Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is fucking amazing. (I'm reading his collected stories.) He's very good at a number of things, and one of them is how he shows you the minds of these fucked up characters. Profoundly, massively fucked up, but subtly so, which makes it all the more creepy and entrancing. I've been wanting to do that, wanting to write from the perspective of someone who just has a weird fucking mind, and who also has a certain obliviousness about just how weird their way of looking at things is... I think in part it's this obliviousness that allows them to continue this way.

I'm having trouble articulating it further than that.

But like, check out this guy's site. The way his mind works is just fascinating to me.

OMG.

Cross-dressing Liberian soldiers. Includes an amazing photo.

best opening line ever

I thought of like the best opening line ever for this funny noirish detective thing I'm working on.

Too bad the goodness of the opening line outstrips pretty much everything else.

Maybe I should try working on the characters and the plot. Before just writing from the first line and letting it amble on its own.

Oh plot and character-driven fiction, how you elude me :D

I'm not revealing the opening line, but it's so awesome and nerdy.

Severn poem revision

After visiting Keats' house in Rome, I wrote a bunch of material, that sort of clustered into two poems that I remember. I worked around with them but still found them unsatisfactory. I think I was putting too much in there; too many significant details in a way that didn't really cohere. Or I was saying things that sounded deep and significant but...without my own conviction that it accurately represented the situation behind it?

Oh, I don't know. It was a bit didactic in places. Anyway, I needed some stuff to show for workshop and more recently I'd been working around with the Severn poem again, and I made it way, way simpler. And hell, there are still three stanzas which each have a somewhat distinct content I think. Whoops, four.

I played around with the line breaks...I was pretty much writing iambs unintentionally. I got it so that in the first stanza there's five, then there's four, then three, then two, though all are iambic, and it's a matter of breaking the lines in ways that amuses me and/or that I think is meaningful or interesting. (i.e productive secondary associations, that thematically fit, not just arbitrary ones.)

In one version of the poem there was all this language about false and fakery and such, and the repetition of that made it seem like... I don't know, that that was a theme. Like... I was calling Keats fake or something? I dunno. It didn't really make sense in terms of the thrust of the poem, and that wasn't something I felt as true anyway, so I revised it to not have it be that way.

I don't like the line breaks in the last stanza, I kind of like them long. Maybe I'll change it back, but I sort of like my 5 4 3 2 thing, and the line breaks kinda work, in their own way... I guess since they are basically just two blunt sentences, I want to have them just spill out and rest there, instead of coming out all choppily.

I should try to rework that Shelley poem, maybe along similar lines (e.g. scrapping a lot of it and making it a lot simpler). I dunno, I don't think I've ever really workshopped that with people.

Oh yeah, and I have to check Severn's biography. >_>

Smells

I need to make friends with an organic chemist or something. Because I want to be able to smell certain chemicals in isolation, so that I can identify them by smell later. Like I want to know the difference between putrescine and cadaverine. And I want to know if I am a super-smeller type person who can smell that one chemical that some people can't smell.

I don't know if I can actually physiologically smell better than average, or if I just notice/care about smells more. Like certain smells bug me to the point of being infuriating, even if they are not terribly strong in the air, and even if they are not "objectively" unpleasant (like not actually something that makes you want to retch; it's more the presence of the smell, as something distracting or that doesn't "belong" there.

Like we once had a house-guest who smelled up the bathroom. I don't mean he stunk or anything, it's just that his smell was around there so thick, and it was maddening. I took an animal pleasure in spreading my own effluvia (down the usual drains, mind you, not painted on the wall or something), hoping that they would do something to combat his odor.

And once, at a clothing swap, I tried on a shirt that smelled of I don't know what exactly. Partially some kind of strong laundry soap, partly mildew, partly unpleasant mystery. I bunched the shirt up into a cloth donut, in order to get it on as quickly as possible. And I had to force myself to put it over my head. It was like I was having a collar of foreign stench forced around me, and my body fought it instinctively.

I wonder if that is at all what it's like to get on a flea collar.)

I'd like to smell as well as a dog, but then maybe it would be too distracting. I mean, dogs can't help but smell shit all the time. They seem to be having fun with it, though.

It would be worth it.

I also wonder if the reason they seem to "enjoy" smelling shit, other dogs' asses, roadkill, etc., is not because these things actually smell "good" to them per se, but just because they can understand so much from them that it's a source of interest and insight, and not just "Boy, that smells."

Like looking at roadkill is not aesthetically a "pleasant" experience, but if you were some sort of rodent biologist, and by looking at the roadkill you could discern stuff about the species, sex, stage of life, health, etc., you might spend some time looking at it with interest, rather than just passing it by with disgust.

