There is Nothing like a List to Get You Going or My Imaginary Desk

New poem-work

1. I’d like to assemble a manuscript and see what it’s saying. I have a feeling that 
there’s a fleeting sense  of bodily wrongness before I get to the illness/recovery 
poems. How weird is that. An anticipation because you don’t know what it is but
you know it’s coming.

2. Press on illness/recovery poems. Are there more? I should have a time where
 I just try to riff on the places and feelings and stick figure me in the midst. If I 
cannot  think. If I cannot walk.

3. Just a little while ago I had the idea of the word “Beggar.” I think it’s related to
 illness/recovery. Have a  focus-day session on that. What I am to you. See what 
birds land in the field.

4. Poems of joy which seem to be more easily had than poems of happiness. 

5. I would like to read through all my poems again. Chapbook book chapbook 
(book) (book) (book) (now about to be book).

6. Get the work out both small and large. Really push on this. Make up a summer
list of things to do.

7. Do I want to have some kind of public appearance after the reading in June? 

8. I was quite put out when it seemed I was terribly whacked yesterday by being 
outside and on my feet for 40 minutes. In honor of my stamina deficiency, I’m going 
to try to do things in 20-30 minute increments  in May and June. This will include 
writing (although I think I’ve successfully written for a couple of hours once at least
lately). But anyway maybe I must write every morning at work for 20 minutes. 
Maybe it can only be freewriting (which may address many things but must be a 
scallop of riffs, a flounce). 

9. I want to have poem ideas and write poems whether they’re planned or 
unplanned, thought of or unthought of. Write write write with or without punctuation.

Winter Retreat

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

• labelling everything in the house
• Aunt M and her bundle of hair
• "It's all around us"
• lump sum
• like a slack drumhead

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.

Process Notes

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What 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.

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.

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:
--mukluk--spelling and manufacture
--counterpane--is this word obsolete?
--clog dance--and its ties to the industrial revolution (who knew!)
--astra--word origins
--macron--exact definition
--musical saw on youtube--what do they sound like? first song was "Ave Maria"
--saucers of milk for the fairies ("green jacket, red cap/ and white owl's feather!")
--bank as in river bank or bank at the side of the road--looking for definitions and synonyms

My sister googled:
--deadly nightshade again (paralysis)
--girl's names beginning with "L"
--Slovak for "be quiet"

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.

Is Order Important?

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?

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.

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 The New Yorker, 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?

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.

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.

Troublesome Poems (I've Had a Few)

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:

The poem that is there but in disguise--uncover:

• 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.

• 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?

• 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?

• What about using line breaks or white space to put more room in the poem, pauses where meaning can accrue? 

The poem that is not yet there--call forth: 
Discovering/calling forth is harder. (No reference to a muse intended or welcome here.)

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 tell it slant.

• 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.

How 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.

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.

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.

Multiple 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.

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 . . .

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.

I am afraid to say anything about the parking meter being on my mind because of my vehicle!

Retreat to Writing (and Some Fabulous Early Fall Swimming)

Some of the notes I wrote to myself in a random way last weekend (a writing retreat):

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Tweak Aunt B still—make a list of concerns.
• length from section to section
• “voice” of author’s notes
• I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to be longer
• do I want to Cleveland it a bit more?
• 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.”
• why is Aunt H so rich for me lately. Maybe it was just being in the continual presence of her decay.
• I like repeated last two stanzas in each
• something about confessional
• something about wondering why her mother never visits?
• the boundary dispute relationship with her neighbors
• what did being a woman mean to her?

Titles Entered But No Post Written

"Why I Feel Cranky"

"Thinginess"

"How to/What to Expect--Variations, Insistence"

"Writing Should Always Be As Big As God"

"Check Marianne Moore (?) Quote: 'We are Making Birds Not Bird Cages'"

Ways to Think About a Book Title

Something About a Dark Honeycomb--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 ing, the -ar-, the n and ms, the long last o 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 Something About Honey--which sounds maybe too Winnie the Pooh to me. Maybe only if it’s a jar 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.

