Tuesday (Back to school) Musings

Classes don’t start until next Monday, but we have a week of in-service before then, so today I came on around 10 and started to prepare myself (physically and mentally) for the new semester. I want to revamp my syllabus for creative writing and comp, but that’s tomorrow’s project. Today, I attended a meeting for Phi Theta Kappa, which I am faculty adviser for and organized my office. I also sent an email to sign up as a volunteer at the humane society. It is something I have been meaning to do for years, and now I finally have the time.

I discovered something interesting this afternoon, while I was procrastinating and copying poems into my reading journal, I want to write. I know. I know. No kidding, right? I’m a poet. I write. But here’s the thing, when I finished my masters I spent a long period of time not writing. In fact, I actively avoided it. I was burnt out. Bad. This is not to be mistaken for writer’s block, which I’ve also dealt with. In comparison, this was more disturbing because it was as if my thesis had robbed me of the joy I feel in writing poetry. Luckily, I am not experiencing this feeling this time around. In fact, I want to work on a poem this evening. The idea has been marinating for awhile, but now I’m ready to dig in.

I woke up at five o’clock this morning to the sound of a dog barking. At first, I thought it was Kwe but then realized the barking was somewhat muted. My next thought was, Bam Bam, but the bark was too big for him. My third thought was, wow, this dog is still barking. This lovely canine continued to ruff until I got up at 8 am, at which point RJ had been rolling around and cussing for three hours while I had tossed and turned. I love dogs. I do not always love their owners.
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I’ve gone back to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and I have another quote to share. This is in regards to eating your vegetables:

“Overcooking it turns nearly black. To any child who harbors suspicion of black foods. I would have to say, with the possible exception of licorice, I’m with you” (57).
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This comes with perfect timing, because one of my resolutions this year is to read poetry by poets I’ve never heard of. These are the best according to Virginia Quarterly and I don’t know any of them:

1. Kevin Prufer, National Anthem
2.Chris McCabe, Zeppelins
3.C. D. Wright, Rising, Falling, Hovering
4.Dan Bellm, Practice
5. Aaron Baker, Mission Work
6.Claudia Emerson, Figure Studies
7. Todd Boss, Yellowrocket
8.Katie Ford, Colosseum
9.Fady Joudah, The Earth in the Attic
10. Chad Davidson, The Last Predicta

Monday (Kicking off 2009)

We spent all day yesterday unpacking and cleaning and finally, at around 6 pm, our apartment began to resemble a place where people live instead of where nomads occasionally visit.

I’ve been contemplating the new year and the idea of resolutions. I usually do them with my family but this year I am left to them on my own and late. I’m not going to post them on my blog, for fear of falling into a certain cliched pattern, but suffice to say that I feel recognizing and writing them down is a good place to start.
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*I Hate

By C. K. Williams
*courtesy of Poetry

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,

nor either that other tangle of recall, regret

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,

not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,

on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,

mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,

cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,

and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.
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I like this article because it is about something that I continuously explore in my own work and discussed in my recent thesis defense:

What does poetry do in these circumstances? There is satire, but that seems such a hollow posture. In modern nature poetry – perhaps in modern poetry itself – the elegiac tone has come to be the dominant mode, the pervasive mood. Didn’t Martin Amis once claim that the modern world meant the only appropriate fiction was comic? It seems in poetry the only tone left is elegiac.

Monday (Pittsburgh) Musings

What the Ear Said

Nothing to hear in that hollow. Not boats,
not the cadence of boats and their oars.
Not wood and water and the ferry
to island in a storm, not rain. Not
the repetition of rain and the often loved
sound of trees. Or the sea.
Or the open mouth receiving. Not the lean
of the grief-struck against an oxcart or the low
of the dog caught in that rain. Again
the sound of the heart in the throat, and the too soon
lapse of breath. Again the beat of the foot
against the floor—the speech of the bed-creak
or the priest. Not to hear a cloak or some ghost.
Not moon. Not door. Not the entered shoes of a beautiful
stranger and her door, her moon.

