"I LOVE WRITING" MAIDEN VOYAGE: The International of Bad Poetry and Good Feelings

I've noticed some people lately talking about their desire for either an I Love Writing sub-board or, in its absence, some writing threads on this forum in which to post. I think this is a good idea, and have therefore taken it upon myself to actualize it. I have chosen to begin with poetry. Why? Because it looks interesting.

Please feel both free to and compelled to contribute; and if you submit to this compulsion, let it be a submission freely chosen.

here are 'two poems' which 'I' recently 'wrote'; the first as half-hearted technical exercise in the shower this morning, the second responding to the exigencies of deep sadness:

DREAM IMPROMPTU #1:

The other night, I dreamed that I could fly;
I had not mastered it, but still progressed
By clumsy swimming motions in the sky,
Which took me far away from roots of things
To seek their truth in branches still more high.

Still hiding from the guns that lined the ground,
I took off for that solitary space;
The clearing opened up without a sound,
And in an instant, I had lost the way,
But still could see for miles all around.

The tops of buildings, children in the fields --
All things, to me, did then seem to partake,
By gestures that were not exactly real
But still presented me a human face,
In secret hungers I could not but feel.

I woke to find my body floating still
Atop two beanbags, vaulting, like a bridge,
The floor below us, and the skies within.

AUTO-BIO-DRAMA-GRAPHICAL SHORT POEM OF LOSS:

We found we had become two magnets
it was easier to hold apart;

two faces of a canyon, forever staring at each other
across the river,
and the air where the river used to be.

I am 22 years old, at least until Thursday; these days I mostly read 20th-century philosophy/literary theory/criticism/etc. The last poem I read was probably something by Holderlin, unless Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String counts as poetry, which maybe. I don't remember the last time I finished a novel, although I recently read the first ~100 pages of Invisible Man and liked them a lot; have also been rereading bits and pieces of Surrealist novels (Hebdomeros, Nadja).

The preceding is an example of one sort of paragraph that I can write, not without a certain measure of enjoyment; what about you?

i not a writer, i'm not much of a reader, but i liked both.

LAZY SUMMER POEM:

the mosquito’s high

pitched

wine trickling into

first one ear then

both at once (explaining a

trajectory unseen by eye or I in role of mine as seer of the scene the poem would repeat, repeat)

repeats the poem, growing

near, asleep,

asleep

(my plan is to continue posting poems of gradually declining quality until I convince other people to start sharing theirs)

That sounds like a good plan. I like them, though at present I cannot share because I have not any.

yours will need to decline by some way yet before i'm even tempted tbph

My favourite of those three is the first one although the 3rd has some cute wordplay. First one has a Romantic manner but wears it well and the final line is killer. 'secret hungers I could not but feel' is cool. The last stanza is like the opening lyrics of The Byrds' 5D in a woozy sorta way. Second poem is a nice metaphysical image but also quite a literal and solipsistic one (when someone is lost, are you automatically affixed as a canyon wall? I think I prefer the magnet image - at least that is a valency and not a geographical unmoveability) - perhaps it works in a hyper-melodramatic Wyattian manner, claiming one's affections forever in the servitude of emptily observing the dry gulf where once love and love's fluids flowed. Blood/wine image in third poem, as I say, is nice - not sure about the long line or the metacommentary.

I'm gonna plunge in and submit something in a second but I think the single poem that haunts our collective reticence to contribute is Elmo Argonaut's "Saint Sebastian, Pray For Us" which kicks so much ass it is almost unbearable

http://argonaut.tumblr.com/post/909226907/saint-sebastian-pray-for-us

(my critical response to that is basically "whoa")

l0u1s jagg3r I was waiting for yr inevitable appearance in this thread!! lookin' forward to yr contribs, man

also I appreciate the feedback. Romanticism is kind of 'a thing' for me (i.e. I incline towards it at times but am extremely embarrassed to do so because it's like, seriously, what could be more played-out than Romantic poetry in 2k10?), so I'm glad to know I can "pull it off". second poem is definitely "hyper-melodramatic", and was also sorta-inspired by the lyrical stylings of a certain musical ilxor with a knack for depicting relationships at various stages of disintegration.

