trying to recreate in words the physical sensation of dropping off to sleep as I sat in a chair. Not my eyes heavy but my head. There was such a pull. And the sensation so vivid.<br />
<br />
So I had the notion and I kept clinging to that notion/image while looping around it as if it were a maypole. (driving in my car, driving in my car) Little half sentences and repetitive bits remembered and written down. First writing in the back pages of my general notebook, sometimes up the side of the page.<br />
<br />
Then the words being slid around and fastened into couplets--this time on google drive so I can access this poem start anywhere. Where do the lines end? Considering the line breaks makes me lop off a few words.<br />
<br />
I go back to my original notes and realize I've left out "stickiness," "the stickiness of dreams," but really it's there in other words (but sticky is such a good word). I wonder if I have gotten in this idea that the things I dream of are not from nature. I wonder if the poem which feels meditative/observational wants to go somewhere (and it should). Picking up toys I remember that I wanted to have something about Chinese handcuffs in there.<br />
<br />
I think I am realizing that this poem is not yet done (I don't want to read it right now). Last night when I dreamt I realized there is a much better sense of surround in the dream than I was thinking. Maybe that's the part you forget first when you wake up. Background goes, then the not-really narrative. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-67525809780046153162017-01-06T12:16:00.000-08:002017-01-06T12:16:11.000-08:00What Keyser Soze Has to do with My Most Recent Poem (and Googling)It was my lunch hour. I had a little time, a little space, a great deal of quiet. I was trying to write a poem but nothing would come. It felt like floating in a sea of corks. No fluidity. Lots of blunted mental buffeting.<br />
<br />
Finally, I decided to Keyser Soze the second half of the poem. I turned to my bulletin board and picked off random pieces of language to move things along. Some of the language I chose: astra, full cold moon, onion sets. Also, from stuff I'd seen on the internet that morning, the idea of winter, the idea of the northern lights.<br />
<br />
At different times this week I was dib-dabbing at two separate poems. Here are some of the things I googled in the course of composition:<br />
--mukluk--spelling and manufacture<br />
--counterpane--is this word obsolete? <br />
--clog dance--and its ties to the industrial revolution (who knew!)<br />
--astra--word origins <br />
--macron--exact definition<br />
--musical saw on youtube--what do they sound like? first song was "Ave Maria"<br />
--saucers of milk for the fairies ("green jacket, red cap/ and white owl's feather!")<br />
--bank as in river bank or bank at the side of the road--looking for definitions and synonyms<br />
<br />
My sister googled:<br />
--deadly nightshade again (paralysis)<br />
--girl's names beginning with "L"<br />
--Slovak for "be quiet"<br />
<br />
Googling is terrific for quick (and sometimes unexpected) facts and connections, but I miss the pages of my old dictionary, my old Roget, the massive OED.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-71397745551193897322016-06-27T11:38:00.000-07:002016-06-27T11:41:06.177-07:00Is Order Important?<!--[if !mso]>
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<![endif]--><br />It seems to me poets are continually faced with the problem of order. Once the poems are done we keep having to cluster and recluster when we submit them. Should we send a range of work in those 3 to 5 poems? Should we send related poems, poems from a series, poems with the same voice, poems in the same format? Which poem should be placed on top? <br /><br />If we're giving a reading we have to decide which poems to read and in what order. And there are further complications here. Some poems read aloud better than others. Some are surefire crowd pleasers--accessible enough, complicated enough, deep but with some self-deprecating humor.<br /><br />When we're putting a book together, we have to consider the reader in a different way. We have to think about how people read. If it's a novel, mostly I'd say they begin at the beginning and continue through to the end, unless it's a bad mystery, and we skip all the middle and just read who-done-it. I know when I read <i>The New Yorker</i>, I almost always start in the back--those briefer pieces easing me into its intellectual waters. When reading the newspaper, people will habitually attack it in a certain way--comics first, horoscopes, sports, editorials. What about a volume of poems?<br /><br /> Some poets say they don't really think about the order of their poems as they're fitted into a book. They claim readers just dip into a book of poetry--gulp, gulp--so worrying about order is unnecessary. What would be important for those who approach the book as the insect does a flower--hover, land, buzz around some more, hover, land--is that the poem they land on is a good poem--something that will attract, maybe even entrance the gadabout reader, so they'll make another pass at the pages. <br /><br />But I think the unconcerned poet is missing an opportunity. I doubt they'd be satisfied with a hodgepodge of work stuck together like a ball of used masking tape. Perhaps their manipulation of poems occurs in a more wordless, subconscious state--a kind of literary feng-shui. If a book of poems is looked at as a deliberate sequence, however, meant to be read in a particular order, then the effect on the reader can be cumulative.<br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-52960073403835130902016-04-12T09:43:00.000-07:002016-04-12T10:01:25.245-07:00Troublesome Poems (I've Had a Few)<br />
Recently, I headed up a workshop about troublesome poems. It was called Vital Signs: First Aid for Poems. In gathering useful thoughts for the class, I wondered if all the categories of troublesome poems, all the queries/flaws/doubts could break down to:<br />
<br />
<b>The poem that is there but in disguise--uncover: </b><br />
<ul>
