Author: bripike

Saturday (I’m done!) Musings

I am done with grading. I went in this morning to finish a couple of things and now I can get ready to head east for the holidays. Our Christmas/New Years is going to be a hectic one, but I’m looking forward to it. We’re heading to Erie the 22nd through the 26th. The 26th we’re heading to Pittsburgh and we’re leaving their the 31st to come back to Indy. The 1st we’re heading down to Murray for my defense, which is on the 2nd. Phew. Luckily, I don’t have to be back at school till Jan 6th.
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A Yale University professor whose poetry is published by St. Paul’s Graywolf Press has been chosen to write and read an original poem at the Jan. 20 inauguration of Barack Obama. Elizabeth Alexander has published four collections of poetry, and her book “American Sublime” was a 2005 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, Alexander was a poetry mentor with the Loft.

Blues

I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, 'til
my face is creased and swollen,
'til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father's money.

To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worked hard to give you what you have.
There is no sin but sloth. Burn
to a wick and keep moving.

I avoided sleep for years,
up at night replaying
evening news stories about
nearby jailbreaks, fat people
who ate fried chicken and woke up
dead. In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V's of birds flying in formation,
or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

Elizabeth Alexander

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Wednesday (Scraping ice off my car) Musings

We got some snow last night and then we got some freezing rain. This made for a lovely, hard mixture that greeted me as I walked out to my car this morning. After almost falling three times (yes, I know I’m a klutz but it was slippery!) I managed to get my car started, locate my snow scraper, and start hacking away at the ice. Twenty minutes later I was just getting into my car and heading to work. This is where the allure of winter starts to dim…

In other news, after crunching numbers, adding up student loans, and crunching more numbers, RJ and I have decided to wait a year before purchasing a home. I would advise anyone who has significant school debt to not add up all you loans unless you want to seriously ruin your day. Mine was ruined, to the point of tears ruined, but I bounced back when I realized that we could make a significant dent in all our other debt and be in a better financial position in a year and then look into buying a home.
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I subscribed to Poetry about a month and half ago, only to learn that my subscription does not start until January 2009. This irritates mostly because one of my mentors from MSU, Nicky Beer, is featured in the magazine. I plan to go buy it at the newsstand, but it would have been nice to receive it at home. Anyway. Both of the poems featured, Prairie Octopus and Ad Hominem, Nicky read to our poetry workshop this summer.

Ad Hominem

Nicky Beer

The Poet:

Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine—
where’s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:

It must be a dull world, indeed,
where everything appears
to be a version or extrapolation
of you.

The birds are you.
The springtime is you.
Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators—
everything becomes
you.

I, with a shift
of my skin, divest my self
to become the rock
that shadows it.

Think of when
your reading eyes momentarily drift,
and in that instant

you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text
gone before you can focus.
That’s me.
Or your dozing revelation
on the subway that you are
slowly being
digested. Me again.

I am the fever dream
in which you see your loved ones
as executioners. I am also their axe.

Friend, while you’re exhausting
the end of a day
with your sad approximations,

I’m a mile deep
in the earth, vamping
my most flawless impression
of the abyss
to the wild applause of eels.

Source: Poetry (December 2008).

Prairie Octopus, Awake

Nicky Beer

The night’s turned everything to junipers
shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit,
weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut.
I forget this isn’t my universe
sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling
most of my life to land here, a lone skirl
in the immaculate hush. In my world
I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung.

Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not
sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will
do if I don’t keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well—
I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

Source: Poetry (December 2008).

Monday (Freezing Rain) Musings

Your poem for the week (courtesy of The New Yorker. Yes, I’m still catching up):

Terza Rima

In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can’t be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell

How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,

And then flew on, as if toward Paradise.

Richard Wilbur

Note about the form:

Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameters are generally preferred.
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This is too perfect considering R has been a part of both an ugly sweater party and a mustache party…

“Hey man, nice sweater. It’s so ugly.”
“Yeah, when my family first got to this country we had to shop at Goodwill, this is the first one my father bought to get him through his first winter here. Good thing they didn’t have these parties back then, right? He would have died.”
“Geez, man, I’m sorry, you can cut in line for egg nog.”

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Lying about something you’ve read to impress someone you’re taken with comes second after telling untruths about sexual conquests, but ahead of lying about your age or job.