nah don't be embarrassed by inclination towards the Romantic - GOOD Romantic poetry isn't NEARLY as played in 2010 as other more vogueish modes of verse, and it encourages a very broad-minded, panoramic view of things which is often a good place to start - a good place to focus in from. write as thou wilt. aforementioned ilxor will probably be along shortly to criticise our work so don't acknowledge your debt too flagrantly ;)

and the third poem is just something I wrote listening to a mosquito on a lazy stoned afternoon; the long line seemed 'important' but I don't really know why (inability to avoid reflexive self-awareness + desire to break up the mannered/restrained language with a giddy rush of syllables, I guess?)

but it sounds like you were in a moment whose very stillness dictates that register and benefits from its consistency

look here

-

LAZY SUMMER POEM:

the mosquito’s high

pitched

wine trickling into

first one ear then

both at once

growing

near-asleep,

asleep

a good friend of mine and I often like to edit one anothers' poems and send them back to each other (usually it is he editing me as he is a more confident poet than I) - are we allowed to do that in this thread? I hope we are

I certainly don't have a problem with it; and since no one else has posted a poem yet, I believe the motion passes!

just ate lunch, came back and took a quick look at yr poems; don't have much to say on a first reading except that I enjoy the language in the second ("flicking pith down your gullet"!!) and nod appreciatively at the ending of the first

also, at the risk of turning this thread into I LOVE MY BABIES HOW DARE YOU BUTCHER THEM???, I will make the argument for my mosquito poem as it stands: IIRC, the particular feeling that inspired it was having my eyes closed and listening to this mosquito fly around, obviously hearing *that* it was moving, but utterly failing, despite the best efforts of my ears and brain, to follow it by sound alone; so I guess the long line was supposed to convey something of that sheer undetermined motion, that thing which I could neither pin down in the moment nor reconstruct after the fact. but also, sometimes I just like strings of syllables more than I like words or images or whatever.

All of these are quite good!

so I like "Saturn" but (no offense) I think you are maybe too young to pull off the feeling of immense age and weariness you seem to be shooting for (but then again, that's why I like the last line so much, so don't take this as a criticism so much as an observation)

last line of "if I was yr grlfriend" reminded me of two short self-conscious poems I wrote ~1year ago during period of writer's block/angst; I offer them up in lieu of a commentary:

I.
I run my hands over

glass fingers stuffed into shapes

wrapped in plastic string

or reconsider

these active words

by which I’m poemed out

foaming time in a machine

II.
and really, what’s therapeutic?

the smooth working of a cat’s programming?

the idea of a body

whipped, dragged, eaten by ants,

filling with purple swollenness on the highway shoulder?

everything gets away from me these days

unspooling into whatevers of letters

or a little cottage a fisherman is returning to

I liked Saturn too. I didn't like 'autumnal debris' (not specific enough) or 'false and fallow moons' (no idea what this means). But the rest I did. Why does 'within' get a line of its own?

'cosmic shards', then?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/The_Shard_October.jpg/250px-The_Shard_October.jpg

led me to this splendid picture, which also brings to mind Saturn V's engines so it's all linked man

the cosmic shards ring the orb, the russet crown - they are at this time useless, yet they remain, obsolete and proud

hehehe. this does clear up the "red musk" line, which was bothering me slightly.

btw that photo was taken from as far as I can tell more or less the exact spot I wrote the poem from

because I can't stop myself, here is another poem, in which the approaching day is saluted via joycean wordplay:

still behind un-
twitching eyeslip, eyes drip;
a crust of breakfast bread
a-sit and griddled goldenly

dawn come bring
slow blue-greening,
dry-like-paint-ing,
on the whitening walls where

sleep, a slip,
a falling-off, a shift -- o dawn come fall on
eyes lips hair tongue tooth,
and day's first spreading sprout
from downy dust of armskin

so I guess the long line was supposed to convey something of that sheer undetermined motion, that thing which I could neither pin down in the moment nor reconstruct after the fact. but also, sometimes I just like strings of syllables more than I like words or images or whatever.