<li>And here I do not necessarily mean to uncomplicate the poem because layers and braiding and teeter-tottering between different materials can be effective. One does not always speak directly in a poem. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Is there a lot of language clutter in the poem? Could the poem benefit from lopping off the beginning or the end which is where we tend to get explain-y? Could the poem be improved by deducting 10 percent of the words/20 percent of the words? </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Have you read the poem out loud? Have you put your finger down on the place where it “sounds funny” which can be a rhythm problem or maybe a grammatical problem or a problem of clarity or the discovery that what you wrote does not really mean what you want to say? </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>What about using line breaks or white space to put more room in the poem, pauses where meaning can accrue?<b> </b></li>
</ul>
<b>The poem that is not yet there--call forth: </b><br />
Discovering/calling forth is harder. (No reference to a muse intended or welcome here.) <br />
<ul>
<li>First, I would say get rid of the idea that the poem can mean anything, that the images and language are just serviceable placeholders that the reader hangs his own experience on. If that was so, why bother? Therefore: </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Readdress the images you use. If there are no images, this is worrisome. Be more specific which is the same as being in control of your poem. Create the landscape of the poem, so that the kitchen chair is the kitchen chair you remember, not the placeholder for the reader’s experience. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Make language choices that are unexpected, that keep the reader awake while reading. This has to do with their sound and their aptness and their specificity all at once. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Is the poem you’ve written from the wrong perspective? Or from a too usual perspective? Does it needs a new focus? Sometimes I recommend writing what I call companion poems--poems with a different speaker or addressed to the acorn under the speaker’s foot or in the voice of a series of waves on a winter day. How can I approach in a different way--sideways/upside-down/more thoroughly? Which is to say <i>tell it slant</i>. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Sometimes maybe you’re boring yourself? By which I mean you are writing in the way you have always written and maybe you want/need something else. </li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 18.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-84228488195883310282015-11-20T12:19:00.000-08:002015-11-20T12:21:03.394-08:00How I Thought/Think About Poems I Write (Connection)A long time ago, I was trying to write a poem that was solid, all of a piece, weighty as a stone that I could drop into the vast water of a reader's attention. There would be that satisfying plop noise and then the rings travelling out all the way to the invisible beyond.<br />
<br />
Then my desire for narrative crept in. How do I make the poem longer? How do I put the story together, where does it end? And now the rock isn't the poem, and the poem is not a container. The poem is an action bouncing off the surface of the water again and again. Or it's the points of the star that show how to draw a constellation like a crazy skeleton with faulty cartilage allowing some flex and bend.<br />
<br />
So many of the ways I thought about poetry I have broken down. I have put aside line break rationales in order to embrace the pudding
of white space holding things up, together or apart, on the page. Maybe hearing different rhythms hurried this along? Maybe a growing love for piece-i-ness? Maybe the fatalistic nature of growing older recognizes a truth about connection: putting two things together is what makes them jump.<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-75601222884724128342015-11-02T12:42:00.000-08:002015-11-02T12:43:40.292-08:00Multiple Meaning Because I am temporarily between parking lots/structures, I have to remind myself to go feed the meter at work. I have a hot pink post it on the upper right hand corner frame of my computer. The first time I read it inadvertently, I did not think parking. I thought of the system of stressed and unstressed syllables that lurks in the back of most poets' heads. That thing implanted by the poems of the past, the memorizations of the past, the dramatic schoolroom declamations of the past. The lilt I recognized and recreated without fully understanding.<br />
<br />
I have written in meter, but not frequently after the first 10 years of school. Sluffing off meter was part of the great unloosening I felt as a teen and young adult--all the things that were gotten ride of: white gloves, hats, garters, bathing caps, pantyhose, sexual abstention, the kind of politeness that erases self. When I am seen and heard, it is in ghost meter if anything at all, the iambic pentameter-y ice cube tray of our normal locutions: section, cube/section, cube/ section, cube . . .<br />
<br />
Right now, the sun coming through the window at my back is highlighting that post it note and nothing else. Meter! An exhortation! Rather than apply it to my work, marshalling my language in recognized ways, I will merely continue to accrue quarters.<br />
<br />
I am afraid to say anything about the parking <i>meter</i> being on my mind because of my <i>vehicle</i>! <br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-18580477655606199862015-09-28T16:59:00.000-07:002015-09-28T17:03:22.483-07:00Retreat to Writing (and Some Fabulous Early Fall Swimming)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Some of the notes I wrote to myself in a random way last
weekend (a writing retreat):</div>
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<br /></div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">Do I
ever want to talk to myself about style? I think I am thinking about the
crazed kind of quality (and I think I am diminishing it to call it crazed)
of poems like “At Home in the Middle” or “If the Dead Could Just Hang
Around.” The lecture poems I don’t have to understand why they’re put
together that way. Aunt B—maybe like putting a broken vase back together—pieces
and lines.</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">When
things come back try sending out grouped work which I said I would do and
didn’t—food poems (ketchup!), lecture poems, Cleveland poems.</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">I know
