I wonder too...

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~Graham Greene




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Sayin it in fewr ltrs

The other day I was talking with a co-worker and made the comment that back when I was in school a mouse was just a rodent. In reply she quarried, "isn't it still?" I said, "What's that on your desk?" Her chair swerved back away, "Where?"  This isn't a a ditzy person.  Some changes we hardly bat an eye over anymore and clearly parts of language are among them.   Pauk Jury's "5 Ways Texting Is Ruining Changing English" illustrates some of the ways we've progressed (I don't mean that like it sounds) in the past few years.

I'm interested if anyone is employing or even stops to consider employing some of the common Textese language in there poetry?  Maybe for effect? Ok, I mean besides in Flarf. Such language modifications are a part of our changing culture. 

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Scoring Daily

For several weeks now I’ve had a widget on my sidebar for a site called joesgoals.com. I suppose it’s kind of confusing when you look at it because at first glance one might say why are Joe’s goals on Michael’s blog? On further look, you will find my name on it too below the graph.



The point of this post is to talk about goals. The Capricorn in me is almost a widget addict. It’s all about trying (emphasis on trying) to stay organized and effective. I think this is what all Capricorns want but we have built-in traits that tend to sabotage us.


The Joe’s Goals widget has actually been helpful because I can be as narrow or broadly focused as I want to. In my case, there were several things that were important to me. Things that are writing related and things that are health related. I decided I wanted a balanced view of what my days / weeks are like. Plus I can print out a category list by week or month to see how well I’m doing in the more specific areas.


You can give weighted points to the items. For example, I expect myself to write daily and most of the time do. I give myself 1 point for doing this. Same for journaling, and reading. Submitting poetry has become a chore to me. It’s honestly worth twice as much as say a writing session. A rejection letter gets negative points as well, and is an incentive to right away get back on the bike again so to speak after the fall. And an Artist Date is another challenge for me to take the time and energy to plan out and follow through on, hence it’s worth three points. For health I’ve factored in both positive points and negative where I’ve fallen down. I like that it keeps me focusing on the present and the future.


This little system may not be for everyone, but it’s a good fit for this Capracorn.

Your three words for 2010?

Last night I did something I’ve been intending to do for some time now. I got comfortable on the bed and pulled out a file folder with some of my poems and began separating them into stacks based on how I thought they might work into a manuscript idea that I have. I found some that I believe will work as they are. Another group that I believe could work but I feel require anything from some minor tweaking to more involved rewrites; however I can still see working. Then there are the rest of them.


I would like to have had more that I thought would be a good fit, but I still have some material that was not printed out in that folder. I have material in a couple of other places, like our desktop that I don’t use for writing any longer and just some hard copies of work that I’m not quite sure where the original files are. Fortunately I’ve gotten better about how I retain my work, but there are things that fall into the hole of historically I’ve not always been so good about it.


I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of what my goal is here, but I did set some general timelines back in September about a manuscript and I am working to stay focused on this project.


Contrary to my norm, I did make some new years resolutions and I am happy to say that at this tinder age of 2010, I’ve stuck to them.


This has nothing to do with my specific resolutions, but I was trying to think if I could select a three year mantra for 2010, what it might be. There were several things that came to my mind, but in the final analysis, I chose these: “Read, write, more.”



What three words define what you wish for in 2010?

What the poem wants...

Earlier this morning, I roughed out onto paper a couple stanzas of something trying to become a poem. At lunch time I revisited it and decided I think I can build upon it and take the poem somewhere when it wants to be. Right now there are more pieces of it in my mind that it wishes to connect with on a page. Later, I hope to bring them together and see where it is they wish to go together.

Idle Hands...

Finish this sentence: Idle hands are ___________. Did you answer the devil’s tools or devil’s plaything?

How long can you sit with idle hands? Do you ever? Is this how you start to write?

In the most recent issue of Poets and Writers magazine there is an article about a writer who talks about stillness as he writes. “I’m very tolerant of stillness. I don’t mind sitting there for half an hour. I’d rather not move my hands just to move them; I’ll wait for the right thing.” Jonathan Lethem is a novelist not a poet, but his approach to initiating work on a page is maybe not a bad one even for poets. I sometimes will start with a line of something that comes to me. Maybe two or three different lines till something I feel something take hold. But when I think about my blog post on Monday and the Anne Sexton quote that I committed to thinking about all this week I’m thinking a lot more about the idle hands approach. The wisdom in the Sexton quote suggests listening hard. “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard,” Sexton says.