OK, this is fair enough. In theory, editing each other's poems is valuable but in practice it's usually quite problematic - whose poem is it now etc - and I'll trust you enough to accept this explanation for its unchill departure.

that last poem is nice, a touch of hopkins possibly in the compound pounding

I am not familiar with the work of Hopkins (Gerard Manley, I assume?). something I'm kind of self-conscious about (especially when offering comments on others' work) is the narrow scope of my own knowledge of poetry... alas, there's always more to read... but hopefully this thread can help with that, too!

GMH, aye. He's pretty good. Well, one of my favourites in fact. I too need to read a lot more, especially of contemporaries.

I liked it

okay I don't want this thread to die but I haven't written anything in a while b/c all my creative energies are focused on nanowrimo preparation atm... so here's a poem from ~a year ago, probably the dodgiest thing I've posted on here yet but oh well. no title, as usual.

When the sun was almost down I fell
into a sort of. Well I guess a kind of.
Gorge? Or canyon maybe?
Tall and weathered rock faces rising
on both sides, water rushing off
as far as the eye can see,
that sort of thing.

The bottom of a gorge
(or canyon maybe)
is like the shoulder of a tree-lined state highway:
you stand and you look around you and you feel,
quite acutely,
that you should not be standing here, no matter
how appealing it looked from just over
there.
And there is something off
about the light, which makes the rocks look
a bit unreal, when compared to other rocks
you might have seen.
(Of course, to observe this, you’d need
to remain in the canyon
until the sun has come up again,
which, understandably, could prove inconvenient.
But perhaps you have noticed a similar effect
when you stood in a familiar bathroom
with one or two bulbs missing from the fixture above the mirror,
and the shadows did
not fall in quite the
right places.)

The sound
behaves strangely too, the walls
being uneven,
and craggy,
and less reverberant
than you might think,
compared to other walls.

Speaking of walls,
try not to let them hurt you too badly
on the way down. You’ll want to stay relaxed,
because when you get over the strangeness,
it’s really a rather nice place to sit and think,
or even spend a night. There is
little wind; the narrow strip of sky
pares the stars down
to a manageable number;
and if you wake up
confused, your bladder straining
and your eyes unfocused,
the sound of the river is easy to follow —

not like the summer of the drought,
when I would wake up to use the toilet
and then, without flushing,
return to bed amid silence,
feeling that I had somehow gotten lost
as I walked the white hallways.

the airbrakes and police sirens crying
out across the flat plane, over trees
and tops of quiet houses —
I am in one such house,
and amid the unmusical silence
of no turned-on machine
but only lights, clocks, boxes,
they cut through the blinded windowglass
like tin shears shearing
tin (of course) —
like some distant animal trumpeting its presence,
like big dogs
broadcasting their big-dog status from
behind fences, contesting something
they have never even seen,
but only heard.

been experimenting with a 'new style'. I dunno.

exhibit a:
If a hummingbird flew backwards
westward
looking out of
keeping pace with
the forever-setting sun

what colors would he see retreat
and how many at once?

exhibit b:
Cheering all the
wine-drunk bastard
children of the
night was under—

—until they wrote each other riddles
with their fingers, in the air

even pages only
flip a handful of
times at best and then
are shut up again
for what must seem an interminably long time

thought withdraws on waves
of sound from other
rooms, roads, towns, and
calls out in the forest,
where water churns the soil away
or boils on the stove,
and sleep alone is something like
a leaving of the world in trust

bernard i very much like cut of your jib and the last line of your shorty xp'd above is awesomely wry.

here are a few drafts submitted for inspection & critique.

1
last night i spoke at length
to a starbright lovely wonder
and now, with just a cofee,
i stumble through the morning
dazed and full unfocused.
on lunch i amble to
a lonely wodden bench.
i nap beneath my jacket
and bake in the
november sun.

2
behind me a woman
speaks with excitement
into her telephone
in a language i will
never take the timme
to understand. her words,
loosed for me of urgent content
and absent the anecdote that
brings a gurgling laugh
to the back of her throat,
become a sung solo, an echo of
an alice coltrane melody
bathed in the dust of
years and colony.

3
when the old ladies come in to
do their volunteer work, the
stuffing of envelopes and
the double checking of addresses,
I always put on the jazz station
and let the Ellington play soft
in hopes they'll start to say
more about the days theyd dance
with the men in their suits just
home from the war.