Slime Mold

"Slime moulds (or Slime molds), are protists that normally take the form of amoebae, but under certain conditions, such as those harmful to the organisms, change into globular sluglike beings, for mobility, which then develop fruiting bodies that release spores, superficially similar to the sporangia of fungi. They should not be confused with true moulds, which are actually fungi. Although cosmopolitan in distribution, they are usually small and rarely noticed. There are several different groups. Slime moulds can be found in damp and dark forest floors. Slime moulds tend to grow on rotted wood after rainfall. Slime moulds generally move only about 1 millimetre per hour, although some can reach 2 centimeters per minute."

"Most notable are the plasmodial slime moulds or myxogastrids (also known as acellular or true slime moulds), where the feeding stage takes the form of a giant amoeba with thousands of nuclei, called a plasmodium. It is not divided by cell membranes, but rather is enclosed by a single outer one, and is thus like a single large cell. Most are smaller than a few centimetres, but the very largest reach areas of up to two square metres."

"In the early 16th century. the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch depicted an estimated 22 species of slime mould in The Garden of Earthly Delights."

"It has been observed that they can find their way through mazes by spreading out and choosing the shortest path, an interesting example of information processing without a nervous system."

"In 2006, researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of Kobe reported that they had built a six-legged robot whose movement was remotely controlled by a Physarum slime mould. The mould directed the robot into a dark corner most similar to its natural habitat."

Thanks, Wikipedia!

I need to figure out how to tell these things apart from fungus, or discarded pieces of pink gum (which evidently they can sometimes resemble). The one in the picture I included (from google) looks like melted ice cream. I'm digging the artful pink border.

cat dog

I had a dream, as I sometimes do, in which I thought, "I should make this into a short [or long] story! That would be really good!" And it feels good, in the dream. Then I wake up and go, "Huh?" Either the inspiration is just lost or it actually wasn't that good of an idea to begin with, I don't know. Maybe both; I'm sort of the opinion that there are no bad ideas, just bad writers. There are tricky ideas, but every time you think a premise is inherently doomed as Good Writing material, someone shows you it's not the case.

Anyway, the story was something about... a narrator (who owns a really humongous dog, I think in the dream it was "160 pounds," despite being 4 months old) encounters a woman in a park or something. With a cat on a leash. That she insists is some sort of breed of dog, despite the fact that it's very definitely a cat.

I dunno, it could be funny.

Tip-Of-The-Tongue Phenomenon

"The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is the feeling of knowing something that cannot be immediately recalled. TOT is a near-universal experience in memory recollection involving difficulties retrieving a well-known word or familiar name. Despite the word-finding failure, people have the feeling that the word to be remembered (the blocked word) is figuratively on one's "tip of the tongue." It is felt that the blocked word is on the verge of imminent discovery. Inaccessibility and imminence are two key features of an operational definition of TOTs."

Mentioned by Anton Chekhov in his 1885 short story, "A Horsey Name," but mentioned a lot earlier by Aristotle.

"Cognitive psychologist Bennett Schwartz examined fifty-one languages and found that forty-five of them include expressions using the word tongue to describe the TOT state. Some languages use multiple metaphors. In Korean, the metaphor "sparkling at the end of the tongue" is used, as well as "caught in the mouth and throat." French speakers use the "tongue" metaphor and the expression "memory hole". In some languages, eg. Danish, and possibly others as well, tongue is often replaced by lip, "I got it(word) right on my lips", the concept remaining identical, and having an obvious relation to the tongue. The results of the language survey suggest that the use of the "tongue" metaphor is not idiomatic to English but instead a commonality of the TOT phenomenon... TOTs occur most frequently for names of people, but for common words as well."

Thanks, Wikipedia! *salutes*

We Must Destroy The Whales

Points of Argument:

* They take up too much space in the ocean
* They are intelligent and have a language. Could be plotting against us.
* Related point: have proportionately tiny eyes. Not trustworthy.
* Will provide valuable whale oil, ambergris, baleen, whalebone, etc. (until we run out).
* May inspire people to read Moby Dick, which is considered a classic work of literature.
* Would provide jobs in whale-killing, harpoon-manufacturing, flensing industries
* Would leave more fish for us
* Their absence would leave ecological niches available, thus spurring the evolution of new animals, which would potentially be more interesting than whales (and which might not possess sufficient intelligence and language to be dangerous)

Subargument: What About Dolphins?

Pro:
* Are technically whales, and it would therefore be dishonest and contrary to our original purpose to spare them
* Are intelligent, have language, etc., could also be plotting against us
* They engage in "free love," which could set a bad example.

Con:
* Contain less blubber
* Don't take up as much space in the ocean
* Have been known to save drowning humans
* Dolphin-swimming a lucrative tourist industry
* Can do that thing with their tail where they rise up out of the water and swim backwards and forwards
* "Flipper" a cultural icon
* They engage in "free love," which could set a good example.

