freezer lad

I should really update this more frequently, and with more poetry related stuff.

I'm doing this poem a day thing, which has been very helpful for me. Today I started out trying to write a humorous poem chronicling the origins of Freezer Lad (who apparently is some sort of dodgy superhero or superhero sidekick) and within like 2 lines it turned into something which ended up being a sort of elegy for dead relative/coming of agey thing. PLANT METAPHORS AHOY

I still have issues with line breaks. But I think they're *good* issues, or at least I'm glad I think about it, even if I don't know what to do a lot of the time.

Aaaaaah.

I'm cataloguing stuff I've written. I seem to have a short-term memory about that--a list I compiled, a few years ago, filled w/ all these poems I've forgotten.

Oh my god I can hardly bring myself to read them. They're so bad. Or actually they're probably not that bad, I just can hardly stand reading them anyway. They make me writhe. Arrrrrgh.

I kind of want to show them to a trusted person and just get their assessment of it. So that I don't have to look at it. My eyes just want to slide off. laskjdflkasjf

line breaks

I do not know what is up with me + lineation these days, and I should be working on my own thesis or reading someone else's rather than writing this post. Ah well. Factors that go into line breaks:

1) form (e.g. certain number of syllables or beats, end-rhyme)
2) breath/phrase/clause breaks (places one would naturally pause slightly or where there is a discrete clause. breaking across those can create greater momentum and sometimes a jarring sensation, which can be okay/desirable in some circumstances but generally not, I think)
3) making the first and last words of the line interesting and/or significant. We pay most attention to the words at the beginning and ends of lines, because of orthography, structure of English, left to right reading, etc.
4) similarly, placing more emphasis on a certain word than there might be otherwise (in unlineated writing or in a lineation that more closely followed breath or phrase breaks)
5) evoking different or multiple meanings (keeping in mind productive vs. nonproductive ambiguity, that is, ambiguity that actually enhances meaning or expands things in some useful or meaningful way, rather than just cramming in extra connotations/weirdness for the hell of it)
6) surprise or irony

So yeah. A few years ago I seemed to be more into the latter 3, especially doing the unproductive ambiguity thing. I was so all about trying to make poems and lines that made the reader feel like the back of their head was blown off (however ED phrased that exactly). Now I'm really not. That is one flashy trick out of a whole bag of them, and there are better ones. Now I feel like I'm focused more on the first two, or more than I was earlier at least. I don't want to be breaking lines just because it's "poetry" and there are line breaks. One poem recently I was like, fuck it, it will be a prose poem. I don't know, line breaks are awkward for me now.

Oh, also I forgot 7), how it looks on the page. This is an irritating one.

Whew.

Another inadvertent blood sacrifice to the Hopwoods.

Hopefully it will dry and look like coffee smears or something.

I feel proud of my manuscript, but now I'll be obsessively wondering whether I stuffed them in the binders wrong or something.

look what i found

Okay, so I'm looking over my work because I have to submit the first draft of my thesis to workshop, and submit stuff to a contest, very shortly (and on the same day). A couple weeks ago I just complied all my shit and put it in alphabetical order. Just now I went through my brain and computer to find poems which I hadn't included and there were 23, which I'd totally forgotten about.

This is probably because I rule.

Okay, fine, a lot of them are basically ore at the moment. I didn't say they were all great poems. But perhaps I am unusually productive after all. It doesn't feel that way. I think of all the time I spend NOT writing.

So much work to do. I was looking at a list of the poems I submitted to the contest last year and was like, no WONDER I didn't win, I can't believe I even made it to the judges. I must have drastically improved/changed as a poet. At least, I hope that's true. I suppose it's possible that I simply have a different perspective on my previous work, just because I'm more removed from it now, and that I am making all sorts of equally clueless blunders. That I am just as bad, but my blind spot has shifted around, so to speak.

So much revision needed. And so little free time. I just want to have to do nothing but write. Caffeine is my friend.