"he would spin me around on
the big horn blasts, and
my dress would flare out like
a little a red parachute.
it felt like i'd fallen
from the sky. I had waited
to feel his hand touch my
back for three long years
of letters and prayer. every
stuttered step to the beat was
the thrill of my life."

thankin' u for your kind words — that's the nicest thing anyone's said about my jib in a while. I read yr three poems as loosely 'connected', because why not, eh? like the last part the best (parachutes!!), second is good too ("the dust of years and colony"), first mostly just gets an approving head nod for doing the sorts of things that I like to do and doing them well ("dazed and full unfocused" — dunno what it is about these sorts of phrases but I love them unreservedly)

also: I was (and still am, I suppose!) genuinely uncertain as to whether some of the misspellings (esp. "wodden") were typos or deliberate artistic choices, which is always kind of a neat feeling b/c it means I'm 'into it' and giving the author the benefit of the doubt.
(but I'm guessing you didn't mean anything terribly profound by "timme")

for the drummer

Your shirt was red, and redly you
removed yourself against
a background redding
(in the velvetiest way)
and were to—

unseeing
as I am
could still fill
pages upon pages
if I only didn't—

but you, alas, undone,
by redness overswum, and
dimly, swinging, flailing, float away

homage to eliot (older poem, newly found)

April was
scarcely a month at all; eating
once a day at most, I'd stay
awake for hours inside your room, your bed
beside the box of the wooden matches, lighting,
relighting. Outside,
the rain unfurled a flag,
whispering otherances, and in the afternoon
rose from the pavement cloying tendrils
about my legs. Crossing and uncrossing
the street, I kept my open
eyes fixed on the ground before me.
Not that I expected
salvation
would spring from there, but only
where else was there to look?

line 5 should read "beside the box of wooden matches, lighting"
fuckin ruined the whole thing :(

wrote a short poem/prayer to my books b4 going to sleep, I dunno.

------------------------

when I rise
tomorrow, be not as
a dead letter unto me,
but rather stir beneath
my hand, and rise,
and make me restitution
and return for
all that have lost
in sleep

we spoke at length,
smoking,
outside,
our cigarettes—
at length, and
at a distance,

ME:
a cold
reliable machine,
dispensing stones,
stories, jokes at
which no one else
laughs much,
promises of

(the smoke that curled itself into our hairs)

YOU:
unmaking me
with skillful jibes,
arousing in me
hopes of future
further such delights,
forcing me
to recognize the essential
pointlessness of

(the words hung heavy from the cabled air)

ME:
nodding, affirming,
deferring (to)
thy pleasure

There did I behold a splendid
clamoring of colors, flowers
rung, and like a church's bell
ranged far along the hills.

fuck those last few I posted were emo, sorry y'all

caught dreaming of a
deathbed camera pullback
shielding eyes, revealing
lines of force that drove me
ever onwards, seeking something,
into sunspot smudges
on the surface of the day,
what could I call out
from that caverned cave but:

"while I hold together still,
drive sharpened stakes
into my limbs, and
make of me a child's
puppety plaything,
endless dancing,
likely building —"
less poetically, of course

cigarette paper

your uncreased increasing
flatness' unfolding filling
fields and planes
so thin, so white,
so smooth, like perfect
legs, like perfect
legs of perfect furniture
that sits unbought
in warehouses somewhere;

like tubes syringing fluids in and out
of bodies in their unfamiliar beds
that groan and mutter through a dreamless sleep;

and all this loveliness of blankness
hanging, soon to be consumed,
suspended by the strip of gum
I fumblingly feel for in the dark

rly into 'eroticizing' things lately, probably b/c i'm 'not getting any'. (see also: http://givefascistshell.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/errata/ )

marlette
why the hell are my smokes crushed in here
and where the hell is lonnie
it is five past nine already today
marlette

That's really, really good bernard. 'Somewhere' and 'syringing' don't work for me though - 'somewhere' because it sounds like a tailing off whereas your narrator's actually ultrafocused; and 'syringing' because it's not what the tubes do, I don't think?

I'm not sure about the whole 'tubes syringing fluids' image, actually - it's wet (though not messy) where your poem is immaculate and dry.

