Working On It

So I'm writing a poem every day since I got here. Here are two that Brette said were alright.

August 9, 2009

What Is Still Literal

“…[T]his vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric—and vaporous—metaphor: the cloud.” – The New York Times Magazine

“Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems.” – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The cloud doesn’t hold a character,
a bit or byte of memory, a digital image.

The cloud is an animal, a cetacean
that grieves and the sky

its own whale-road, full of forgiveness.
The cloud is a Ford Fairlane

with a long hood and fins.
The cloud is also a loon, loud

wings flapping against the water.
The cloud isn’t a metaphor

but a shape that doesn’t hold
like the loss of joint memory, a place

where we held externally our interiors.
The cloud is not a place

to store data or one to decide
who remembers what. It is a cloud.


August 10, 2009

The Tipping Point

Skitter is too cacophonous a word
to transmit the sound
of a mouse sliding down the plastic
trash bin’s side. S doesn’t
soften the k to reflect the futility
of four paws up and then back,
the hasty upshot and heavy
return to bottom. If gravity is
relative to size, then we can all know
how the mouse feels coming down.
We can all understand
the convergence of some dozen ants
that creep in, defying gravity,
to take out the mouse.

Lorca

Gainesville Chapter Book: Chapter 13: In which our heroine...

I had a really wonderful afternoon in Gainesville last week. I wandered and drove around to a lot of places by myself. Spent about three hours just stomping out ghosts and reading poetry in the park near where I used to live.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with that necessarily. And if I were taking Robert Bly's advice (I'm finally reading the entirety of Leaping Poetry) and running on wild association instead of sluggish association...

"I had a really wonderful afternoon in Gainesville last week. I wandered and drove around to a lot of places by myself. Spent about three hours just stomping out ghosts and reading poetry in the park near where I used to live.

Last summer I wrote some poetry that I'm not too embarrassed to post here, even though I haven't touched it since then."

Letting the Fish

“Feel the backbone with the knife,”
he says to you, as if a knife could feel.

The eye looks upon its entrails
And you cringe at the after-fight:
its disguise gone, he reveals
the filet beneath the skin.

The lake laps, not to question
But to affirm this ritual
And the eventual return
Of Y-bones, scales and broken might

To its sun-starved depths, an ersatz pike
Set free again unto the Earth.


Palimpsest

Deceiver of the body, reflexive pain
Pulses in the place between

What is felt and what is spoken.
We call the shore dry land opposed

To water, but mean the two
Must meet. Your parents in a photo,

Younger than you, exist there, bright,
Having not imagined your life

As the throbbing spreads to your hand
Just as the sea rewrites the sand.


We Have Become Antique in Our Beliefs

Space between buildings carves a city of inverses
As the skyline cuts shapes in the horizon
Like miniature headstones of another universe
Where the sun forgets to do its rising.

The city in relief is the toad entwined in the hare
And when you see the young girl’s fur in the old
Woman’s bonnet, the illusion is laid bare.
Then the transparent air grows

Solid to our eyes and matter
Is pushed into silhouette. Our figures seem
Not like plodding things but better.
When robbed of crosses, golden rings,

Intentions like sharpened knives with no handles,
Cuff links and brooches, everything new,
We look less like innocent animals
And more as criminals just before death do.

Mr. W

- The funniest movie is here. Find it

I'm showing this for personification in my poetry unit. Thanks, Bretterson.

Brooklyn Writers

If only the NY Times showed reciprocity in the same way as the Village Voice feature "Hate Us or Love Us," given the amount of times I quote the Times. We'd get more traffic.


There's a piece in the Book Review this week by Brooklyn-based writer Colson Whitehead called, "I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It." What I love about the piece is that yes, it does seem a little silly to confuse "a geographical and economic accident with an aesthetic movement." It's true, there is nothing inherently creative about Brooklyn as compared to any other place in the universe. Although the water in the Gowanus canal does probably flow with some funky mojo.