Oh, I think a lot about titles. What will make someone pick up a book? Issues:
--Will it make someone pick up the book?
--Is it lame and potentially eyeroll-inducing?
--Is it a reference to a strong poem, and/or possibly one people might consider emblematic of the whole work? (because people are going to try to make that connection--including they're actually reading your poetry in the first place, of course)
--Is it okay to have a title which tangentally relates to your poems, or even doesn't relate to it entirely? I feel like it's cheating. Because sometimes I have way more fun coming up with titles than anything else.

production, theological quandaries

In the last couple of days I've printed out most of the stuff that I've written over the last year and a half. Here is a picture of me holding it up. It feels weird, and it does not feel like that much. I was told that the amount I've produced is "exceptionally productive," but I dunno. Maybe if it was all poetry, because if so that would probably come to 2 or 3 times the poems I have now; about half of it or a little more is fiction. That contains only one finished story though. Apparently I have about 30 pages of SDN, which is more than I thought.

Maybe I feel weird or like it's not as much as I'd like just because I want to produce so much more, I have all sorts of ideas. I guess I should be grateful for that; it's just hard to find the time/fortitude/inspiration/etc. to finish a lot of these things.

I'm reading this really cool book, "The History of Hell." A quote:

Intelligent, educated men, who, if they had been born centuries later, might have explained the ineffable or metaphorical in terms of quarks and black holes in space, instead turned their attention to such considerations as whether food consumed during a lifetime would be part of the body at the resurrection. (Yes, was the answer, but then interesting questions of cannibalism arose.)

Hahaha.

sorrow's springs

I did my little presentation on poetry and imperfection today. I hope L wasn't... offended or off-put. Because I just don't really know how I can engage with the idea of the perfect poem, or of what is beautiful to me--which was really the point, right?--without dealing w/ imperfection, temporariness, ephemerality, etc.

I felt like crying while reading the poems (not mine, 2 auden and 1 roethke. maybe I will post them) and pretty much couldn't even get thru the last line of my paper. then i went into my office and cried, for what (i agree with hopkins) is really the best and only reason: that everything i love and everything that is beautiful will pass away.

sorrow's springs are the same--yes. Loss is loss, over and over again, in different forms. I don't know about it being myself I mourn for--because I am very concerned over my own mortality, of course. And if I could live for a million years that would take a lot of the sting out of losing things, because I'd like to see what would happen. But I don't know, I think I could die in more peace knowing or believing that the things I loved would persist after me; that might be enough of a comfort.

Thinking of that James Dickey poem... while the notion of ceasing to exist, being unable to perceive anything, and moreover, unaware that you are unable to perceive anything--the idea of say, actually being killed and eaten by a wild animal holds no terror. I think I would be comfortable with going like that, actually. Not literally comfortable, because being chewed up is no doubt painful. But I could accept my end if it was at the hands of something beautiful that I respected, that overpowered me, and that I could help to go on.

Because I think of "immortality," persistence w.r.t. art--I have been terribly ambitious. I have burned to add something huge and lasting to stories, literature, etc. (I don't know how ambitious I am now, because I guess I feel like I have to do this, and will do this, regardless of the "rewards"). But I think I'd be okay with people not knowing it was *me,* or thinking someone else had done it, so long as something I created could persist.

Maybe this is just a translation of the reproductive urge, which thankfully I don't feel in a literal sense, or maybe, too, it's something less selfish--a desire to give something, a thing that will live and give back and exist outside yourself, for others besides yourself--that your life does not end when your life does, that you can affect things in a positive way beyond the span of your life.

Anyway, shit, I basically pulled a Margaret. Story of my childhood, if not my whole life. I meant the "sensitive poet" thing facetiously, but...shit, man.

SDN

I was pretty grumpy today and still sort of am. I went to a bubble tea place and ended up working on this story I'd totally forgotten about. I about doubled the word count. Go me. I think I could finish it in a month, yeah? Why not. It's silly and I like it. How many words of prose are there per page, on average?

It starts out normal and pastoral and gradually gets crazy.

finding money in coat pockets

Met with my professor today and showed her some random poems that I sort of dug up off my hard drive, as the idea was to show her stuff that we wouldn't be workshopping. And she was incredibly positive and encouraging, to the point of suggesting only very minor revisions and talking about publication o_o

So that was pretty good for the self esteem.

And then I was looking back thru my notebook today and found some other stuff I'd forgotten about. Like she said, it's like finding money in the pocket of your old coat or something. Or rediscovering an item of clothing in your closet that maybe you didn't like much before, or that didn't work before, but that is now awesome. It's somehow better, in ways, than getting something new, because there's both the novelty and the rediscovery/recovery.