Yeah sorry about
Leaving so early
I'd like to be able to say
I had something on the next day
But to be honest
It was a pretty boring party
The next day I basically just sat on my arse
Moped a bit
Thought about that guy you gave me those old tapes by
The transcendental meditation guy
With the creepy beard
Like I thought I would do that maybe
Listen to the tapes and be
You know
BE

xp yeah I wasn't sure abt that part — the transition (in my head, not on paper) was sort of, moving from flat things to cylindrical things (table leg, syringe) a la paper becoming cigarette; hospital setting wasn't too much of a stretch b/c SMOKING IS BAD AND U WILL DIE or whatever but then I tried to also turn it into a big double-entendre ("unfamiliar beds", fluids in & out etc), somehow ended up with tubes instead of syringes...

I like yr point about wet/dry tho — maybe need to hold the wetness back so when I get to the gum at the end it sticks (heh) out more? will reflect on this

tracer: I don't totally understand but I like

btw philologists of the future: while going thru papers, found a missing fragment of

AUTO-BIO-DRAMA-GRAPHICAL SHORT POEM OF LOSS:

We found we had become two magnets
it was easier to hold apart;

two faces of a canyon, forever staring at each other
across the river,
and the air where the river used to be.

Where we used to touch, there was
neither you nor me, but
something that would become us both.

(think i like it better without those lines but those lines are something too)

three newish ones, kinda rough, variations on old themes and new ones; think the second is probably the best except that the ending is weak... whereas the third is kinda meh but I'm pretty proud of the last couplet

#1
What emerges from me in
long sounding-lines of words intoned
is perhaps only the record
of a lost life's history;

some singular, eccentric sequence
of confusion, understanding missed,
mistake and momentary lapse
that constitutes a world, trailing
long like string from distant kite.

#2 ("Conceptual Mummies"):
Somewhere, in the back of my mind,
our dry limbs twined round each other
waiting to be engulfed in flame.
Me in your bed one afternoon
while my clothes dried, trying to feel warm,
listening to the storm, the lightning
flashing up and dying down again.

So anyway, one day the lightning struck
and burned up all the trees, you told me
that you felt alone, somewhere behind the world,
no way to grasp a single living thing — I think
that you were pretty stoned, but anyway,
it sounded right to me.

#3
birds of prey
low light and
motionless tra(i)ns
fixed like
stuffed with emptiness

to glorify the unseen currents,
trace strange circles in the air —
the closest thing to angels earth can bear

even lewis jaggleur doesn't read these things anymore :'(

weird combination of emotion, night-terror, beautiful strangers working service-sector jobs, being woken up by my cat — not quite sure I pulled it off but oh well

visitor

the pale tip
toeing lines of
you,
your body
gliding into view
in silence, lit with
ghostly hues,

in ghastly fashion
greeting me,
with downcast eye,
a word, or two,
or wordless cry,
and secret weights
so lightly pressed
to bring the tightness
to my chest,
your face
expectant, still
awaiting my

unutterable reply

for fathers

the mirrors were aligned
and caught the sun
like two hands clasping fire;
feet, descending from
the summit, break into a run,
make haste to bring the good news
to the town where
someday praises will be sung
in honor of a heart still pining
for its bed of needles, cedar shingles,
dry debris, and everything that kindles
hope — reflected in my eyes,
the eyes betray me,
rays of light refusing to obey me:
even with my back turned to the slope,
I still can see your fate unwind behind me.

[think Prometheus]

one last one:

the texts were wound
and woven into me —
which was not bad,
on balance, though it lead
at times to situations of regret:
a single strand
when called by name
or tickled by a playful finger
(as in the living room,
you lean and linger...)
inexorably set in motion
apparatuses unfolding,
coiled springs releasing and returning,
razor wire unspooling from me
forming in a pile on the floor,
bloodying our faces, and encasing
house in cables,
following and lead,
escaping us and skipping
down the street,
in rhythm,
criss-crossing
like railroad tracks,
and with them

a couple humble image-poems (rather than confused emotional diary-poems) of recent vintage that I am more-or-less happy with:

Land of the Dead:
As the distant
gun shot echoes
died away, the streetwise
senator
peeked round the corner
of the pillar where she’d sheltered,
seeing nothing moving
thought of calling out for help,
but then thought better, drew the pistol
from the ankle holster, and descended
steps with careful steps,
around her seeing
less and less
the silence and the emptiness,
the ruined road down to the railway
station, and abandoning
the city to its holy mess.

untitled (#53):
The blues are something real,
I think; I’ve never
felt them, but can sometimes
glimpse
deep lakes of indigo,
electric neon, streaks of sky
behind the screen of vision,
pictures shot
through openings
admitting passage to
the other side, and the
ideas strangely
angling, like arrows, for my hide.