Oliver de la Paz
Furious Lullaby
Southern Illinois University Press

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I can’t imagine living without poetry. And I’m not saying this to put non-poets down, because I think everyone has a poet inside them somewhere. It’s not about vocabulary or good handwriting or saying lofty things; poetry is merely honesty, and everyone has the potential for that.

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).

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.

Thursday (Exahustion) Musings

I’m tired. My eyes are tired. It has gotten to the point where I have enhanced the size of my computer screen because the regular sized font is starting to blur. Part of the problem is these fluorescent lights. But mostly I’m tired, and while the end of the week is in sight, I don’t think there is going to be any rest for me until after the first of the year.
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Earlier this week, I was completely taken with the issue of Poetry I had bought at our local newsstand. I sent out my subscription letter (something I’ve been meaning to do for months) and set about to reading the great Adam Kirsch essay and the reviews. The essay was great, and I’m sure I’ll also enjoy A Guildhall Summons: Poetry, Politics, and Leanings Left, too. However, the first set of reviews by Carmine Starnino, well enjoy is not exactly the word I would use.

I have not read the Boland book or any of the books for that matter, that Starnino reviewed. Between my thesis, teaching four courses, the creative writing club, and life, my reading time has been cut down quite a bit this semester. I’ll be better in the spring.

All that aside, I can see why one of my fellow poets had this to say about Poetry: “I either want to call everyone I know and tell them about the issue or I want to throw it against a wall.” That’s pretty much how I felt when I read those reviews last night.

While it obvious that Starnino is knowledgeable and highly intelligent, it is also obvious that he knows it. It may be because I find myself constantly defending poetry and poets to my students who accuse both of being pretentious and high brow, that I’m particularly sensitive to snobbery. At times the condensation seems to come through a little too much. I mean if a book isn’t any good, it isn’t any good but I felt like with some of these reviews (Boland especially) the books were being shot, hacked up, buried underground, and then a high rise was built on top of the grave site.

That being said, he did convince me to check out The Currach Requires No Harbours.
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Visual Poetry?

Monday ( Blue Christmas) Musings

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Poem of the week from Poetry

Our Valley

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August

when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay

of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard

when suddenly the wind cools for a moment

you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost

believe something is waiting beyond Pacheco Pass,

something missive, irrational, and so powerful even

the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains

have no word for ocean, but if you live here

you begin to believe they know everything.

They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,

a silence that grows in autumn when the snow falls

slowly between the pines and the wind dies

to less than a whisper and you can barely catch

your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn’t your land.

It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside

and thought was yours. Remember the small boats

that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men

who carved down to nothing. Now you say this home,

so go ahead, worship mountains as they dissolve into dust,

wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Phillip Levine

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Kate Daniels is going to be featured on Poetry Daily this Saturday.
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As the title to this post suggests, I heard Blue Christmas by Elvis this morning on my way to school. I love the holidays, don’t get me wrong, but it seems a little premature to be playing Christmas music already. Although, my sister sent me a picture message this morning showing at least six inches of snow at their house in Pennsylvania. Perhaps it’s closer than I think…

Tuesday (It’s Election Day!) Musings

I chose to vote about three weeks ago. This is mostly because my teaching schedule would not allow me to vote until late afternoon, and I didn’t want to forget or let time slip away from me on Nov. 4th. RJ and I went down to the courthouse and it was a breeze. I think today we’re going to see historic numbers in terms of voter turn out, and I think that’s exciting. I think the youth vote is going to turn out strong, which I’m very excited about because they’ve been the heavily courted demographic for the last few years. Regardless of who you choose, it is important to get out and vote today. I think no matter if you’re a McCain supporter or an Obama supporter, we all agree, it’s time for something different.

My dad sent me this link this morning. I think this basically says it all.

I’m doing the ballot thing again this evening. I think it’s going to be a long evening, but it’s cool to be a part of the election process.
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Next week I’m going to begin my “winter poem series.” This week is going to be hectic at best, so Monday we’ll kick it off officially.
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My Halloween costume:

It was fun dressing up like a cupcake. I like making creative costumes and I have to say, pink tights with no feet? Awesome.
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The Academy of American Poets sent this email out last week:

Dear Friends,

What does poetry have to do with the serious financial havoc the world has been enduring? Does anyone have time to consider a confection of art — spun from the imagination — while we face the chilling reality of lost homes, tattered businesses, or a compromised future? “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

We seem to be able to do so little against the loss and fear and panic. Yet poetry’s realm is precisely here — in the emotional center, where desire and terror and hope and dread converge without easy answers.

