Progress: Just finished an intensely sexy pantoum inspired by this prompt. I’m still one poem behind (from Wednesday) and hope to catch up tonight when I get back from my afternoon errands. Edited 9:05 pm to add: I just finished a fairly silly little poem about Peeps, so I’m now caught up.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
I took Peg’s line from yesterday about the harp and wrote something. The opening lines go:
I had Nero’s fiddle as a role-model
but four strings only bring a city down.
because I may take down the graphic later:
[poof]
Progress: Yesterday I wrote an incomplete first draft of a poem about a nightmare I’d had the night before, which involved this gigantic hairy spider leaping onto my head and laying her egg sacs in my hair. What I have of the poem is pretty good, I think, for a first draft, but there’s four or five little blank where I need a better image than what I have. I’ll come back to it in May and make it (I hope) brilliant. Today I’m planning to try my version of N+7, in which I replace nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and only keep the sentence structure, and then use the resulting hot mess with its occasional serendipitous accidents as a springboard to write something that makes sense, on “Elegy for Sol LeWitt” by Ann Lauterbach, which is the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day poem for today.
Prompt for today: Join me. Pick a poem you like and do an N+7 and then craft something sensible out of it.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
Seventeen lines on the immorality of toads, thanks to Ryan. Like everything I write, it started with me and some meter, and I thought I had left the toads behind until they made for a good twist to the trajectory.
A line-break darling:
no bird can sing, neither can the sun
come up, but they are metaphor
This one I would like to polish and do something with.
I nearly wrote about copper tungsten this evening because I was still being goaded by Jeannine’s periodic table from yesterday and CuW has such a beautiful look to it.
Instead, I did my 3 pages of scribbling, which went all over (but neither to arches nor tungsten), and ended up with a sonnet idea and an almost-quatrain. Perhaps something to come back to, tomorrow.
I had intended to post last night with my goals for this writing marathon and having failed to do so I feel as if I am already behind.
My goal is to write every day, not just every weekday. If it’s new scribbling, I’m holding myself to my three page rule from last time. I would like to work on Queen of the Steppe if so motivated, so I’m going to count revision as writing. Also, I would like to write at least one (new) pantoum because the journal is becoming all triolets, all the time.
Tonight? There are so many options, Joanne gives metaphor,
the Portland Art Museum an enchanting picture of arches I must return to, Jeannine the periodic table. So I confess to jealousy:
The whole world’s made of metal
to an astro geek, too heavy
with its many shells and layers,
banal in its scarcity.
Give me exploding pink shockwaves
of hydrogen, abundant mother
material whose lightweight arms
curve matter with the grip of gravity.
Real spark even if not high art. What fun.
Progress: None. I watched the peregrine falcon who sometimes hangs out on the balcony on the 11th floor of my workplace, instead of writing. Tonight is trivia at the Barley House (pretty much the only thing going on in Concord, NH all winter long) so I don’t expect to get much done. I’m planning to do two poems Saturday to make up for it.
Prompt for today: Read Write Poem on metaphor.
Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.
April, although NaPoWriMo, is really the month of work travel for me, not readings. There are so many wonderful readings coming up in my area in the next few weeks; could some of you go for me, please?
Kevin Young is reading at the ICA in Boston on 16 April. (I loved his book Black Maria.)
Also on 16 April is X. J. Kennedy at the Lexington High School!
On 2 April, Sabra Loomis and Jennifer Rose at the Suffolk University Poetry Center at 5:30pm (much, much too early to escape from work in time to arrive).
Karen Weyant‘s Stealing Dust (published by Finishing Line Press) makes you feel too hot, too sticky, too tired, too old, too dirty. It sings the songs of the assembly line so irresistably you will sing along whether you have sung them before or not:
Forget eyeliner. It stains shadows beneath your eyes.
Forget mascara. It runs. Even the waterproof kind.
from “Beauty Tips from the Girls on 3rd Shift”.
The poems make obvious and close as skin worlds outside my own experience. From the title poem:
They don’t care about what we
take home with us: dirt that crawls
up our jeans, seeps through our socks,
leaving tiny dots like deer ticks
embedded deep in our skin
and dust that melts through our shirts,
our white tank tops, our bras, coloring
the tips of our nipples, black.
The poems open your eyes, then blind you. From “3rd Shift Sunrise”:
The sun looks different
after 8 hours of dust & dirt,
& fluorescent white lights.
…
edges blurred
as if melted from furnaces
that never stop running.
You can find more of Karen’s work on her website.
I have little experience writing reviews. Do not hold this against Neil Aitken‘s The Lost Country of Sight.
Although it seems strange to me, I think I am, as a reviewer, supposed to explain what the book’s about. If you’d just read the first poem, it would be fairly clear. The poetry is about home. It’s about not being home, coming home, searching for home, settling for home when home is not home, the implications of home and not-home on your identity.
Even the longing and the confusion are beautiful in Neil’s work.
From “I Dream My Father on the Shore”:
And when night comes, it comes without a tread, without a word.
From “After Neruda”:
When you press it to your lips,
you can still taste the unwashed salt of sorrow.
From “Gift”:
There is always cold at my heels, the tall ships
of thunder, small men with seeds. This is my gift.
This storm I bequeath to the acres of graves,
the bent necks of reeds, trees I remember.
More than color, I leave rain on doorsteps.
One of the things I admire most about Neil’s poetry are the details. Each poem has a similar silence, a quiet or a tone that I will now always associate with Neil’s writing, but the details in each are discrete, tangible, clear, differentiated so the book does not give the effect of being one long piece split up occasionally. From “My Father as Landscape”:
But I am not a forest. I am a road cutting through its midst.
I am what the mountain yields, the path through tall shadows
of pines and maples. I am the line that stitches the earth, my body
an unending arc of stone and gravel. I am the eye, the sight, the sign
at the edge of a ravine before the drop to nothing. I am the steel rail
on which you lean, the cross, and the wild flower burning against the dark.
Near the end, Neil takes on Jose Marti’s quotation “I have two countries, Cuba and the night”: “In me, there are as many countries as names.” Furthermore:
If there are three, there must be a fourth.
I will find it in your skin. Hear it resonate in your bones.
A ringing echo. Something of sound. It will be small.
Almost a hut. A thatched roof shack in the wilderness.
A hermitage for two. A boat in a river. Almost a home.
The book is now available for purchase on the Anhinga Press website, for USD15. Continue reading