It’s easy when you have a routine that says your take thirty minutes and write that you want to start writing as you sit down. The clock is on. Go! Such routine can probably create bad habits just as well as it can create good ones. But just as silence can be useful on a page, maybe it’s not a bad place to start to center yourself / your writing. In “The Artists’ Way” I think the morning pages are meant to drain out of your system all the residual sludge that can otherwise stain your work if you can’t get your mind off it. So maybe to start with, we should pause. A nice pregnant pause of sorts and then begin to create on the page as something surfaces.

Dad in the Dog House

Some interesting things coming forth on the page today.   I'm happy actually with last two days of writing.

My youngest daughter us a cyclist. She loves the Tour de France.  Once again she has engaged me in a fantasy racing team battle.  I'm not in good graces with her as of today.  I've beat her in points so far for three out of three stages. Her text messages are growing terse.

Love ya honey!  :)

National Poetry Month

I'm participating in the poem- a- day challenge for the month of April. I've not decided if I will post them here, but at this time I'm leaning against it. Writing a poem-a-day is really the exercise of creating a new draft each day. Rarely do I ever complete a poem in one day so these have to be considered in the context of a very rough draft. Some may go on to become poems while others simply will not survive the process or may become part of an entirely different poem. Still, the exercise is a good one for any writer to undertake, and I'll keep you updated on how I'm doing, and maybe share a line or two now and then.

There will be other poetry month stuff posted here over the next 30 days as well.

collaborative poetry

I've not really had any experience with collaborative poetry in the context of shared writing. I always consider poetry to generally be a collaborative between the poet and the reader, but that's another whole matter.

I suppose it requires a special temperament for two artists, both poets, to work together to produce something that is a joint creation.  C.D. Wright in a symposium I attended earlier this month, spoke of collaborating with photographers on work. That seems to me to be a particularly beneficial arrangement given the tenets under which both art forms develop.

Mutating the Signature (great name by the way) is a relatively new blog of two poets who have been actually collaborating for a while now. The poets Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore have certainly put an interesting light upon such work.

Nathan for example has explained a part of the benefit of this shared creative process this way,'"Collaborative poetry offers a respite from the struggles of solitary work. My poor, overworked ego is given a break as process and product are shared, voices are melded. It’s a fantastic feeling to be partner to the creation of a voice that’s greater than your own.'" I think any of us who've written for a while are certainly aware just how solitary the work can become.

Dana seems to derive an energy from seeing the twists and turns that can develop when two are working to meld their voices. She is quoted on their site as explaining it like this... '"The surprise of the poems we’ve written. Oh, the unforeseen turns the writing takes. Going in and not knowing where you’ll come out, or when or how. The way we each respond to the words and phrases the other person contributes. How a piece that in one moment seems like it’s headed nowhere fast can, in a word or two, find its way somewhere startling, strange and gorgeous.'"

As I've stated, I've not really worked except in the simplest terms, like at a workshop of people joining to create a poem, and that was more for fun and hardly a serious collaborative venture.  I'm curious about the experiences of others, be they positive or negative. Any takers is this discussion? What's it like and perhaps you can share a bit about any rules or secrets of making it work that you'd like to share? 

Technorati Tags: Collaborative poetry,writing,Dana Guthrie Martin,Nathan Moore,Mutating the Signature

Blue Moon Over Kansas City

A poet friend the other day was giving me feedback on one of my poetry drafts and in response to something I had written said, "You should read Wallace Stevens if you haven't lately. The crazy things that guy does with repetition and refrains." So, I went looking for a Wallace Stevens poem and read The Emperor of Ice-Cream which I found enjoyable. I then moved away from the poem and began to type. Keep in mind I often begin drafts in longhand. There were just two words that came to my mind and they were, "The pretext" and nothing more. Where they came from I couldn't say, but after typing them from the keyboard with just a momentary pause I began to type again and in relatively short order, maybe 20 minutes at the most I had a draft that I stopped working on. After moving away from the draft for some time, I went back and quite frankly felt that I could do nothing more to it. Not by addition or subtraction other than a change of title.

The number of times I've written something on the spot like this and could not improve on it are like never.  There is one occasion in which I came close to this, but still made some editing changes. It's not an occurrence that one has happen very often, if ever.