Saturday (Winter Farmers Market) Musings

The Ming Dynasty exhibit at the IMA was awesome. We were not allowed to take pictures but we bought a book especially created for the exhibit, which showcased all the items in the collection. They had the exhibit divided into three phases and it was interesting to see the change in color and subject matter as you moved between the different sections.


We went to the Winter Farmers Market this morning and bought some goodies. I was lucky enough to get the last Parmesan baguette. Delicious.

We are watching our neighbor’s dog, Bam Bam, this weekend. Here is a vid (courtesy of RJ’s phone) of Bam.

Friday (Cards and Art) Musings

RJ spent most of Wednesday downloading new software to his blackberry. One of the new functions is a video camera, so he took this short vid of Nimbus purring.

We live about ten minutes from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and we’ve only been once. I consider this a disgrace, especially because general admission is free. It so happens that one of our friends was given two free tickets to an exhibit featuring art from the Ming Dynasty. The exhibit is called Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty. Below are some pictures from the exhibit. I’m looking forward to it.

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It’s all there in black and white: a poet’s pain, her suffering, her emotional distress. Turn the page and find secrecy, shock and disappointment. But don’t expect passionate verse. These are lawsuits, not poems.

Edward Hirsch

I came across this post on The Elegant Variation awhile back when I was working on my blog project for my MFA. I made a note of it in my little red moleskine that I carry around with me and forgot about it. Well today, in true procrastinator style, I flipped through my little red book and was reminded of why I loved the following from Ed Hirsch:

Four Subjects for Poetry
(this is a list from William Matthews that appeared in a 2006 NPR interview with Hirsch)

“1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
2. We’re not getting any younger.
3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.”

In the same set of notes, I wrote “More than Halfway…lovely!”

More Than Halfway

I’ve turned on lights all over the house,
but nothing can save me from this darkness.

I’ve stepped onto the front porch to see
the stars perforating the milky black clouds

and the moon staring coldly through the trees,
but this negative I’m carrying inside me.

Where is the boy who memorized constellations?
Where is the textbook that so consoled him?

I’m now more than halfway to the grave,
but I’m not half the man I meant to become.

To what fractured deity can I pray?
I’m willing to pay the night with interest,

though the night wants nothing but itself.
What did I mean to say to darkness?

Death is a zero hollowed out of my chest.
God is an absence whispering in the leaves.

Thursday (Winding Down) Musings

This could explain why I always look forward to winter:

Snow is the weather to which poets’ imaginations are most beholden; more often than any other it’s given centre stage in a poem rather than providing the incidental music, as rain or sunlight might…

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I am slowly but surely making my way back to my stack of unread books. This new job and my thesis have kept me away from recreational reading this fall, but I am bound and determined to read more this spring.

I finished Lee Martin’s River of Heaven about a week and half ago, took a brief respite to decorate my Christmas tree and do laundry, and then began Barbra Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

I love Barbra Kingsolver. I read Bean Trees when I was a sophomore in high school and read The Posionwood Bible last fall. I think her writing is beautiful and this new nonfiction book is no exception. I’m only about 30 pages in, but I’ve already copied some of the passages down so I won’t forget them. This passage is from the opening of the book:

This story about food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family’s las day in Arizona, where I’d lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride her bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was kist the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.
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These days, poetry readings might seem a strange concept. Why would you give up an evening of watching The Biggest Loser or Dancing with the Stars to listen to someone read what you could easily read, and perhaps more easily understand, on your own?

Technical Note

I’ve been having some trouble with my blog since Tuesday’s post. The links were reverting back to typical blue and purple, which was screwing up my color scheme and not making me a happy camper. After researching the problem on Google, I discovered that cutting and pasting online material from a word document is not a good idea in Blogger.

I just thought I’d pass this on in case anyone else encountered a similar issue.

Wednesday (I look like an elf) Musings

This morning I put on navy slacks, a green turtleneck, and my favorite green shoes. As I was leaving the house, I grabbed a red shrug to bring to school in case I was cold. Only now do I realize that I look like an elf.

Oh well.
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I bought this as a “good job you finished your thesis” present to myself. I think it’s lovely.

I found the seller on etsy.com, which is an awesome crafty website. If you love one of a kind handmade items, you need to check out this site. It is fantastic.
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A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:
Woman: What do you do?
Man: Me? Oh, I write books.
Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?
Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.