... and, okay, one confused emo diary-poem:

(de)termination:
I am impossible,
a woman cut in two
before a crowd that hardly cares
whether I am smoke and mirrors,
flesh and blood, a vision from above
that barely keeps together
in the open air, or else whatever…

For there is no
thing but air between me
and the other feet, supposed
to stand for mine, but
distant as the stars
above, preceding me,
awaiting my approach, then swiftly
springing into being;
like the circle traced in sand,
a better angle on our nature.

In the darkness, twitching,
stretching out my nervous tangle
through the walls, I make no contact
with the lifeless limbs that dangle
on the other side, and I am still
divided from myself,
reflecting on my axis,
when the flashing tooth adroitly passes
through the trick box, and the phony locks:
illusions that I saw through
to the bitter end, regardless.

I wrote something about letters.

I slightly regret the title but couldn't yet think of a better one, not wanting to call it 'we could send letters' and always having liked the REM record a lot.

http://reelingatall.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/dead-letter-office/

But the other, less self- evident reason for not writing more letters is – would anyone want to receive them? Wouldn’t they think I was odd, writing them a letter? It’s as though the contract agreeing that we do this has broken down – not because we agreed not to do it, just because it’s fallen out of use, we’ve walked away and forgotten it. The practice of letter-writing has never been formally and deliberately abandoned; just idly let go.

coincidentally, I am just now writing a letter to a friend studying abroad! (and also feeling weirdly self-conscious about the whole thing because, holy shit, when was the last time I wrote a letter? maybe home from summer camp to my family as a teenager?)

but yeah, she has specifically asked ppl to write her letters — can't imagine writing to someone unannounced, out of the blue; it would just feel... I dunno, almost intrusive! like, look, here is this thing, it shows up at your house unexpectedly, it represents an amount of time that someone has spent THINKING ABOUT YOU, and an investment of effort you will now have to make to read the damn thing... I guess there are some close friends I could get away with doing this to, but suspect most people would just be annoyed!

PS (heh) I told her about the morrissey thing, too, which I found p.funny in a "statements very much in character" way

Mr Snowy, thanks for reading my piece and your interesting response. I'm glad that it struck a chord with your current experience. I find it interesting to hear of someone requesting letters - it doesn't happen so often. I agree that writing someone a letter would seem odd to many recipients now. But maybe the experience of writing to your friend now will reawaken some good things about letter writing?

dude let's exchange letters
(ilx penpal club??)

it's a good idea

poem written while walking to and from the post office to mail the aforementioned letter — seven stanzas, one for every mile:

Peripathos
(for Durham, City of Medicine

I.

With wanderlust,
painpoeming and spring
inside my heels,
along the little lakes,
the fields of mud
and swimming cigarette butts,
I retreated

with the sun pursuing, keeping
congress with my shadow,
who is taller than I am,
a little lankier, and darker
in his attitude, his garb
and his demeanor — so I think of
funny things to say, and clever observations
to parade before the other,
and we have a conversation.

He responds when prompted
but his figure is unchanging:
impassive, ever-patient, waiting
for a sign or something —
until suddenly, the light is stolen
from our thoughts by clouds
or tops of trees, the day grows dim
and I alone, again, lose sight of him.

(… and still my poem
wants another part, demands it of me
as does life, when setting me
under the knife, it robs me of my senses
but insists that I, by wit or
will, somehow, survive…)

II.

Now, look! See
from how far the hospital
is visible; how even
in a clearing miles away,
it rises high above the woods;
the way the tower shoots up
through the gloomy seething living writhing
dying mass its crystal needle
burns and strives to keep at bay.