the poem-a-day thing in October is foolish time-wise. But maybe I’ll do
something different. Maybe each day I will work on some broken poem. Go through
stuff and find things to improve. –“Something about Darkness” surely, the
one about miniature golf.</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;">Tweak
Aunt B still—make a list of concerns.</li>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">length
from section to section</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">“voice”
of author’s notes</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">I’m
pretty sure I don’t want it to be longer</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">do I
want to Cleveland
it a bit more?</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">there
are many things I didn’t put in. Could some be included in
existing sections? “What are You Going to Do?” “I just stood there.”</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">why
is Aunt H so rich for me lately. Maybe it was just being in the continual
presence of her decay.</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">I
like repeated last two stanzas in each</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">something
about confessional</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">something
about wondering why her mother never visits?</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">the
boundary dispute relationship with her neighbors</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in;">what
did being a woman mean to her?</li>
</ul>
</ul>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-18068711787174510012015-08-04T12:37:00.000-07:002015-08-04T12:37:32.049-07:00Titles Entered But No Post Written"Why I Feel Cranky"<br />
<br />
"Thinginess"<br />
<br />
"How to/What to Expect--Variations, Insistence"<br />
<a class="PXLWASD-F-i" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8645596108270490005#editor/target=post;postID=7239211449409704110;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=2;src=postname"><br /></a>
"Writing Should Always Be As Big As God"<br />
<br />
"Check Marianne Moore (?) Quote: 'We are Making Birds Not Bird Cages'"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-72847479315275951502015-07-01T12:03:00.000-07:002015-07-01T12:03:10.328-07:00Ways to Think About a Book Title<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-7e594134-4aff-2d93-85a2-d485342ba48d" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Something About a Dark Honeycomb</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">--5 words, 9 syllables. This title is more evocative, visible, has intimations of both uncertainty and shadow which surely is what my writing is imbued with. Even in joyful poems of which there are some. This title is more pleasing to the ear with the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">ing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the -</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">ar</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">-, the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">n</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">m</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">s, the long last</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> o</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> vowel. When I read about the phrase “dark honeycomb,” I can see that if it was studied it could be meaningful--the place where the baby bees are birthed/raised (whatever happens to baby bees from whatever form they come from) the darkness indicative of less pure matter, more occupied, busier cells as opposed to the tranquil hexagons of only honey. Is it misleading to reference a natural object that really doesn’t have a primary place in the poems as opposed to a bird or the lake or other objects repetitively addressed and hauled out for scenery? Is it misleading because of its relationship to sweetness--although the honeycomb itself would be a rougher version and maybe dark curtails full sweetness (the difference if title was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Something About Honey</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">--which sounds maybe too Winnie the Pooh to me. Maybe only if it’s a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">jar</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of honey.) Also, the side-note thinking about the power/significance of a poem that a title is taken from. If this was the book title, it is also a poem title. I like the poem, but don’t think it’s most powerful or central or even in the top 5.</span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Cupboard That Won’t Quite Shut</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">--5 words, 6 syllables. Am I paying attention to this counting because I’m worried that other people don’t like the long, long titles that I revel in? Are they too much like those people who have a first name, a last name, and 10 or 12 others in between? If I think only about sound, I might note that all of the end sounds are hard sounds, stops--</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">d</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> or</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> t</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. How unlikely that feels. Makes it more emphatic, less mellifluous? I like this title because of the idea of container, so something is inside, and also that the container is somehow imperfect. And the sense of everydayness to the named object--cupboard. It’s a very domestic word. Everyone has one or more filled with things they love and</span> thi<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">ngs they’re trying to hide. Or things they’ve forgotten or want to forget. Sometimes they are very neat with shelf paper, but the un-shut-ability of this cupboard seems to argue against that. Also, if not shut things can not only leak out, but also get in. No closed system here. And that feels very true to me. Kind of as if Pandora’s Box is a very false story because it can never remain completely closed forever. Maybe Pandora is blameless? Maybe the un-shut-ability also gives a kind of energy/life to things contained?</span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m down to these two titles from an all-time high of 32 choices. (A long time ago, I had a book that was titled </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mystery Hill</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. I still like that title.)</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-12743893182838396522015-05-27T11:26:00.001-07:002015-05-27T11:26:17.189-07:00Ten Thousand HoursI was just reading an artist blog that referenced Malcolm Gladwell's calculation that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. Such a large number feels unfathomable. But if I figure out how many hours there are in a year (8760--not counting any leap nonsense), I can wrap my head around the figure. Still it feels unhelpful in the same way as thinking that one spends a third of one's life in bed (by which is meant asleep).<br />