Read Gombrowicz these last couple of days, who is awesome. Must find more.

Oh, and last night I was reading Auden--I have this book, some selected poems or other thing, which is basically his non-revised versions of earlier poems. God, they are so good, and I pretty much do prefer them to the revised ones. What is it about young voices when they're still a bit raw? Not so smoothed over. Sleater-Kinney, The Clash, Wordsworth, and Auden too. Of course he like retroactively forced this weird moral poetics back on himself. Don't know much about that... I can kind of see where he's coming from, and YET. Beauty is truth. That's what he was afraid of, I think, the lie that seems true because it is so beautiful. And what with propaganda one does have reason to fear that, and in many ways I do admire the integrity of his position. And yet. I'm a sucker for beauty.

I dunno, reading my students' poems, realizing that I'm really a sucker for sound. If it's sounding good to me I'm not so worried about what it means or whether the meaning is clear, or the image. And thinking, too, that I am grooving on and accepting weirder images/combos/associations than I might have at some earlier point. I don't know why that would be. But loosening up, grooving on the weird.

But anyway, I am reappreciating Auden and also his really interesting line breaks and enjambment. I think he'd be a really good person to study for that. Oh Auden <3

People keep asking me who I read and I sort of feel like I'm going back over and over the same dead white guys that I've already loved for years, and that makes me feel ignorant and narrow and insufficient. And yet I feel that I'm reappreciating them in new ways and on deeper levels, soooo.

And I have good suggestions for people to look at next. My professor lent me what I think will be an amazing book, by a poet who seems to sort of have my sensibility in some ways. Language has to sound/feel good! Otherwise you may as well be wearing a shirt with no pants. (Okay, that is probably not a very apt metaphor). But in any case, the sounds will carry you when the meaning and images aren't doing their full work, and vice versa. You can't just rely on the richness of *imagery.* Phanopoeia + melopoeia.

I'm thinking a bunch about logopoeia too, but I have this suspicion that my mental idea of what logopoeia is is a lot different from Pound's, and also that mine might be more complex or specified. But I think my mental version of logopoeia is pretty cool, so...

*looks at some of her writing*

I rule.

Oh, did I mention I really want an ostrich? Because I know now that I want one. One day! *sigh* Ostrich. I wish they were big enough to ride on.

Also, lmao.

Did I mention I'm really into writing ghazals now? Cuz I am.

I realized that I want poetry criticism to reduplicate or recapitulate in some way the experience of the poem.

I am digging up some older stuff I'd forgotten about, and it's pretty good. Some of it I'm not sure what to do with, and/or if fully fleshed out it could be pretty long.

Valence

Oh, and I feel like I've recently experienced a sort of state-change with regards to my appreciation for or attention to sound, in my own poetry and others', and just in language generally. I think it's due to the prosody class. So I'm happy about that. It's like another electron bumping something up to the next valence level. Or something. Because god I don't know shit about chemistry but I was trying to use that metaphor with someone last night and they didn't know what I was talking about, so at least I know about valence levels. "Level" is probably not the right word here. Nor is "about," at it implies a bit more of a grasp than I have. "Of," maybe.

And apparently there are cool other meanings of valence, like in linguistics and psychology.

OMG, that's where "ambivalence" comes from! Holy shit, I never realized that.

Awesome seagull

Although eating chips isn't healthy, so I have mixed feelings about this.

My reading was yesterday. It seems to have gone over really well. And now back to reality and comparative un-glamour. Wait, I suppose the reading was reality too. Now at least I don't have to worry about what I'm going to read.

People seem to have liked the dog one and the geese one especially.

I made some insecure comments here but deleted them.

I have to revise a poem so I can send it to a visiting poet.

Looking for old poems I'd forgotten about as things to possibly read (I have a reading Friday). Went older than I'd planned, to December 2002.

Dear god I couldn't line break for shit.

That and all the other things that jumped out at me.

Man, I'm a way better poet now. That's comforting, at least, that I've improved that much. Makes me wonder, though, how bad I'll find my current poetry in a few years :P

line breaks. also BEE PARTY.

So I was working on this poem and realized something, which is that my line breaks were possibly hiding less good words or phrases, or allowing me to ignore them or keep them in, whereas otherwise they might be more noticeable or seem more clearly problematic. So I want to continue looking at my own line breaks and maybe reconfiguring things if only to see what that shows me about words/phrases that are weaker or not quite what I was going for. That was a good epiphany and I was feeling pretty smart about myself.