Cupboard That Won’t Quite Shut--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--d or t. 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 things 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?

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 Mystery Hill. I still like that title.)

Ten Thousand Hours

I 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).

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.

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.

So I may have put the time in already which comes as a suprise to me.

Of course achieving "mastery" is another long discussion entirely.

Roses are Sometimes Not Red or Why Dr. Seuss Doesn't Write Poems

"Roses are red" is not a poem.

Dr. Seuss--not. Sorry.

Shel Silverstein. Sorry again.

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?

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.

I once did a break down of what "Roses are Red" does and doesn't do:

• It's succinct rather than flabby.
• It's memorable.
• It's traditional--harking back to some lines in Spenser which might be a little racier than the current version: 

                       She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;
                       She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,
                       And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.

• Alliteration, consonance, end rhyme, interior rhyme, and half rhyme contribute to its musicality.
• 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.

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?

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?

Maybe it's that these images--rose, violet, sugar--are unrelated in any meaningful way to the beloved. When Robert Burns says, "O my Luve's like a red, 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 . . . 

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?

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?

Why 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.

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  Story Trope Bingo cards on Book Riot 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.

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?

Making 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.

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:

• "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.
• "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
• "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?
• "My Life But Better"--the first sentence says "What Are You Waiting For?" 

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. 

Ten Things I Hate About Writing

Even 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:

1. I hate that I can't do it all the time.
2. I hate when I seem to be returning to something I thought I was done with.
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!
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.
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.
6. I hate that I cannot expect to support myself as a poet.
7. I hate that there is so much bad writing in the world.
(I could only come up with 7. I stole 8 from my sister.)
8. I hate not being read.

Notes on Student Poems

• Streamline. How to say something more clearly. 
• More humor. Jazzy titles
• How can the reader know what you know? Readers respond to image, narrative, the unexpected, a different point of view.
• Abandon centering. Think about using stanzas/space to create clearer meaning.
• Rhyme is doing you no favor.
• 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?
• Too pretty sounding?
• I like this incremental repetition but I want more. Push harder.
• Combination of two things can increase interest, effectiveness.
• Read aloud for rhythm, clarity, necessity.
• What I want most is for you to experiment with not centering--will change feeling of lines.
• Cutting always good.
• 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?
• Maybe un-sentencing would help.
• This sounds funny.
• A little falling off towards the end where earlier there's all this great, various stuff. Think about order.
• Think about line breaks to shake up usual way of reading and emphasizing words.
• Doesn't hang together in interesting or directive way like what follows.
• Not clear to me why this enters the poem.
• This is a great quote but it seems sassier than the poem itself.
• Think about order--clusters of idea/messages.
• Why so many commas?

Transcribed 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.

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.

What else might qualify in strange ways (I'm crossing the numbers off so things don't have to come out straight):

• Miss Roger's piano room
• the pool at Rocking Chair Cove
• the cottages after I grew up
• the wine bottle when I pushed down the cork
• the pothole where I got that flat tire
• the stuffed veal breast
• the hollow chocolate egg of confetti
• could I try the rubber boots again
• the library on Mapledale
• or maybe a particular book--The Dandelion Cottage with its wallpaper scrap idea of making a home
• the pyrex coffee pot--thinking about it like a movie with repeated sloshings gurgle gurgle swamp swish empty
• the surrey
• the secret place behind our thin suburban woods
• Alvie's 
• the little park and Bob's Big Boy while we waited for Katie

Lake House Diary VI (Thinking About the Prose Poem)

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.

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.

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.

(note at the bottom of one of those notebook pages: feral cats in the backyard)

Lakehouse Diary V

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 Glossary to my left says Adagio. Allegro. 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.

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. Molto. Piu. Sostenuto. 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. Forte. Cadenza. I wonder if this robust rattle makes them more perfectly in time when the official music begins. Much fuller now.

Excerpt from my lecture--"Beginnings, Endings, Titles, and White Space":

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.

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?