<br />
Ten thousand hours. Is this the same thing as infinity when you're at the beginning of artistic desire? But on another shore (not opposite because that would mean the end), I calculate again.<br />
<br />
If I say it's been 30 years that I've been working on poems--returning, writing, scratching out, throwing away--that comes to 333.33 hours per year. 333.33 hours--underlining, using the dictionary, wishing I believed in the muse (not really), cutting and pasting--divided by 12 months, comes out to 27.77 hours per month--rethinking, sending out, making sound lists, rejecting, counting lines--which would be less than an hour a day.<br />
<br />
So I may have put the time in already which comes as a suprise to me. <br />
<br />
Of course achieving "mastery" is another long discussion entirely.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-85464344557611559042015-03-26T04:03:00.000-07:002015-03-26T05:37:06.651-07:00Roses are Sometimes Not Red or Why Dr. Seuss Doesn't Write Poems<br />
"Roses are red" is not a poem.<br />
<br />
Dr. Seuss--not. Sorry.<br />
<br />
Shel Silverstein. Sorry again.<br />
<br />
Is this a continuum--verse to poem? Or is it two grab bags, two pencil boxes, two messy stacks of paper, the side of the goat and the side of the sheep, the Atlantic and the Pacific, the lady or the tiger, the lion and the lamb? I teach in an art school so I should be able to say "Roses are red" is to a poem as a stick figure is to the Mona Lisa. And is the difference skill or ambition or shimmer?<br />
<br />
Yesterday a student said we agree to disagree when I would only agree to saying that Dr. Seuss writes narratives that rhyme. And sometimes there's not much narrative.<br />
<br />
I once did a break down of what "Roses are Red" does and doesn't do:<br />
<ul>
<li>It's succinct rather than flabby.</li>
<li>It's memorable.</li>
<li>It's traditional--harking back to some lines in Spenser which might be a little racier than the current version: </li>
</ul>
She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;<br />
She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,<br />
And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.<br />
<ul>
<li>Alliteration, consonance, end rhyme, interior rhyme, and half rhyme contribute to its musicality.</li>
<li>The metrical pattern has a variation in foot at a key place (beginning of last line when we move to the beloved), conveying information and contributing to musicality. </li>
</ul>
What is the problem? Is it only a cliche through overuse? If it were a rare unremembered song in the Roud Folk Song Index (#19798), would I feel differently?<br />
<br />
And yet I think the problem for me is the images chosen. They feel easy. They don't seem to have any nuance. We are moving from "fact" 1 to "fact" 2 to "fact" 3, and pretending line 4 is also a fact. Does this kind of false argument have a name? Sometimes roses are not red. Sometimes violets are white. Their sensory existence is predetermined by nature which is not true of line 4. Is line 4 just flattery? Is line 4 just a swift sweep up of the common endearment--sweetheart or honey?<br />
<br />
Maybe it's that these images--rose, violet, sugar--are unrelated in any meaningful way to the beloved. When Robert Burns says, "O <i>my</i> Luve's <i>like a red</i>, red rose" there's a connection between the beloved and the image. The image is there to begin a wave of possibility. We can enumerate the ways this might be--soft, fragrant, beautiful, swift to die . . . <br />
<br />
So what is missing is complexity, layers, some kind of shimmer to meaning that cannot be entirely nailed down? Holograms of meaning? The ability of the poem to keep opening/shifting instead of closing down?<br />
<br />
When we return to a poem time after time is there still pleasure, discovery, an unfolding? Do we need the burden of purpose or an unburdening on the page or the making of a kind of armor that can be shared? A sense of the serious?<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-78817269752564671462015-02-25T18:00:00.002-08:002015-02-25T18:15:17.077-08:00Why Did I Do It?This past week I've written a poem in a strange form. It started out regular in a block of prose text, but then I decided to separate the phrasing into thumbnails in columns in a grid of white space. First, it was 3 columns, then 4. I played around with the question of how many thumbnails there should be. I had 15--should I have only 14 because that's the magic number for a small poem--calling all Shakespeares, calling all Petrarchs. But I think I've discussed my love/hate relationship with this idea before.<br />
<br />
I had begun this strange shaping as a result of several subconscious influences, two of which I can identify. The first was a series of <a href="http://bookriot.com/2015/02/17/story-tropes-bingo-almost-every-genre/">Story Trope Bingo</a> cards on <i>Book Riot</i> which offer plot points like "Dark Past" and "Someone Vomits." The other influence was a picture I saw online of an art installation consisting of dozens of photos overlapping and ruffled like plumage, stuttering out an image. But for this particular poem, I settled on a grid from my past--the sliding tile puzzle, where disordered tiles are pushed around to spell a phrase. You could use your thumbs just like texting.<br />
<br />
