I was challenged to re-write yesterday‘s poem idea without a rapist, as they are, possibly, “easy antagonists”. (See “Mr Hyde’s Daughter”.)
So, I got about twenty lines in, building story, but don’t think I have the stamina tonight to finish. Violence is short-hand for many things but sister-speaking is a longer thing. More on this later.
Opening lines:
You went when the banners came.
Your war found me mid-field,
misbehaving, tongue-slip of your name
stilling the overseer’s slap. Magic
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]
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.
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
Sometimes, some beautiful times, it feels as if poetry drips, heady, from the interwebs.
Books I wish I had in my hands right now:
And if you don’t have them either (order!) at least we can all want together.
Even the non-poetry blogs are talking about Elizabeth Alexander’s poem and its delivery at the inauguration. I had wanted to make a comment about it, nearly identical to Jeannine’s regarding poems that fall flat and Evie’s note on Alexander’s reading style, but there is something to be said for not adding negativity to the universe.
So.
I have come to praise Elizabeth Bartlett‘s poetry. I have come to extol her cynicism, her music of the everyday, her flights of fantasy, the blood and the dirt beneath her nails which have gone into her poems. I have come too late.
Degrees
by Elizabeth Bartlett (published in A Lifetime of Dying: Poems 1942-1979)
We are the ones with Faberge’s eggs
concealed about our persons, or walking
humpty-dumpty up the ante-natal clinic path.
No doubt you wish we were not here at all,
gazing out over the heads of sleeping children
at the boxes which are our homes, and gardens
full of prams and strung with washing line.
We are the ones who don’t appear too much,
the ones which modern English poetry
could do without. We don’t hold degrees,
except perhaps of feeling, the mercury
shooting up and down like crazy.
Oh lord, the thermometers we break,
the sweaty sheets in which we lie awake.
We have no O levels, or A levels either.
We didn’t fight and we didn’t win,
we only ran to get the washing in.
Look out, you just missed us
as you crossed the crowded campus.
We were only there to clean the floors
and hand your morning coffee out.