I may well wake in the morning and find room for improvement, but I don't expect it will likely change much. That's how good I feel about it. Better than some pieces I've worked on over a span of more than a year. It's moments like this that makes all the other eternal rewrites seem worth enduring through.

Thanks Amy for the advise. How the Emperor of Ice-Cream led me to the pretext and all that followed to write what I now call The Face of Mount Rushmore, I'll never figure out. They are nothing alike, but I'm sure that one lead to the other.

Technorati Tags: poetry,Wallace Stevens,The Emperor of Ice Cream,A poet's life,writing

Reaction / Action

 

Listening to: Chiquitia by ABBA

I was thinking today about how much time I spend in reaction rather than action. In some respects I think such an assessment could provide a good benchmark for how much one is in control of their life. Am I in control of my day or do I allow my day to control me?

My job is has a largely crisis driven aspect to it that I'm not able to really control. I can plan, and I do, but in the end my plans are often reshaped by and taken over by events in spite of my best efforts otherwise. This is highly frustrating, stressful and I imagine gives cause to my reluctance to even attempt to impose any meaningful discipline upon myself after work hours. My evenings and weekends often are thus allowed to unfold upon their own as opposed to attempting to decide what and when and stake out a plan.

There are of course in the post work hours where I will recognize a deadline is upon me for something and will step in out of a combination of the pressure associated with the deadline and some degree of guilt causing me to roll into action.  Not a very smart or fulfilling way to approach life.

This approach is often applied to my writing and the more mundane clerical matters like submitting material to journals. I can honestly say that last year the reduction in submissions I made to journals was at least in part due to such a reactionary work ethic. It's one think to accept the fact that my 9-5 job is going to be impacted in such a way that reaction will always be a factor. Writing on the other hand should not be impacted in the same way. Sure there will be interruptions that come about when an emergency arises, but this should be the exception rather than the rule.

Anyone else experience this kind of problem? What drive you forward in your writing and what road blocks do you build for yourself? 

Technorati Tags: Writing roadblocks,planning

For my birthday...

I intended to post this earlier, but I've just been swamped. This was a gift from my wife for my birthday last Saturday. It's a Libelle fountain pen. I have a Waterman that was also a gift from her that I use regularly. Occasionally I have got to work and left it behind at home or the reverse. She decided I needed the ability to leave one at home for writing. The tough decision now, is which one?

From my journaling this past week

Journal bits—

Saturday, Dec. 6th -(listening to an interview by of Katie Lederer, Hedge Fund Poet and editor of Fence) It’s important for writers and other artists to report – our work can be a form of anthropology.

Monday, Dec. 15th-You threw out a song like a bouncer / throws out disgruntle patron / who’s drink privileges were cut shout / not soon enough.//

not to oversimplify, but our massage / is not as harsh as it sounds / but it is with the honesty of clothing / hung out on a line.//

Wednesday, December 17th- I am amazed at the orderly disintegration of both wealth and the overall economy all around me. It’s like there is so much inter connection of the economic fabric of society that everything can’t quite collapse because not everyone can account for their assets at the moment at hand. But you know it is coming.

Poetry That Won't Compromise

My previous post was a simple statement from Brad Holland. No additional commentary, just his quote which I now repeat.

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't. ~Brad Holland

For most of you, the name Brad Holland will likely mean nothing. It meant nothing to me till I ran across this quote, which I’ll admit to instantly taking a liking to.

Holland is an illustrator who was born in 1947, so he is my senior. He was born in Ohio, and began drawing at an early age. He sought employment by Walt Disney, but was turned down. He started school at the Chicago Art Institute, but decided it was too restrictive for his liking. He went to work at a tattoo parlor and later too a regular job at Hallmark Cards in the mid 1960’s and spent his off hours developing a serious portfolio. In 1967 he moved to New York with his portfolio and from there made a name for himself as an illustrator. Freelancing, he became perhaps most notable for his work in Playboy magazine, Avant Garde magazine and various other publications. In 1977 he published Human Scandals, a social commentary using ink drawings.

While Holland is not a poet, he is truly a student of the developing history of art and culture. I have found a degree of cynical humor in some of his statements, but the one I have focused on for this post seems pretty straight forward. I think what he is saying is something which I whole heatedly agree with, but perhaps would never have quite been able to articulate it as well as he has here.