Then we workshopped the poem and brought up a ton of other stuff that didn't even occur to me in that process of myopic scrutinization. This being the good of workshops I think. I think I have enough to mix things up a bit.

One of my colleagues (or whatever the hell I should call it) writes against beauty (in her own words). I think I admire that; in any case, I want to know more about that.

There is some sort of poetry and poetics meeting that's going to be happening. I wonder what the ratio of practicing poets to scholars will be. I don't think any MFA types were heading it, at least, but then again we are understaffed there to begin with.

L thought my line breaks were good, hence why it couldn't/shouldn't be a prose poem. I should probably break it up into more stanzas, because it's kind of dense.

That's probably one reason why we have line breaks and stanza breaks, besides the different semantic or sound emphasis it can put--because poetry usually uses more dense or "charged" language, and it's hard to take it all in at once unless it's more conveniently chunked for you. Sortoflikethereasonwhywehavepunctuationmarksbecausereadingsomethinglikethishurtsyoureyesandyourbrain.

Amazing, though, that people basically *did* write like that for some time.

I have to go prepare for class. The one I'm teaching. I feel like at first I was cramming in way too much syllabus wise and now the pendulum has swung the other way. But I think it's important to start small. Teaching is hard. :B I could talk a lot about all sorts of shit but unfortunately that's not the way to impart this stuff.

Hehe, I broke some sort of formatting tables.

I also told everyone about the mushroom outside my house and about how water is really blue (like its actual innate color. Hence oceans aren't all white on overcast days). And I really got excited about the notion of a bee party.

So yeah, I think I'm quickly uh, showing my true colors to the people I don't know yet. :P

BEE PARTY.

I want to throw a bee party. I *will* throw a bee party, gods willing.

describing your work

I won a prize (yay me, the money is nice but the validation, especially at a difficult time, is even better), and they asked me to write a blurb about it. And now that I've already sent the description off, I feel like it sounds retarded.

I was trying not to make it all "Bler bler, here's how profound my themes are, in academic language." But my themes are profound, dammit. :P I dunno, it just sounds a little preachy. "Only by blah blah does he reach greater awareness of his self and a communion with his surroundings."

But that's kinda what happens. >_>

Argh. Anyone wanna PR this up for me in like, 2 days?

Oh, and I took a cab today and the guy was asking me what I wrote about. And I was like, mythology and animals and biology and science and stuff. Which, again, is true, and I have no idea how much of a picture it actually gives of what I do, and/or how lame it sounds.

God, I hate when people are like, "So you wanna be a writer when you grow up? :B"

No, I am a writer. Already. Thx.

I'm not sure I really even get that. Like is "writer" the sudden completion of some process of metamorphosis? Achieved once you get a book deal, perhaps? Now I'm just munching on my leaf or coccooning myself up and turning into genetic goo, on the way to some awesome transformation. A proto-butterfly that might be snatched up by hungry birds, and therefore shouldn't call itself a butterfly yet.

I do like bug imagery, and bugs. (I like moths better than butterflies. Butterflies are too laden with twee symbolism, too overused as decorative motif. Butterflies are a monophyletic clade in Lepidoptera, and I only dimly grasp, at best, the wider significance of that although I could roughly define "monophyletic clade" using lots of hand gestures.)

But really, as far as I'm concerned, if you write, you're a writer. That doesn't mean you're a good writer, but come on, I take this seriously. It's the closest thing I have to a "vocation," and even if I had some other job, that would be the thing that pays the bills, writing being the important thing and the vital ambition.

What's that poem that's basically about this? The gist is that you spend years, you know, writing and developing shit and no one takes you seriously (e.g. "You wanna be a writer?") and then finally, at some point (e.g. book deal) everyone's all, Ooh, a writer! and it's like they suddenly get that you were one all along. Well, either that or they actually do think that you, as a writer, magically coalesced into existence at the signing of said book deal, whatever relevant writerly properties you had, or activities you engaged in, being the piled gunpowder that isn't necessarily going to ignite, the wet questionable firework, the setup. For the punchline. This is a tangle of pseudo-metaphors.

I am glad the strike tag works on this. I was afraid it wouldn't.

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.

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. >_>

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.