Commodus: one fucked up dude.

More fascinating facts:

The lead-drinking thing, and possibly inbreeding, might be why Commodus
looks like that. I figure, the man was the fucking emperor. If a commissioned sculpture of "He Who Spared None" looked like that, can you imagine how he really must have looked? He ordered someone to be thrown in the furnace when his bath was too cold.

At the age of twelve.

(This is the same Commodus of Gladiator movie fame, by the way.)

Apparently his relatives were also dumbasses:

The task of slaying him was assigned to Claudius Pompeianus, a kinsman. But he, as soon as he had an opportunity to fulfil his mission, strode up to Commodus with a drawn sword, and, bursting out with these words, "This dagger the senate sends thee," betrayed the plot like a fool, and failed to accomplish the design, in which many others along with himself were implicated.

Crafty.

Okay, the picture in this post is the best I could find. Boy ain't right. And he looks like that in EVERY statue, adult as well. Bovine, half-asleep, dull, eyes not quite pointing the same direction. Oh Commodus. :D Even your Hercules costume and marble-chiseled abs couldn't hide it. He was succeeded as emperor by a slave. Of course, said slave was also a prefect of the city. Slavery was a bit different then.

MAN I need to study Latin again. Because I am absolutely positive that the original Latin of the text I linked is even more bluntly depraved than the 1920s translation makes out. For instance, the Latin word "subactor," which apparently means the uh, "catcher," was translated as "his partner in depravity." (And I think the word "procurer" is a euphemism for "pimp" or something. Apparently Commodus acted like a pimp's servant. Which is presumably not nearly as respectable as a pimp. This makes us wonder: what did an ancient Roman pimp wear?)

And in truth, on the occasion when he laid before the senate his proposal to call Rome Commodiana, not only did the senate gleefully pass this resolution, but also took the name 'Commodian' to itself, at the same time giving Commodus the name Hercules, and calling him a god.

What?:

Certain men who were lame in their feet and others who could not walk, he dressed up as giants, encasing their legs from the knee down in wrappings and bandages to make them look like serpents.

Also:

In his humorous moments, too, he was destructive. For example, he put a starling on the head of one man who, as he noticed, had a few white hairs, resembling worms, among the black, and caused his head to fester through the continual pecking of the bird's beak — the bird, of course, imagining that it was pursuing worms.

(Was there a cage over his head or something? Why would it stay there? I don't think starlings are that dumb.)

Oh my god, read it. It just keeps topping itself and getting more and more ridiculous:

He displayed two misshapen hunchbacks on a silver platter after smearing them with mustard, and then straightway advanced and enriched them.

Ahahahaha.

So in conclusion, Commodus was one fucked up dude. And "He displayed two misshapen hunchbacks on a silver platter after smearing them with mustard" is a strong contender for "incredible phrase of the month," because really, it can't get much more incredible, and the month is almost over.

Vanilla

Today's fascinating fact:

Vanilla comes from orchids (more specifically their fruit pods). It's native to Mexico, but is now cultivated elsewhere; Madagascar apparently grows a lot. When New Coke was introduced, the economy of Madagascar collapsed, because Coke is the biggest user of vanillin, and they had switched to an artificial one for New Coke.

According to some cookbook I make cakes from, real vanilla extract and the fake phenol-derived stuff are totally indistinguishable to humans. I'm not sure if they're actually chemically different or what. But we're talking the taste experts whose actual job it is to taste things, and identify like fourteen distinct ingredients in the most quotidian mouthful, and eat off gold spoons because regular ones affect the taste for some reason and I guess gold spoons don't.

What other metals would affect the taste of foods, and would this have a positive or negative effect? What about platinum? Electrum? Copper? (Okay, I think copper would oxidize or something, it does that easily, doesn't it? Actually, how the hell do iron and copper pans not just like, turn to rust/whatever the copper equivalent of rust is called? Is it because they're "seasoned," i.e. covered with oils or something to prevent direct metal-to-air contact? The more I find out, the more I wonder! These things are inexhaustible, I think.

Oh, and apparently in ancient Rome people were lead-poisoned in a number of ways. Through the pipes that conducted water, through their drinking vessels, through face-powder that was basically powdered lead, and, most amazingly, through actually sprinkling it into their wine on purpose because they liked the taste.

I wrote like eleven pages of the course description + notes on stuff I want to cover for the course I'm teaching. I'm getting really psyched about it.

It turns out that Jim Heynen lives in the Pacific Northwest! Maybe I should look him up this summer. According to his website, he's stopped teaching now and is writing full time, which he prefers. I think I must have been introduced to him by my babysitter, Hope, when I was no older than eleven or so. I loved the stories, and it made a big impression on me. It's funny, I think a lot of stuff Hope introduced me to has. Interesting how things you encounter early make a lasting impression on you.