Should this kind of poem be subject or approach specific, if I considered a series? Should the title have 4 parts (like the 4 columns)? Is there any kind of suggestion in the poem that the parts really could be pushed around? Although the puzzles were only solved to 1 order as far as I know. But if we are not at least thinking about disorder, what is the point? <br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-59105814812116980982015-02-01T07:35:00.000-08:002015-02-01T07:35:37.881-08:00Making Lists (a Kind of Crochet)I feel that I should follow my last post with "10 Things I Love About Writing," but I'm not feeling that exuberant today. Maybe because it's February. Maybe because I'm going to have to shovel snow later although usually after I get out there I kind of like it. So bright and impersonal and large.<br />
<br />Instead, I'm going to talk more about lists which I am always making in notebooks and on scraps of paper and now in Google Drive. Sometimes I never consult them again. They're a way of thinking through things. Here's some of my recent lists that had titles:<br />
<ul>
<li>"Today"--this is on my Google Drive so that I can consult with it anywhere (ha) and includes random things I should do, the week ahead, and a little section on where I can shoehorn writing into my day.</li>
<li>"What I Do and Whether I Should"--you can tell I started this around the first of the year but sometimes it's useful to state why you do something on a regular basis. Things need to be examined. Although I do make a semi-impassioned defense of watching TV late in the evening having to do with the mushiness of my brain</li>
<li>"5 Things I Should Do in the next 5 Years But That I Might Not""--what does it mean that I could only come up with 1 thing that was relatively new?</li>
<li>"My Life But Better"--the first sentence says "What Are You Waiting For?" </li>
</ul>
Side note: I'm very fond of the list in poetry. Last class, my students and I noticed and appreciated the list on line 4 of Kim Addonizio's "Onset": "Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing." Unusual objects, replicating shapes, repetitive (in that plus plus way) sounds. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-46639326937417190362015-01-03T05:16:00.000-08:002015-01-03T05:52:39.464-08:00Ten Things I Hate About WritingEven though I belong to two writing groups (1 poetry, 1 mixed) and go to two annual retreats (both mixed), sometimes you need more. So yesterday, my sister and I had a writing day. We talked and made lists: 3 event-oriented things to do in the next six months, 3 things to change in our writing life, 3 things to stop doing, etc. We made a list of 10 things to write about. And we made a list of 10 things we hate about writing. This was meant to be a kind of joke category. Here's what I came up with:<br />
<br />
1. I hate that I can't do it all the time.<br />
2. I hate when I seem to be returning to something I thought I was done with.<br />
3. I hate how there's this unconscious/subconscious element. The thing in my head that I cannot control, but I can coax. It's like a goddamn husband. Tempt it to please me!<br />
4. I do not hate how it has become more labyrinthine or complex, how it has remained fluid and potentially unsatisfactory even though it was once satisfactory that way.<br />
5. I hate that I don't have enough time to read support literature whether other poetry, how-to, research for something I want to write.<br />
6. I hate that I cannot expect to support myself as a poet.<br />
7. I hate that there is so much bad writing in the world.<br />
(I could only come up with 7. I stole 8 from my sister.)<br />
8. I hate not being read.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-2318662764217022192014-12-10T03:55:00.000-08:002014-12-10T06:10:25.666-08:00Notes on Student Poems<ul>
<li>Streamline. How to say something more clearly. </li>
<li>More humor. Jazzy titles</li>
<li>How can the reader know what you know? Readers respond to image, narrative, the unexpected, a different point of view.</li>
<li>Abandon centering. Think about using stanzas/space to create clearer meaning.</li>
<li>Rhyme is doing you no favor.</li>
<li>OK. I like all this where the familiar tale is being mixed with other things and given new particulars. But then in last two lines back to usual--why?</li>
<li>Too pretty sounding?</li>
<li>I like this incremental repetition but I want more. Push harder.</li>
<li>Combination of two things can increase interest, effectiveness.</li>
<li>Read aloud for rhythm, clarity, necessity.</li>
<li>What I want most is for you to experiment with not centering--will change <i>feeling </i>of lines.</li>
<li>Cutting always good.</li>
<li>Language--what is the ratio of complexity to clarity. Think about necessity. Deliberately making it more difficult and I can be fine with that if it has a purpose--re-seeing?</li>
<li>Maybe un-sentencing would help.</li>
<li>This sounds funny.</li>
<li>A little falling off towards the end where earlier there's all this great, various stuff. Think about order.</li>
<li>Think about line breaks to shake up usual way of reading and emphasizing words.</li>
<li>Doesn't hang together in interesting or directive way like what follows.</li>
<li>Not clear to me why this enters the poem.</li>
<li>This is a great quote but it seems sassier than the poem itself.</li>
<li>Think about order--clusters of idea/messages.</li>
<li>Why so many commas?</li>
</ul>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-32632781109779529672014-12-02T12:47:00.001-08:002014-12-02T16:09:12.280-08:00Transcribed from a Lake House (but not there now)Definitely want to work on the poem but now my methods change. Notes, notes, notes, some looking up, then typing into the computer the fits and shreds, firming up the lines, moving things about.<br />
<br />
I'd like to make an idea list. It's 7:03 and I have a strong cup of coffee. A list for small places in Cleveland which interests me as a series, an approach. So far 1. Daddy's car 2. The Brick 3. alley by Euclid 4. WW utility room 5. censer 6. Amana freezer 7. BSS parking lot.<br />
<br />
What else might qualify in strange ways (I'm crossing the numbers off so things don't have to come out straight):<br />
<ul>
<li>Miss Roger's piano room</li>
<li>the pool at Rocking Chair Cove</li>
<li>the cottages after I grew up</li>
<li>the wine bottle when I pushed down the cork</li>
<li>the pothole where I got that flat tire</li>
<li>the stuffed veal breast</li>