There are two points about this axiom which I believe stand out as fundamentally sound. One is the tendency to treat most of what we do in the constraints of what we believe principals of democracy. That is to say, we naturally fall into the trap that in society what the majority of the people perceive as “good” or as “acceptable” is just that. It is the cumulative value of the majority view. The other fundamentally sound argument Holland makes is that is that this is exactly what art is “not.”

Let me shift back to poetry for the rest of this discourse. It is after all, an art.
When it is said that the job of a poet is to name the unnameable (a concept that we've all heard and I believe is attributable to Salman Rushdie) I think one has to expect that poetry has to take us to new places. It may be in the way words are utilized, it may be in physical location of those words on a page… their presentation, or the metaphorical image, but above all it is not the same old standard commonplace usage of language that everyone expects. It is not simply the cumulative value of how most people see something.

It is true that some people want to hang a still life painting of a bowl of fruit on their wall that looks exactly like you could reach into it and pick up an apple. To paint that well indeed takes skill. It is a craft that not everyone can or has mastered. It would however be a contradiction to the concept of postmodern art which settles not for carbon copies but originality, not cookie-cutter art but for audaciousness.

And so my question to artists, but especially poets is, what two or three things most prevents you from freeing yourself of being an artist/poet in a democratic society tradition?


writing and poetry

Conversation with myself

When a writer is engaged in the creation of a novel, there is an audience that he/she should have in mind. I've never quite accepted that premise where writing poetry is concerned.

It seems to me that when I am writing poetry I am having a conversation with myself. Quite frankly the process will rise and fall upon the very nature of internal conflict within this very conversation. I think it was Frost who said (and I am paraphrasing) that he never knew how a poem would end till it did. That underscores a good part of the conversation that takes place. This is true when in draft and it continues in rewrite.

I think the distance between poetry and philosophy can be placed on a pin head. It is during this creation process that some of my great philosophical battles with myself occur. Sometimes taking issue with long held notions. Sometimes standing something on end to see how it looks from a different view. This is true with the message but also is true with the form the message takes.

An example of the latter would be that sometimes I like to throw punctuation out the window and at other times I cannot convince myself that it works without it.

If someone were to ask me to describe poetry, my answer today, (and tomorrow this may be different) poetry is the sum of my parts jumbled. They may not look like me, or mirror my life experiences, but the product reflects an assemblage of who I am. My poetry is my biography.

This is different from "confessional poetry" in that it is not to say that what I write is about me or about my life. It is rather about what who I am can conger into image. This is what happens when I am in conversation mode with myself and a pen.

Technorati Tags: writing,poetry,a poet's life

The leaves & cold of fall

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Boarders Books in northland to see local poet Rebecca Stallard read from her new book of poetry and and sign copies.  The book, And the Birds are Singing is available here.          

This morning I mowed the front lawn. The air was crisp and fallen leaves laced the lawn. Just a preview of more to come.

This time of year is a mixture of things I like and things I dislike. Usually about October I start feeling the effects of the shorter days and it manifests itself in the form of feeling melancholy, especially in the early hours after rising in the morning. I use a special lamp which has lessened to some degree the impact but the period October through say March can be rough. This is not to say I don't find enjoyment in fall and winter. I prefer the cooler temperatures to hot summer days. I love the multicolored landscapes that we have available to us in Missouri. 

After the end of the World Series I miss that baseball goes away. Football just doesn't have the same magic that baseball has.

It seems that fall is ripe for writing. I don't know if it is the stark changes that occur but there is something that seems transformative and this seems to feed the creative process. I seem to often get a boost in my writing output. I don't mean quantity so much as I do that I seem to be happy with more of what I write.

I've actually given thought to signing up for nawrinomo but I don't know if I can break myself away from poetry for a month to write [insert shudder here] fiction.

Technorati Tags: it's a poet's life,writing seasonal affective disorder,fall

What's That You Say?

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Dana Gioia Takes Another Direction

The arts have truly had an Ambassador in Dana Gioia who has served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts since 2003. But Dana who wrote poetry quietly while working in corporate America has announced that he plans to depart from his second term at National Endowments early next year and will join The Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit organization founded in 1950 as the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies.  The position at Aspen will be a a half-time position. Dana plans to return to his writing as well. He has been both a poet and a critic. In fact leaving to accept this new position is really about freeing up time to write. About his decision, Gioia noted, "I announce my departure with mixed feelings," he added. "I will never have a more interesting job. But I am a writer. If I don't return to poetry soon, the Muse will never have me back."