I remember writing a Jim Heynen-inspired story in sixth grade or so, titled "Who [did something]," because some of his titles were like that (e.g. "Who Made Such Good Pies). The teacher "corrected" my title.

Well, look at me now, I'm a poet, I can mangle language however I want. ;) Plus, he did it first, and he's a Respected Author and whatnot.

I think I may just update this blog regularly, but with random trivia. My new favorite activity might be wikipedia-surfing. I am so excited about the things I learn. I wish other people were even half as excited!

So I didn't win anything in the earlier-mentioned contest, but my poetry was passed on to the national judges at least, and only like 8 are, so that's good, especially for a first year, A. said. I got the judges' comments; one singled out a particular poem for especial praise, and said the other poems in the manuscript ought to be more like it. The other singled out that poem as ineffective (but pointing out an aspect of it--the meter evoking light verse, undercutting the otherwise serious tone, which is something I actually intended--I guess they didn't like that or it didn't work for them though).

One also called one of my sequence poems "unnatural," and I don't really know what they mean by that. And then s/he misquoted the title. :P

So yeah, I'm not sure what the lesson is there. What some people like is exactly what other people don't like, sometimes, I guess. :) But I appreciated the comments, and thought that some of the criticisms were certainly true, like that the abovementioned sequence poem is/feels unfinished. I am grateful that I am able to write in a variety of tones and styles.


I have done a bunch of work on a longer poem for the Wordsworth and Coleridge class; I think it's about 7 pages. Right before class and having to read it I sort of frankensteined it together, actually cutting and taping things in a different order. I've never really done that before, because in circumstances where I would have had more time, I would have simply rewritten it in the different order, either longhand or on the computer.

I'm happy with it. It's not finished. But I like it and I like reading stuff out loud. I wrote a fair portion of it today at Starbucks but the notion for it was formed in my head earlier. I'll have to let things "settle" after this very recent writing and rearrangement and see if I think they work on a later rereading.

So I feel positive and satisfied with my work, both the work I recently created and the ideas I have for new projects.

If only I felt the same way about the two critical papers I need to do for another class, one a revision and the other a paper from scratch. :) I don't want to write any of this crap, I just want to write my own "creative" stuff. It's been very interesting to be one of a handful of MFA people in a class with mostly PhD students; our approaches are so blatantly different and that gets hammered home again and again. Like my response to a fellow poet's paper had to do with... well, authorial stuff. How does our intention, what we write and want to convey, relate to what's read, the thing created as now apart from us, as something that can get passed down (or not) over time, and read quite differently than what we meant?

Whereas another's response was about authorial intent and the ethics of dealing with different versions of a manuscript as an editor.

Or the professor will get quite excited about something for its implications of reading a poem from a certain philosophical framework, and that just makes my head spin. I... don't think I relate to poetry and poets that way. And I don't know why this should continue to be surprising! It's enjoyable to realize that difference though.

I am thinking about teaching next year, how I want to teach, what I want to do. I don't think we'll be doing any long fiction, by which I mean longer than a couple pages. It's my opportunity to foist my own desires and interests on students. :D I think it will be good.

Since I haven't written in a while I should also mention that I went through a sort of constipated period, and then unloaded a packet of like five poems upon my cohort. People don't seem to like the constipated metaphor, perhaps because it not only evokes shit, but likens one's writing to shit. B. and I came up with a much more pleasing metaphor, about regurgitating owl pellets. The author presumably being the owl, the delicate bones of shrews and mice inside the pellet being all the good stuff, or something.

2-sentence stories

So earlier this week I got shit together to enter a contest, in both fiction and poetry. I spent a lot more time tweaking and freaking out about the fiction one, which is maybe stupid as that's not my "primary" (i.e. theoretically stronger) genre, but on the other hand maybe it therefore needs more tweaking. My last-minute nitpicks were less and less relevant, like "Oh my god what ORDER do I put the poems in" or "Oh my god do I italicize the titles or put them in small caps??" or "Oh my god what FONT do I use?" Which maybe is good as at least I'm not last-minute freaking about the content of the work itself, as that felt reasonably finished?

Not that I wasn't like, "This poem sucks, should I even include it?"

I feel like I have a lot of stale or inert poems that need to be workshopped but I don't want to because they're old and I'm sick of them.

Ended up writing a thing the other night at the reading/at dinner which is... okay. It was about those 2 skeletons that were found embracing, which I guess like everyone else had planned to write about too. But I did it first. Bwahaha.

What I found fucked up about the article about that I read was that they were all, "Maybe the guy died and the woman was sacrificially killed to accompany him to the afterlife." What the fuck? What kind of evidence is there for that besides "fucked up assumptions"? Hell, maybe the GUY was sacrificed to accompany HER to the afterlife. They both were young and had arrows in them. Don't see how that leads to the scenario they suggested.