But purity, though soothing,
can be dangerous: it wounds the sky,
offends the eye of God and Man alike,
and is consigned to slow decay,
at best remaining as a ruin
and reminder of the day —
of this day, when the way was long
and harder than I’d thought;

without a sens or Sein
to give me hope, I turned
things over in my head,
regarding myself, found
that I was broken down. And still
I could not trace the problem
to a single source or cause,
but only knew
that I had fallen.

whoops, I dropped an italicized parenthesis way back there
lemme just:
)
okay that's better

I'm very impressed.

Looking at

"the way the tower shoots up
through the gloomy seething living writhing
dying mass its crystal needle
burns and strives to keep at bay."

I thought for a moment you had abandoned complete syntax, but you had not.

The idea of writing all that in your head is somewhat staggering. Then again, 7 miles is a lot of walking.

thanks!
walk woulda been significantly shorter but I tried to take a shortcut and went far out of my way — hadn't walked to the post office before, probably won't often, but it's nice to know that I can. (and I did write down some stuff at the post office before I came back, so it's not like it was all mentalism.)

Frustrated and relatively uninformed reflections on the political situation:
http://reelingatall.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/cheaper-than-bombs/

that's impressively written.

That is nice of you to say.

yesterday I got really blue and sat down and wrote an angry long-ass poem that I think has temporarily cured me of the need to write poetry, like pulling a bad tooth — poem wasn't bad either, I'll post it here in a sec

where I’m at

A patchwork nest of colors
I have built myself down on the floor from
blankets beanbags pillows
papers clothing books guitars
for crawling into on those nights
the mattress grows into a mountain
that is difficult to summit.

My head, kept covered mostly
by one scrap of cloth or other,
can be seen at times to peek out
and regard the window sliver
that I keep the blinds suspended over—
not so much for looking out
as letting lightness enter
and the heavy clouds escape
(and also checking on the weather).
Still, the view is nice enough:
the foreground but a single
forking branch, set off against
the sprays of purple dogwood,
yellow something, birds and
grey uncolored sky;
the wind keeps every limb in motion,
more industrious than I.

But what the trees restore to me
the animals steal back again:
the anguish in the voice of
cats demanding to be fed
can make me miserable, frankly—
I don’t know why, but somehow
they seem qualified to judge me,
in a way that I withhold from others,
so-called friends or former lovers,
therapists and doctors,
even closest family members.
They sing to me of sadness
that we both know I can remedy,
and every second that I tarry
is another strike against me.

But don’t I do the same?
Begrudging people their indifference,
the slowness of their humors
and the deafness of their consciences?
Not that I want to forge a sword
of sadness, and condemn the world;
nor do you owe me anything
who, even for an instant,
pull apart these pages
to decipher what is written.
Life sometimes has been friendly to me;
still there is a tendency
for everything to crumble
in the presence of another.

I remember crouching,
with the light on, underneath a quilt,
and watching how its surface shimmered
like a many-colored aspic,
lime and salmon in suspension,
and my tearful gales of laughing.
(I had tidied up my room
and took a couple hits of acid
from a summer long before
I found forgotten in a folder.)
I went downstairs
to smoke a cigarette
and met my father,
who looked older,
frail and birdlike,
in the glow of his computer.

He spoke to me with words
I could not understand,
and read a story
of a football player
who had died the day before when he
was chasing down a pickup truck
and jumped into the bed, but then
was thrown and landed on his head.

I did not know
what I should say;
but somehow felt
I could relate.

That life must be a hellish thing
I realized early on, and dealt with
more or less alone—
as must, I figured, everyone.
So when I reached my hand out
I had hoped to find more sympathy,
had hoped to find more comfort,
and had hoped to make less enemies.
I hoped the truck would slow down,
and the driver spare a moment;
but it didn’t, so I leapt,
and perhaps I missed the target
and must now stop wasting words
and forever soak in silence.

You are extraordinarily productive!

I will try to make time to read your poem, properly.

But the specific function of libraries is not the only issue. There is also the sense that public places are being taken away; that in withdrawing provision for publicly owned spaces, the state is damaging the social fabric in which we live. I think that’s true.