At Aspen Institute he will be the Director of The Harman/Eisner (H/E) Program in the Arts. A new program of the Institute the purpose of which is to deepen the Institute's work by incorporating leading artists and to use the Institute's convenings to support and promote the arts.

Technorati Tags: Dana Gioia,National Endowment for the Arts,Poet,writing,Aspin Institute,Harman/Eisner Program

Saturday morning and lots going on in my mind

I can't help but wonder what the ultimate damage assessment and loss of life will look like on the Gulf coast from the savage path of Ike.  It all seems sorrel having so much news coverage and yet we know so little of the human tragedy yet. It's still all drama and yet you know the loss is there.

Then too there is the horrific train collision in the LA area. Yet another reminder how fragile life can be even in the daily grind.

If you look past all this, there is still a campaign going on, though the candidates attempt to tip-toe through the human suffering so as not to offend.

In reality an election is going to happen in the end and it is perhaps one of profound importance when you consider where this nation has been in the past 8 years. Our economy has gone from one of deficit reductions in the years prior to Bush taking office to one that is historic in terms of national debit. At the same time we are seeing banks and major investment houses collapse in their own debt write-offs for losses that not only are corporate losses but translate to shareholder losses as well.  And those  share holders are not all wealthy individuals who can sustain the risk of their investments, but in many cases baby boomers whose retirement pensions are often tied to such investments.

Meanwhile, we continue to spend $10 billion a month (not even counted in the federal budget) for the ongoing military action in Iraq. A war that was a mistake from the very conception.  All this time, things grow worse in Afghanistan, the country with the real connection to 9-11, not Iraq.

Quietly on the home front, the Bush administration continues to pursue a course of action that threatens our very constructional protections.  One by one eroding our rights as citizens. The most recent example seeks to take us back some 30 years to the Nixon era when it was necessary to clean up the constitutional abuses of a very paranoid president who felt it necessary to abuse powers to spy on the American people.

This week, as a perhaps final legacy of this administration, the FBI announced it is seeking to implement new rules as of October 1 that would allow agents pursuing national security leads to employ physical surveillance, deploy informants and engage in "pretext" interviews with their identities hidden to assess the danger posed by a subject. Such assessments could be initiated even without a particular fact or concrete lead that a person had engaged in wrongdoing. Additionally. as in the days of Nixon, it is suggested that changes still could be made in some areas, including ground rules for FBI agents who secretly infiltrate activist groups or collect intelligence at public demonstrations and events without a suspected terrorist threat.

It's a lot to chew on this Saturday morning. The underlying question now is, can I clear my head and write today?

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan,Iraq,Bush,Nixon,national debit,investments,financial institutions,FBI,civil liberties,Ike,war,election

Sensory Triggers

Mary Biddinger writes in her blog Word Cage about sensory triggers. Those things that set off a particular behavior or thought by recreating a past experience.  Isn't it true that the best poems usually are able to take us to experiences that that we are able to relate to; that by the poets very words we can suddenly taste Grandma's apple pie or feel the warmth of the fireplace against our face  on a cold November night, while smelling the oak log burn and sipping hot chocolate? Words properly chosen have the power to transport us to another time and bring alive real experiences of the past.

So I sit here this evening thinking of things that I would consider sensory triggers I can relate to.

• The smell of cut grass takes me to a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at the ballpark. The warm sun beating down on the green field.
• When I feel the lawnmower with gas it takes me back to when I was a kid and my Grandmother would stop for gas. Those were pre air conditioning days and with the windows down it aroma of gasoline was particularly sweet and strong.  I always am transported back to that little filling station in town and still see the sign reading 34 cents a gallon.
• The feel of those wood spoons you get with Frosty Malts feel like rough, dry tongue depressors in the doctor's office and make me want to cough.
• When I'm handling something that tends to dry my hand out a lot, I am suddenly on an out of town trip, headed home to Kansas City, along the roadside changing a flat.

Those are just a few things that come to my mind.  There are lots of music triggers that take me back to the sixties, seventies and eighties. Events and places.

I think I should spend the next week listing such triggers in my journal. 

Technorati Tags: Mary Biddinger,Word Cage,sensory triggers poetry,writing