I've been thinking a bunch about what I'll do when I teach next year. Because I have to teach next year and don't know what to do. Or I do have a fair amount of ideas but am sort of afraid my students will hate me for making them do them :D

In total I have lost like 2 days to sleep this week, one post contest submitting and one yesterday just... because I suck.

But one of my hypnogogic or perhaps hypnopompic ideas was: 2-sentence stories. And no long-ass sentences to get around it.

My favorite one that I came up with, which I will probably find far more amusing than anyone else in the world:

"Aaaaah! I'm being sharpened! Oh my god! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" screamed Woody. But nobody heard him, and nobody cared, because he was a pencil.


I guess technically that's more than 2 sentences if you count his agonized ejaculations as individual sentences. I don't care.

I came up with another thing which I guess is also more than 2 sentences "technically" but it actually prompted a story which is now several pages so there.

Oh for the stick-to-it-iveness to finish things! We inevitably have more ideas than we complete, but I don't want a Coleridgean ratio of grand-idea-to-completed-works.

I am definitely going to make my students turn in an observation journal though.

I suck at titles in blog form too

Well, I certainly haven't updated in a while.

I went through and reorganized the files on my computer, and in order to do this I naturally opened some documents with enigmatic titles, the contents of which I didn't know. And I was really pretty impressed with my writing. Though most of it was prose.

As I mentioned before I've been writing a fair amount of prose, fiction and non, which is fine in and of itself except that I can't workshop it. It's stupid of me to think I can't actually show it to my friends and get their feedback because they are poets, of course. But I also feel generally less secure about writing prose fiction, due to my comparative lack of workshop and upper-level thinkin'-bout-craft experience. There are probably well-known ideas and issues that I am oblivious to except on the dimly-sensed instinctual level.

Wrangling with a piece written a few months ago. I am trying to get stuff in shape for a contest, a contest with money.

I am submitting a fiction piece, but one problem is that the minimum page requirements are 15 pages. And mine is not fifteen pages, it's like eleven. How strict are they about that, I have to wonder? Because otherwise I might be compelled to do some padding out additional development and or document format fiddling.

Been reading Wordsworth and Coleridge, as I'm taking a class on them. I'm very fond of Coleridge. But I just have to say, those dead sailors in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner are up and down like marionettes. Not that it's all about RoAM, of course. His notebooks alone are worth reading.

It is fucking cold here, and I don't like that. But I do like ice and snow.

I may begin updating this with not-directly-about-writing-poetry posts, BTW.

Dayum, no wonder Statius was ranked with Ovid and Virgil.

Of course it's so hard to tell what of this is due to Statius and what is due to the translator; so much hinges on a good translation. This translation, by Charles Stanely Ross, is really excellent. It's iambic pentameter; no strict rhyme scheme but there is some effort to rhyme or have near-rhymes on occasion.

This is very good.

Having to turn in my portfolio made me realize that I've actually produced a fair amount of writing; I've been overwhelmed class-wise, and feeling that I didn't have as much time to write as I wanted.

Another issue is that I've been writing a lot of prose, which is all well and good except that I can't workshop it.

Today was the last day of my Chaucer class, which was excellent; I still have to finish my poem for that class.

I am starting the Thebaid, by Statius (translated by Charles Stanely Ross).

Ore

Did I mention that I started my MFA program? Because I did. Anyway. I wrote a long (like 5 pages in Word, but of course as poets we generally don't go all the way to the edge of the page with each line) thing in response to a prompt. And felt good about it. And went back over it again and didn't feel so good about it. It goes both ways. Sometimes you're like "meh" and stuff is just sort of pouring out of you in that altered writer state and you pretty much type it up just as it was in your notebook and it turns out to be awesome and in need of little revision. And sometimes you think it's awesome and you read it over and it's not quite so awesome. But I still see it as sort of the raw ore that contains what I need, what I'll work with and refine. It's there, hewn up from whatever state I was in, the raw ideas and connections I need to work on and figure out. There is stuff in there you don't even realize until someone else points it out.

What else it can do

Another thing I want to get into a bit is that I think these days we both expect too much and too little of poetry.

Consider this: for centuries, for as long as we have had written records, really, the primary form of "fiction," of tale-telling in the so-called western world, was in verse. There were chronicles and such, but the first prose fiction you really get in Western Europe is at about the turn of the millenium. From Iceland. Other than that, the tales are all in verse. Poetry is the medium for storytelling, for keeping the stories alive. It is the thing done in halls when it is dark and cold outside. It is the thing that gains you entrance to a king's court, it is the thing that passes down all your lore and stories, all the things that keep your culture's soul alive. It is a primary form of entertainment. It, verse, is the primary form, I repeat, in which stories are communicated. Not prose, which is now the ubiquitous "respectable" form of storytelling it seems.