<li>the hollow chocolate egg of confetti</li>
<li>could I try the rubber boots again</li>
<li>the library on Mapledale</li>
<li>or maybe a particular book--<i>The Dandelion Cottage </i>with its wallpaper scrap idea of making a home</li>
<li>the pyrex coffee pot--thinking about it like a movie with repeated sloshings gurgle gurgle swamp swish empty</li>
<li>the surrey</li>
<li>the secret place behind our thin suburban woods</li>
<li>Alvie's </li>
<li>the little park and Bob's Big Boy while we waited for Katie </li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-65996659951310179012014-10-01T07:44:00.004-07:002014-10-01T07:49:02.877-07:00Lake House Diary VI (Thinking About the Prose Poem)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm1y_oeZ4KkreONbHlVjg_0-KdtE-jM13zaDiKHvXfx3C8xZ7znDfAXHo_RlxfuH-roA3KS4fBuUHVXyw3vpdjBO9seHC_uPgLYpDjC1IcK2X0FGh_j97rvxyiFSy6EO_VloeIgVnyIHo/s1600/Tiny+island.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm1y_oeZ4KkreONbHlVjg_0-KdtE-jM13zaDiKHvXfx3C8xZ7znDfAXHo_RlxfuH-roA3KS4fBuUHVXyw3vpdjBO9seHC_uPgLYpDjC1IcK2X0FGh_j97rvxyiFSy6EO_VloeIgVnyIHo/s1600/Tiny+island.jpg" height="320" width="256" /></a></div>
<br />
I just came back from a long weekend on a large island in Lake Erie. It was an annual gathering of writers that we figured out has been going on for 20 years. Good friends, good writing, good newcomers, surprising turns, noisy dinners, conclaves on the back deck, swimming off the bird sanctuary beach. Because I've been having kind of a dry summer, I brought with me a talismanic notebook (steno) that I used several years ago when I wrote like a storm pouring out and everyone would wish for a return of that kind of bounty as do I.<br />
<br />
I also considered if I am nostalgic for the rhythms of the prose poem. Maybe I think that because of my two recent readings. At one, having read a number of poems in a row, I read the last poem (a prose poem) as if I was a furnace gusting out a great fireball or a prophet letting loose his proclamation. At the other, I read in a much more punctuated, measured style. But this second reading was only one poem--much time elapses--and then second poem (not prose poems). And I know a rhythm and a power can be built if there is a continuing in the reading. Something to think about.<br />
<br />
Maybe my sense is that prose poems sometimes have something untamed about them and I like that. Do not gentle me! Nor should I gentle myself in this! I went to the prose poem because of rhythm but maybe there was also burgeoning and proliferation and carelessness in the right way which really means there was not care in a mingey persnicketty kind of way. I need that wildness again.<br />
<br />
(note at the bottom of one of those notebook pages: feral cats in the backyard) <br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-12964027036732237932014-08-19T18:45:00.001-07:002014-08-20T03:51:57.635-07:00Lakehouse Diary V<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Writing this on the program for the symphony performance because I am so very early. I heard music as I was approaching the amphitheater and thought I had mistaken the time. But just warming up and delightfully discordant. The orchestra is wearing white. The <i>Glossary</i> to my left says <i>Adagio. Allegro.</i> I think there were more people here yesterday but maybe it's early days yet. The lecture went well. Heard that it was useful, rapid-fire (good, good). People laughed in the right places. My lecture/reading person is not the same me nor is my workshop person. <br />
<br />
I think I finally managed to relax this evening before walking over here. I sat out on the balcony and read an entertaining, light-hearted book on Kindle. Usually my time is too carved up/allotted so that here long stretches of the day just confuse me. Maybe I can write for a set time for the next three days though I still have the workshop plus prep and the individual conferences plus prep. <i>Molto. Piu. Sostenuto.</i> What about what I began in class today? Object study of the patio's awning? Maybe make that sense of being a possession or attachment a part of the poem. Must be careful not to step on Mary's poem's toes. Many people with pillows. I can always sit on my jacket. <i>Forte. Cadenza.</i> I wonder if this robust rattle makes them more perfectly in time when the official music begins. Much fuller now.<br />
<br />
Excerpt from my lecture--"Beginnings, Endings, Titles, and White Space":<br />
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<![endif]-->A title is a convenience, an aid, an arrestment. If a poem has a title, the reader feels he has a handle on things, an orientation. And maybe that helps him enter the unfamiliar territory of otherness, the exotic, the dangerous, the sensory. So first, the title can make the poem approachable. OK. As the reader I know where we’re going, even if that turns out to be a complete illusion.<br />
<br />
A title has many possible uses which is why I can never understand why people want to say “untitled” or “Poem #732.” Why throw away an opportunity? Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-6705009740005767102014-08-17T10:40:00.001-07:002014-08-17T10:43:01.455-07:00Lakehouse Diary IV (New Lake Again)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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August 15, 2014</div>
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Where has Brenda Hillman been all my life? I have just
started reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seasonal Works with
Letters on Fire.</i> I love it—playfulness, attention to sound, wordplay,
interjections of Latin insect names, scattered vivid image, white spaciness
later on. I felt more excited reading the Section I title page (4 epigraphs and
a section called “Argument” which is a very, very long list: “microseasons,
vowels, panticles, California
grasses, existence, sex, the cosmos . . .) and the first three poems than I
have felt all summer. </div>
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August 16, 2014</div>
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Things I have heard this morning: operatic-y voice singing a
hymn, somebody practicing the piano, church bells tolling the hour, church bells
playing a Woody Guthrie song, boat honk, parts of a sermon, motor boat buzz. I