What's interesting to me is the fact that my agreeing with Whitehead is, in a way, ironic. One of my favorite books of poetry of all time is Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, and a big reason I love it is for O'Hara's bopping-around-New-York thing. The first time I came to visit Brooklyn (and on subsequent trips), I wrote lots. I got pieces of multiple poems out of it. I thought a lot about how moving here would influence me as a writer.

Now that I live here, I haven't really written much of anything. I wrote a poem for a wedding, which included F train imagery (though I didn't name the train). I wrote a poem for a funeral, which included Manhattan skyline imagery. And that's it.

If living in this place influences me as a writer in any way other than superficially by giving me urban imagery, that'd be nice. But I probably won't find that out until much later, in a reflective mood, when I'm writing again. And probably not until I live somewhere other than Brooklyn.

PS. Whitehead asserts that if you Google brooklyn writer you'll get "Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?" But, if you Google image search brooklyn writer you'll get this guy:

More Cop Out Blogging

Hoping to get a job in the next week. I'm one of two people left in my class to have not landed myself a permanent teaching job. But I've got high hopes and two teaching demonstrations this week for jobs. Wednesday and Thursday. Think of me if you get the chance. I got an ominous e-mail from the NYC Teaching Fellows office about my status in the program being zilch if I don't get a job by February 1st. The two schools I'm going to this week seem like my best prospects to date. So there's that.

In the meantime, before there's real news to report, I was watching the Sundance channel today and actually saw a poem on TV. Granted, it's Billy Collins, and I don't particularly care for his mainstream platitudes, but I was happy to see a poem on TV nonetheless. A Youtube search turned up a few others, so I've posted them here:

Get a CLUE

Last night I attended the final event in a series called "Between the Lines" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). First, I'm ashamed to say that was my only visit to BAM since I moved here. But I am trying to get out more.

Anyway, A Public Space, the magazine I interned for over the summer, commissioned some works from writers and partnered to put on the evening of readings and video. One of the pieces was a video called CLUE: Color Location Ultimate Experience, directed by A.L. Steiner and choreographed by a duo called robbinschild. Here's a tiny snippet of the 10-minute or so clip we saw (I hear there's an even longer full-length version):



The clip really doesn't do it justice (it's grainy, small and short compared to the real thing), but I wanted to post it because it sparked a connection in my mind with another piece of art that I recently read: the novel U.S.! by Chris Bachelder.



The connection between them is an appreciation for collage as a meaning maker. The thrilling part of reading U.S.! is the force with which the collage of the first half of the book propels the main character (Upton Sinclair) through the second, more traditionally narrative half of the book. In the first part you find press releases, letters, eBay listings, songs, poems, phone logs, interviews, a whole pastiche lifted and/or twisted from other sources.

Similarly the video CLUE, which was more collage than directed narrative, provoked emotion through the stacking of image upon image and the heightened tension created by video played both forward and backwards. Even more than the choreography of the dance in the video, collage itself made the meaning.

The whole point of the tenuous-seeming connection I'm trying to make in this post is that sometimes it's nice to look outside linear time and narrative in a way that isn't so self-aware.

And here's another clip of CLUE:

Poet Top

I'm inspired to write by the stupidity of this item I found as I was browsing Gap online. (I go through periods of heavy on-line window shopping every so often).

Amongst the rest of the outerwear (isn't everything other than underwear actually outerwear?) such as the patch pocket coat, the puffer jacket, and the three-button blazer, this little number didn't really catch my eye. Until I realized it was the poet top.

Obviously when I realized what it was, I had to have it. Actually no, that's not true. It still looks like a bland, brown item to me.

But, I was taken with the genius of calling something a poet top. I wondered, if I wear it, will I write more or better poems? Does wearing this boring top make the poet more creative because she must then fight her outward appearance as a dullard? Is this the top Emily Dickinson used to wear? Robert Frost? Does William Logan have a closet full of these in Gainesville?

55% silk, 45% linen. Dry clean. Oh right, Gap. You expect me to believe a poet of little means will send this top to the cleaners?

The details sound like a poem in themselves:

THE POET TOP

Shirring around collar-
less neckline, button front, hits
the hip, puffy sleeves.

So now you know what I want for Christmas. On sale for $24.99.