The long epics, the names after names of who came from whom and did what, the sacred histories of a people, were in verse. They're much easier to remember that way, for one thing. They are compact, tightly packed.

Now poetry is seen as marginal, frivolous. More on that, maybe, some other time. It is expected to be personal, not public. To be temporal, not timeless. To capture some moment, some feeling, some epiphany--not to contain a history and a people, the life of a hero or of big characters, characters as real to you or more as your family

But poetry now is also expected to perform significant duties, heavy duties for small words. A poem, if it is good, is now expected to change you. To hit you in the head, make your heart skip a beat, provide some revelation, take the cover off some corner of the world. And that's well and good, and poetry can do that. But frankly I don't always like that, because it's hard to feel so much. There are poets (Sharon Olds comes to mind) whose work is so good, but hard for me to read, because it is like my flesh is being torn open. You can't have that all the time, or I can't, because I'm busy enough trying to keep myself together without a poem coming in and fucking with me all the time.

Maybe also poetry can change you subtly, poem by poem. Because they are good and just because they are works of language, stories. Change you, become part of you, the way that everything you eat does. Giving you fuel to keep living, knitting into your flesh and bones gradually, so you wouldn't even notice hardly. Instead of transforming you drastically like Alice's cake, so that the world is a different shape, so that your body is reeling and uncertain of where it is or ought to be now. Poems that build in you and build on themselves, the true treasure-hoard of any people.

I want poems like that, I want poems that tell me a story. It was foolish, wasn't it, to think that I can't tell stories any more, being a poet. That that is a job for the "fiction" people, who are like some separate breed I don't have the attention span to keep up with. And it is not that such poems don't challenge you, make you laugh or make you sad. They just don't need to, and aren't meant to, fuck with you, you know? They're doing something else, they're telling a story.

Heh, there was a time, really not very long ago at all, when I thought that good poetry was about making some amazing line that would cave your head in with its mind-blowing aptness. About refiguring some little piece of the world some way in words so that you gasped at its simultaneous freshness and rightness. That is just one trick. A good trick but maybe a cheap one, flashy, like a bang and lights, that does startle your heart, admit it, make you aah inside. But there are lots of other tricks, that may be older, that may take more craft.

What about the trick of making a whole world live? About making a man, a woman, live? About making them live for centuries before the waking eyes of the people? About giving that gift, to a people? That's a grand gift, and will nourish for a long long time. It may be like the magic table in fairy tales, that you feast from and is still laden for you, always.

Those who can trap the world in apt lines do have my admiration, envy sometimes maybe. Those who make a world and make it live, have my abiding love and honor.

I shall probably clean this up; I'm tired and my head is fuzzy and usually when I read these things over they seem foolish and young and brash, my points too ill-defined or too sweeping and dismissive.

Second Person

Haven't updated for a while, obviously. I recently began my MFA program, though, so I will have a lot to think and write about. When I am not busy.

I realized recently that I have been writing a fair amount of stuff in the second person. That was an assignment once, in an undergraduate poetry class. We explored some of the things that a second-person point of view gives you. Uh, the poem. Reader. Whatever.

Firstly, an "I" as a narrator is potentially unreliable. Why are they speaking to us, what do they have to hide? Plus the whole personal/confessional poetry thing is done quite often enough, and even if the 1st person narrator != the author, that's the expectation readers may come into the poem with. I'm really not much into the personal confessional sort of thing myself. I'm more interested in the external than the internal, maybe. (Even when the external is an embodiment of the internal, or vice versa.) I'm more interested in birds than I am in some stranger's emotions.

Secondly, with "you," the reader is immediately placed in an intimate position: they're being asked or invited (commanded maybe?) to represent a certain perspective, to experience it perhaps. "You do this," you are told, "You are like this." You are put into the position of that person.

Third, it can establish a relationship between the author and the reader; it is as though the author is addressing the reader. So long as this is not didactic, this may give a refreshing sense of involvement. It's a "giving," in a way, to the reader. You ask or require that "they" be included. Because it's a lot to ask, really, to write all about yourself and expect perfect strangers to really care.

Fourth, in my experience... this is not a case of putting the reader in the subject's place. It is about speaking for and to a subject directly, a subject who is not the reader. The conversation, then, is between myself (the author) and the subject; the reader may look on at our communication.