have practiced my reading which will be today at 3:30. I have studied on the
parts of my first workshop tomorrow. I have worked on the lecture that will be
on Tuesday at lunch. After lunch today, I took a short walk down to the
lake shore and over past the Atheneum to the beach. Later: reading + reception +
more Brenda Hillman+ listening to Thrity Umrigar’s NPR interview. (Swimming in words.)</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-44542686117590819552014-07-27T08:45:00.000-07:002014-07-27T08:48:34.003-07:00Lakehouse Diary III (New Lake)Friday, July 18th<br />
<br />
I am sitting at the desk in our hotel in Reno, a way station on the way to Lake Tahoe and all that it represents for me personally which is in part a kind of personhood where all my first impulses are to me and to my writing and to my healing from whatever vicissitudes have been marking me. I want to let go of all the responsibilities I usually carry. I want to feel happy. When they say "happy as a clam," maybe it's because the clam is in his shell and can shut up shop for the day as he sees fit. I want to go and steep myself like a teabag in beauty. I want to open up the doors that are shut in the everyday behind which are the things of my poems. That's not really true since the things of my poems are made up of little pieces from my life. But something is shut up or off--maybe the muscle of my writing, maybe the ceiling is lowered when I need the whole sky to carome off of, gyrate, flex, like the acrobat/gymnast I never was. So, clam. So, teabag (sorry this has some kind of possibly icky sexual connotations). So, ceiling raised, pushed up, opened, wiped.<br />
<br />
On the plane I made notes of 3 things I'd like to write about--not in poems I don't think:<br />
1. What would your writing plan be if you got a Guggenheim or whatever and had a year off in which to write?<br />
2. What is something you don't normally attempt like that note in the orange notebook about deliberately trying to evoke something in the reader--I think it was in response to an author saying how he deliberately tried to evoke horror.<br />
3. Questions from the writing group discussion of my 2 poems.<br />
<ul>
<li>I was struck by B's noting my use of items from daily life/pop culture and calling them kitsch. Surely that 's a term of a derogatory nature. He asked why I didn't use more formal or classic elements. Was this question arising out of "value" or having to do with process? (kitsch--"something of tawdry design, appearance or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste." "tawdry, vulgarized, or pretentious (sentimental appeal)."</li>
<li>L's question about how the poems had 2 parts which worked differently and had different levels of impact on the reader. Interested in thinking about this in detail.</li>
<li>T's question about whether I intended emotional or intellectual response which I realized only later can never be one or the other but always both in various stages of realization/permutations of power. </li>
</ul>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-26658916717780679742014-06-12T11:54:00.002-07:002014-06-12T13:30:34.331-07:00Lakehouse Diary II<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Wednesday</div>
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More snakes! Although really just one when I went for a walk
at the end of the drive. I wrote a very strange poem today about how people
supposedly have mistaken a giant fish or a whale or a giant turtle for land.
Even St. Brendan! Very long multi-syllabic words for it in several languages.
The poem interests me but is perhaps in another country from other things I
have written perhaps ever. I also sorted through my unbooked poems and made 5
sections—two unseries, work series, lecture<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>series, small place series. I think I’ll put “Soldiers” by itself in the
front because it seems to me it prequels several sensibilities to come. Sat for
a very long time in the canopied swing thing while the wind got stronger and
stronger and the light changed and the waves got higher so you could see through
them at the top. </div>
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P.S. T___ makes us look bad by working longer than M___ and
I. </div>
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Thursday </div>
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Danger alert! T___ and M___ attacked by a bird down by the
miniature golf last night. This was after T___ had given this same bird the
bottom of her cone who only got one satisfying peck at it before<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there was a giant bird scramble and it was
taken away. When we were going to the car, T___ shrieked and I thought she’d
fallen, but the bird had thumped her head, and then thumped Mary. We discussed
how this and the angry tornado of birds (also yesterday) could be useful scenes
in the beginning of a horror film. Today writing another weird poem with
parenthetical inclusions that answer the title. Also, we visited the coffee
shop/bakery. Good coffee. M___ declares she can’t remember ever having a better cake doughnut. Planning to make a list of poem ideas this afternoon. Something that will be on that list is the Exeter book which has caught my interest.</div>
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<![endif]--><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-4935448173528919202014-06-11T03:42:00.005-07:002014-06-11T06:27:25.207-07:00Lakehouse DiaryMonday
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We arrived at the Lakehouse yesterday. I’m staying upstairs
in a room with a giant king-sized bed, yet there are no sheets to fit it. This
is the only quibble I have other than the water snakes M___ reported and then I
viewed myself today. There’s a narrow rocky beach here with a large portion
made up of a drift of tiny shells, but the snake has taken the shine away.
Fortunately, there’s this very clever two seated swing with a roof right at the
entrance to the beach that is great to sit and rock and read or talk or just
look out at the water, hear the waves. The waves all the time like the whoosh
of your heartbeat or the anticipation of new things. Advent! All night long I
heard them. Also, there are so many more birds here than at Quarry Hollow or
any place else on Kelleys
Island that I’ve stayed.