I have similar feelings re: the current wave of cuts to public education, especially at the university level, which is one of the few things our country actually does well — it just seems absurd to me, in the face of an economic crisis (that is just as much a cultural crisis), to respond by hamstringing the institutions that serve young people who have very little to do with the current mess, but whose education may be a crucial means of avoiding the next one.

xp haha, I've sort of forced myself to be productive lately... basically relying on it to pull me out of a bleak and painful depression. but it hasn't, so fuck it, time for a little break. maybe find a job or something, who knows?

just a bit of fun this, fnarr fnarr:

lol

I have heard it
said before, true
faith comes in
the earhole only.
(In a messy bit
of theological baloney,
this is simultaneously
taken as explanatory
of man’s place before the pastor
and the subtler mechanics
of immaculate conception—
not to mention, the creation.)
Then again, Pascal said Kneel,
and you will understand;
but forgive me if I’m rather eagerer
to try my hand.

been really into The Dream Songs lately, but I eventually had to stop reading because the pain and sadness were overwhelming me... but not before bidding a fond farewell to the unwell man and his book:

last fall poem
(for John Berryman)

you do not sacrifice yourself
in vain, none of us do, a late
september rain shades
imperceptibly
into the autumn

and at bottom, hell fixed on
them frozen from
the first day of creation;

but what paradise there is
is only in the lying waiting

simple love songs

I saw her stood there
long and lonely
as a french horn note

that sounded in some
sentimental symphony,
selling out
the concert halls of life

before an audience
already growing restless
with this prettiness
relentlessly advancing on them

minute after minute;
with the terrible acoustics;
with the insecure conductor,
his flamboyant mannerisms,
and the thoughtless youthful couple
who had brought their screaming child…

in spite of which, she hardly smiled
when asked
“Why don’t we
do it in the aisle?”

I am still writing lots of poems. this one is from a few months ago and I am quite proud of it:

————

people who live in glass houses
are letting them go all to seed,
wisely allowing the ivy
to grow up and over and hopefully
cover them totally
(chimneys excepted)
pruning back only
those vines that entangle the downspouts,
that threaten the gunholes
and air intake vents.

people who live in glass houses
have stopped getting stoned,
but still they grow paranoid, often
the feeling of somebody watching,
of being sealed up in a coffin,
steals on them softly and awfully,
they pause in the kitchen,
stare into the distance,
and stir at their coffee.

people who live in glass houses
jar their own jams, preserves that remain
in a room in the basement—
and from an adjacent hillside,
on a stormy night sometimes,
one sees through the floor,
dramatically lit from behind under thunder,
sprawled out in rows
like an army of pottery soldiers,
the syrupy fruits of their labors.

and people who live in glass houses keep lamps lit
well after transacting their day’s worth of business;
for people who live in glass houses alone
know that sound is to water
as ghost is to window

(not that anyone cares but I've) been woodshedding poetry hard lately — scribbling down lots of ideas + not posting things on my blawg until I've gotten them to a point I'm happy with; find enclosed my most recent effort:

THE NEW LAW

the new law was friendly,
wearing the face and perfume
of an orchard of apples in bloom,
brushing his fingers
inside of your wrist

the new law had a nose, made a noise
like whatever the noise
of your favorite animal is,
its muzzle’s impression,
and sloppily kissed

under the new law, we prospered:
houses, like haikus,
appearing where nothing was,
holding back shadow
and drawing the curtains

playfully, certainly, onward
we picked up the trashcans
and emptied them (inwardly)
setting to work on the cities
we bore as a burden
—still something went missing,
a phone, or a friend, or a word,
a veil dropped between us and meaning—

of course, the taps and blenders
screens and speakers
couches ceilings walls
we still could see,
but saw obscurely,
through a fog and failing light

when language dies, it leaves a vacuum
other tongues rush in to fill;
so that no word is lost for long

(by ‘word’ I mean not meaning
but articulated feeling)

This sustains beautifully right up until it hits a bump in the final two lines. There is probably a way to articulate that last thought that is a bit less jarring within the context of what came before. Otherwise, outstanding poem!

thanks! funny you should mention the ending, which I was also conflicted about—lately, I've been reading Barbara Herrnstein-Smith's wonderful Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, and trying to approach my own poetry with some of her insights in mind... I agree with you about the jarringness of this particular case, though.

My guess is that you just need to let the idea simmer a bit longer; try out several or a dozen new verbal approaches to it; daydream on it. The nubbin of an image will come along that buttons it up nice and tight for you. Patience will be rewarded.