Er, I could go on about this but I really want to keep going with the 2nd person thing as I think it's potentially very rich. :)

Fresh Feedback

In a lot of ways getting feedback on your poems from "laymen" is far more useful than getting it from fellow poets. I don't mean "laymen" in some sort of condescending way. As a writer, your audience isn't just fellow poets. At least mine isn't. That would be an awfully small audience, and poetry has a pretty small audience as it is, relative to other genres. People shouldn't need to be "experts" in order to appreciate, enjoy, and "get" poetry, any more than they ought to be a book reviewer, literary agent, or English professor, in order to enjoy fiction. And if you're writing with the expectation that the common people just aren't going to get your poetry, then I wonder who the hell you're writing for.

As a reader, I'm not automatically so intrigued by your shit that I want to solve a bunch of puzzles in order to get anything from it. I already have my puzzle-books. If your stuff has some sort of meaning on some higher, intellectual meta-level, awesome. But it has to be good and interesting in the first place, or else I don't care. Absurdist plays are like that. Waiting for Godot or The Bald Soprano are interesting and entertaining in their own right, not just because they were doing something different with the genre itself. Impress me, make me like your work, and then maybe I'll grant you the favor of paying attention to your work on that level. Life is short and there are things I can enjoy immediately, without having to slave over it, like leaves and the smells of things, and good writing.

Poets have generally had more practice reading, analyzing, and critiquing poetry. In a lot of ways, I think this means that when we hear or read a poem, we approach it less freshly. We know how it works behind the scenes, we've been seasoned and maybe jaded by numerous workshops and seminars, by reading other people's horrible, mediocre, and good poetry, and we've become accustomed to approaching poetry as a critiquer, and a fellow creator. It would be a bit like a professional chef going to a restaurant. They'd notice things about the food's preparation, presentation, and so forth, that most people might not pay attention to. Does that mean they appreciate food more deeply? I don't know, perhaps in some ways. They've been trained to notice subtleties. But that also means that whenever they experience it, part of their mind is consumed with analyzing the experience itself, which can distract from a direct and open-minded perception of the food. It's not as though non-chefs are incapable of subtle, intense appreciation of food.

So I admit, when I hear someone else's poem, part of me is in critique mode. This may be because most of the time I've heard poetry recently, it's been in a workshop setting. What would my impressions be, without that, without a part of my mind calculating what effect the poem has on me? Just experiencing and not trying to judge how good a job they did, to figure out what they were doing there and how they were doing it?

Which brings it down to last night, when I read some of my poems for people I knew, friends of my mother's. My friends too--I knew them, I'd grown up with them, and I usually did feel more comfortable around adults than with someone my own age. When I asked for responses, what I got wasn't "Yeah, I liked that part, you should do something else with this line." What I got was, "Here is what your poem did to me." In a direct, frank, and visceral way. And that is what I want to know.

That is the entire point of what I am doing. That is the point of poetry and probably of most writing. I am trying to do something to you. I am not describing what I feel, I am trying to make you feel something, to experience something. To duplicate in you something that I experienced. The feedback of professionals is extremely useful in some ways; the feedback of amateurs is extremely useful in others. And in ways I don't often get. When you take too many workshops, you don't get that feedback any more. You have to use your own judgment to determine what the poem is going to do to someone.

I don't know, maybe you have to get to a certain point in your craft before that sort of feedback is useful. To go through a period where people told you to cut a line, and you didn't already know you ought to. But you rarely hear anymore, "This is what it stirred up in me."

And I guess what I was doing worked. That one poem, where the protagonist was sickened by anxiety, they felt ill. They felt coldness at the back of their neck, they saw the air shimmer. "Like a subway ride," someone said.

At the end of the other poem--I was trying to read those, then move on to other poems, so I wouldn't be left with those as the last--she just said, softly, almost as a surprise, a revelation: "You loved him."

I did.

Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling

Now I know where I'm going to go for grad school, and I'm happy about that, and happy about the program. I can't believe people are going to pay me so much money to study and write poetry. So much for it being a totally devalued art form, I guess. Go patrons.

I also got a scholarship that will allow me to go back to Rome next summer, I think. That will be really good. I miss Rome so much.

This summer I think I'll spend a lot of time on the beach, in order to make up for the lack of Rome. (This involves poking about in mud and sand and looking at invertebrates, not lying in the sand working on my melanoma. Italy involved beach observations too, except it was a different beach, and the water was pretty warm. There was black and gold sand, and smooth rocks that clattered, and I let the waves wash me up on them like a mermaid.

In Nice the rocks were so much larger, and clattered louder. Sucked backwards and forwards, falling off steeply at the tide's edge. Made me think of Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach. But the first couple of stanzas aren't the best part of the poem. I've tried to memorize it a couple of times. The last stanza is the one that punches you in the chest, and the one that he wrote first. I first read it in Fahrenheit 451, when I was what, eleven? It hurt me then like it hurt them all, the women whose upper soul-layers were evaporated like steam under the heat, hurt in the good way that good poetry does. A few years later, having reread the book maybe, I asked my English teacher what the poem was (it was unaccredited in the book). Recently, I don't remember how or where, I found out that Arnold wrote that last stanza first. I'm not sure why he bothered to add the first couple of stanzas. It would have been great with just those last two:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Maybe it was too much, that stanza alone, like a bolt out of the dark. He wanted to ease you into it, wavelets before the crash. Maybe "The Sea of Faith/Was once, too," without an explicit reference, would have bothered him, or grated against the prevailing styles.