Red winged blackbirds being the only ones I’m sure of. Yesterday, I heard a
bird call that sounded like the chimes of a bell. Today I wrote a new poem in
the morning—maybe in the small places in Cleveland
category, and I worked on revising “At the Lecture on Lost Bones and Self
Worth.” I worked it so much, I can’t tell what it’s like. I’ll have to let it
be until tomorrow. Yesterday we had P___’s wonderful Moroccan chicken for
dinner and today we’re going to go out to eat. When we went for a walk there
were a number of 8 foot tall Queen Anne’s Lace growing. I have never seen them
more than 3-ish feet. Anywhere.</div>
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Tuesday </div>
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Danger update. I started looking up the giant Queen Anne’s
Lace on the internet. Turns out it’s hemlock—every part poisonous. M___ had
suggested I bite off the stem when I was picking my posy. Glad I didn’t. And I
just came back from the beach. I sat on the rocks so I could watch the
increasing waves keeping a reptile eye out for snakes. Today I wrote a poem
which at first I didn’t like. It started out by my thinking one of my small
place poems should be about a censer. When I finished my poem, it just seemed
so flat. I finally broke it up into tiny lines with underlining line breaks and
I liked it better. I also read all my loose poems to think about making a new
book. Lots of series. I think the Aunt H series being subsumed into the whole
will make things better. But still lecture series and work series. I know the
lecture series can’t be last. Maybe second? Maybe the soldier poem first? I
should think about what to write when I go to bed again. Still no cute t-shirt
for I___. Two gift shops so far. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645596108270490005.post-69070886090976144822014-05-29T03:03:00.000-07:002014-05-29T03:08:30.112-07:00Writing Process Blog Tour<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-1d7ed611-4457-8d84-afd1-46a25355e3fc" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Kris Ohlson</b> invited me to take part in this <b>Blog Tour about Writing Process</b>, everyone answering the same four questions. I’ve been in many writing groups with Kris (at least three) and I’ve always been astonished and pleased by her intense, vivid approaches to subject matter. Kris’s book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Soil-Will-Save-Us-Scientists/dp/1609615549/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401315006&sr=1-1&keywords=kristin+ohlson">The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet</a></i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i> </i>(2014), presents a rethinking of agriculture, as she interviews and interacts with experts, the chapters like a series of core samples, rich and deep. Kris blogs about her writing <a href="http://www.kristinohlson.com/blog/some-thoughts-writing">here.</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As for me,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> What am I working on?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> This is a tough question. It seems I am always working on numerous tasks that flit through my brain like energetic flotsam and jetsam. But if I sort, clarify, I can come up with three tasks that are occupying me. The first is thinking about a poem-a-day project I’m doing with some other poets in June. Because of it, I think I am actually putting off writing anything new this week because I don’t want to be spent (all the excuses one can come up with!). Second, and more long term, I am writing a series of poems based on lectures I attend, recording language and ideas and then departing completely from the subject matter. It is a great way to jump start a poem. I’m trying to decide if the titles, which note “At the Lecture of X and Y” (always two things) are important. Does the poem need them as balance or can-opener or instruction manual? Third, I am putting together a new book. I’ve just started this so the book doesn’t even have a name yet. I can’t refer to it shorthand as “Cake” or “Bird” yet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> It is kind of dismaying that I don’t have a pat answer to this, but poetry is so various. I like eventual clarity. I am more interested in being earnest than hip/ironic. I am dark yet joyous with it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Why do I write what I do?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I write because I am good at it. I think poetry appeals to me because I have a metaphoric turn of mind. Also, I think in jumps and detours and digressions. Writing poetry helps me to understand things or at least be able to deal with them, run my hands over all their parts and ask questions. Sometimes I choose what I'm writing about, but sometimes not.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">4. How does your writing process work? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It can start with an image or a turn of phrase that somehow I know is important (recently “turnspit dogs” which I haven’t done anything with yet, but hope to). Then things gather around it. I write longhand or sometimes type into a google doc. I like to establish line length early (now that I’m back to lineated verse), and often use couplets, although I’m doing a little no-punctuation-tab-white-space stuff now and then, and that’s usually a block of lines. I write towards the unexpected, not knowing where I am going to end up. I better not end up anywhere dull or with someone else’s poem/words/conclusions/images wasting my time. Sound is always important whether I’m doing a big rant-y pour or a finicky image slot. If I had a regret (although not a part of the question), it would be that I can’t see further into the future of my work. What is it planning?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I've asked another Cleveland writer I know to continue the tour. <b>Brad Ricca</b> is a renaissance man amalgamating the comic book/graphic novel universe and the poetic. I got to know him hanging around the Popular Culture Working Group talking about <i>Pet Sounds</i> and <i>Barbarella</i> and Nancy Drew. His recent works are <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Super-Boys-Adventures-Shuster---Creators/dp/1250049687/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401314412&sr=8-1&keywords=ricca+superman">Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster--the Creators of Superman</a></i> (2013), a literary biography, and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Mastodon-Brad-Ricca/dp/0982876629/ref=la_B0054MZ63K_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401314600&sr=1-2">American Mastodon</a> </i>(2011), a book of poems that won the St. Lawrence Book Award. He blogs about his work <a href="http://brad-ricca.com/">here</a>.</span></div>
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