The complex world of finance is one that humans invented, and it is a world that is incomprehensible to many people — yet it too was first made in the imagination. The response to the current distress will also be forged in our collective imagination. Those of us who believe in the economy of words look to poetry to give shape to inchoate anxieties.

The staff at the Academy of American Poets has assembled a selection of poems on Poets.org that we each have turned to during the recent confusion, and we hope they will open the possibility of a different kind of reflection in the fog of uncertainty. Poetry can provide solace, give voice to despair, restore optimism, or simply remind us of our common connection through words. As William Faulkner said in his Nobel speech, “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

Yours,

Tree Swenson
Executive Director, Academy of American Poets

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Friday (Are we done yet?) Musings

I’m here at school at 8:47 on a Friday morning. Again. I’m gearing up for new faculty orientation. Again. I feel like I’ve been oriented almost to the point of exhaustion. It isn’t that these sessions aren’t helpful. It’s just that I’ve been here long enough where the information is starting to repeat.
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It is a rainy fall day. There is a mild chance of flurries next week and the temperature is supposed to slip down to 20. Welcome winter…believe it or not, I’ve missed you.
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I’m playing with an idea for a poem, which has begun in the form of a free write about flannel sheets. This is what I have so far:

I was lying in bed the other night and it was the first night this month, October, where it felt like fall. The temperature was about 40 degrees. I’ve had flannel sheets on my bed since September, as if I am trying to will the cooler air through the windows. Finally, my cool air came and I twisted myself up as tight as I could in those sheets.

What is it about flannel?

For a time, my flannel sheets smelled like cedar because we used to keep them in a cedar chest that my grandfather built. There was something primitive about the feel of flannel, grainy but soft and the smell of cedar that made me feel like I was sleeping in dirt.

Flannel means comfort and nurturing and a sense of home. I associate flannel sheets with Christmas and holidays.

It is difficult to climb out of a bed made with flannel sheets.

Flannel means bargain. The last two sets of sheets I bought were one sale. High quality. Laura Ashley.

Flannel means sleep, hibernate, tunnel down and don’t come out.

Flannel smells like a wet dog when it is being washed.
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National Novel Writing Month is upon us once again. Despite the fact that I have no spare time and currently no computer at home, I’m going to give it a go.

Monday (Love your Body!) Musings

Today is officially “Love Your Body Day.” I like this idea. I fall into the same trap as many women who get down on themselves because of the way they look. I’ve recently (and by recently I mean like a week ago) decided that I need to get over it. I go to the gym and I eat pretty healthy but I need to stop freaking out when I have a piece of chocolate or eat some french fries. The reality of the matter is we live in an imperfect world, so to try to be perfect is ridiculous. I’m over it. Health is what is important. Thanks to SB for bringing this to my attention.

Here is a link to the site and lots of neat information.

I’m ordering these for my office:

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Here is your autumn poem for the week. I’ve decided that at the end of October I’m going to move onto another “theme.”

Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation

Since that first morning when I crawled
into the world, a naked grubby thing,
and found the world unkind,
my dearest faith has been that this
is but a trial: I shall be changed.
In my imaginings I have already spent
my brooding winter underground,
unfolded silky powdered wings, and climbed
into the air, free as a puff of cloud
to sail over the steaming fields,
alighting anywhere I pleased,
thrusting into deep tubular flowers.

It is not so: there may be nectar
in those cups, but not for me.
All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I’ll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won’t be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

Sir, you with the red snippers
in your hand, hovering over me,
casting your shadow, I greet you,
whether you come as an angel of death
or of mercy. But tell me,
before you choose to slice me in two:
Who can understand the ways
of the Great Worm in the Sky?

Stanley Kunitz

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Some of the “Best of…” from Poetry Out Loud.

Toni Morrison’s new novel to coming soon…