(But I feel relatively ignorant about other poets' work, the history of poetry and its criticism and so forth, compared to my peers. I'm afraid that that doesn't interest me as much as writing itself does.)

Heard back from another school; I got on the waitlist. Which I don't feel too bad about, because they accept only 5 people. This also means, I think, that the wait list probably isn't humongous. After all, would they expect every one of the applicants they accepted to decline, and then the first five on the waitlist, etc.? The respondant also said that naturally, she expected a "writer of [my] caliber" would have been accepted at some program or other. That's very nice of them. But of course if every program said that, I'd be screwed. :)

Acceptance and Rejection

I've been accepted to one school, rejected from Iowa, and put on the waitlist for another, the one that was sort of my first choice.

Oh, Iowa, one day when I am acclaimed you will look back and say, "Wow, look what sensitivepoet has done! Fools that we were, to reject her from our workshop."

I didn't want to go there anyway.

No, really, I would have liked to get in, but it would have been mostly for my ego, to know that Iowa thinks I'm awesome; there were a variety of reasons why I was leaning towards not going there, even if I were accepted.

At least the one school I got into offers a full ride. If I hadn't gotten at least one acceptance I'd be in a far worse mood now.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

While dreaming the other night, I had an idea for a poem. The title, premise, and some line fragments and images. I planned to write it down, of course, but didn't get around to it. Then another morning a couple of days later I remembered that I'd dreamt of a poem, but I couldn't recall any of it. Luckily, maybe assisted by my hypnopompic state, I was able to recall more or less all of it, I think. It will be tricky because I'm not really sure where it's going, but I like it. I like the story it's based on. Not that it's a pleasant story, but it does stick in your head. I remember first reading her name, as a child, when I was searching in a baby names book, for names for a cat. Although the sound of the name wasn't really beautiful to me, I liked the meaning.

Tools

Many writers are picky about what they use to write with, i.e. writing implements and paper. I am too; luckily, I don't need anything particularly esoteric. My preference is to write with a mechanical pencil (HB lead or something medium soft, point size doesn't matter too much). If I've got to write with pen, I like a Bic ballpoint. I have a fancy pen that I received as a present, but it doesn't write very well; it has a lot of drag, the ink doesn't come easily.

I'm not sure why I prefer to write with a pencil, since I almost never erase anything. Rather, I'll cross it out if I decide not to go with it. One advantage to that is that I can see what I originally put down. Maybe it's the idea that I could erase, if I really wanted to.

A mechanical pencil writes quickly and easily, as long as the lead isn't hard and scratchy. One drawback with a pen, at least with the way I write, is that it tends to get less legible, because when writing quickly I sometimes won't take the tip all the way off the paper, and there will be a drag of ink connecting letters or words.

I like notebooks with ruled paper. Not spiral-bound; those are icky, the spirals are inconvenient, take up space and get snagged in things, and there are those little strings of torn paper that get everywhere. I've used Moleskine journals and liked those; they're a good size, and the string around it is convenient. (Cheaper journals with the same design are good too; I got a cute one with bugs on the front of it. Come to think of it, I don't know that it was any cheaper. But it wasn't a Moleskine. Moleskines have pretentious points, too, because they were supposedly used by various famous writers and artists, I can't remember who.) That way the notebook won't get stuff wedged between the pages or bent out of shape in a bag, and a pen between the pages won't slip out.

A notebook I really love is a Miquelrius "Leather-Look Pad". There are many pages, probably at least 350, but densely packed--the spine is maybe 3/4 inch thick--yet the pages aren't thin or flimsy. It has such a nice hand when you open it; it feels very nice to flip through. The cover is fake leather and sturdy, and protects it from water and such. They come in various colors, and in "squares" (graph paper style) or ruled. I just wish that the ruling was a bit more narrow, because I could write more lines per page.

Writing utensils can be a big deal, if you do a lot of writing (and are anal, neurotic, and/or just picky). My mechanical pencil ran out of lead in a cafe, and I was very upset. I started surreptitiously looking at the writing implements of people around me, in case anyone had a mechanical pencil with 0.5 lead that I could borrow. Finally I just wrote with a Bic ballpoint. :P

Okay, we've got a general word for "thing you write with;" you can say "implement" or "utensil" or something. So what do we call the paper? "Medium" or something? In any case:

What are your preferences with writing implements and... media? How important is it that you have Just The Right Pen?