Summer again!

Huzzah, I have made it through my most arduous semester yet. This last month has been particularly tough, as everyone in my life can attest--but it is over. I feel as though I've progressed in various ways (as one hopefully does moving through life) and look forward to progressing further.

I am going to keep my goals for this summer pretty simple, as I'm not good with the whole to-do/goals list thing. So:

Primary goal: Read (and finish) one of the following:

a.) The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

b.) Paradise Lost by Milton

c.) The Bible by... God? Some dudes? Who knows. (Also, is the Bible italicized, or is it an exception? Screw it.)

Secondary goals include revising some poetry into polished versions, reading at the Highland Coffees/delta series, making a regular habit out of running, experimenting with painting, and taking a trip to somewhere the hell else (preferably the Pacific Northwest, will settle for anywhere more than a couple of hours away).

Currently I'm working on a series of small anti-poems which I will probably post here as soon as they're finished, as there is little to no chance of my revising them. Also, a little rant on mystery/romance novels (Hint: they are my guilty pleasure).

Windows

The windows are broken. I have seen the glass in them shatter and speed towards me like kamikaze butterflies high on buckshot. I have never climbed through them, or opened them. Hoop! I have hollered though their holes—Hoo! Wah! but there is not enough noise to make the blood flow. The limp muscle cannot dare the windows. Still I cling to myself like old cobwebs. My bones are hollow, play them like xylophones. Work on me, stretch me across a rack as a canvas so that I cannot breathe for the tension of the potential. The windows’ teeth gleam. They are waiting.

Obstructions

Just finished watching The Five Obstructions by Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth. An interesting film in a few ways, but it definitely succeeded in making me think about two things:

1.) How incredibly nervous Lars von Trier makes me.

2.) How far and how hard would I/am I willing to be pushed for art?

I don't have an answer for that second one, but I think it's pretty damn important. I accept that in many (most? all?) cases, some degree of externally imposed hard-assery is required. This is why I am grateful when teachers, friends, etc. critique my work--I can't do it myself, at least not past a certain point. But just how much pushing, how much grinding their work into the ground, is beneficial? If you push the artist past the edge, does he transcend, or just fall over? This question lingers eternally in the process of creativity, so I will skim past this general form and ask "what about me?" Can I be encouraged to progess, tempted with a carrot, or do they have to get out the stick?

As I grope along developing my writing, I (however cringingly) am more and more inclined to opt for the latter. I need whatever artificial pride I have taken from me and crushed into tiny little pieces. I need to have my best piece vivisected while I watch, so that I may better understand its organs. Even at my harshest, I cannot tear what I have to shreds as must be done. I want it to be done, so I can stitch them back up. I need a crazy Rocky-esque writing training montage.

That being said, encouragement (without the unfortunately usual high fructose corn syrup sweetness) is a powerful tool in the right hands. But it, too, needs to be applied externally, productively. Otherwise I just look like a crazy person.

I can't do this alone, but damned if I'm going to just hand my pride over. That would defeat the entire point.

I Present to You Haiku

Assorted haiku from my poetry journal. Some of these I like better than others, but the worst I have spared you. I enjoy the form; I am a fan of snapshots.

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

The grumbling saw cuts

clean through the budding tree branch

white like bloodless flesh

Woken by a yowl

and porcelain shattering.

The cats are hungry.

Slide swish slice, swish slice--

Endless monotony of

the paper cutter.

My morning pills look

like bright-colored rabbit turd.

I will not take them.

Leaf blowers snarl

and roar, chasing fallen leaves

and deafening me.

The girls are wearing

little but miles of bare leg.

It must be summer.

I did not mean to

crush the magnolia petal.

Its body bleeds brown.

We have overslept

and missed all of everything--

The morning can wait.

Today turned up a

centipede in the garden,

unearthly unearthed.

Words and Words

I am in a poetry mood. No, mood isn't the right word, I'm in a poetry stage. This has probably been encouraged greatly by my enrollment in an actual poetry writing class, but right now I am reading and writing more poetry than anything else. This is not entirely unheard of; I've always been a fan of verse and have even tried my hand at it several times (some of those products are posted earlier in this blog, but I can only view those now with a sad little shake of my head, if at all). But then my interest would drift in another direction, and I would plunge back into fiction (or more recently, nonfiction). Most avid readers/writers I know go through this type of genre cycle. But for me, each time the pendulum swings, it goes higher. I go further into the art. (This, by the way, is terribly exciting--it goes quite a ways towards assuaging my doubts about my motives/attitude towards writing in general.)

And so I have immersed myself in poetry. This, I've learned, often involves a lot of nonsensical grumbling to myself and to other people (usually authors) who aren't really there, and occasionally throwing things. Also, I'm constantly turning up in my purse/backpack/pockets bizarre little image descriptions written on the back of grocery receipts, crumpled flyers, my Italian homework, etc. (Often I don't remember writing these but am delighted by them; it's like finding a $20 bill in the pocket of your washed jeans.) It's a marvelous and frustrating thing I've gotten myself into, and quite messy work if you want to do it right. It intensifies the focus almost painfully on the basic unit of words. Words, these crazy little conflations of sound and symbol and meaning that I've fallen hopelessly in love with, become simultaneously mushy and electrified. And in the end, they are inevitably imperfect. Destined to fail. But hell, that's half the fun. If there were a perfect way to transmit inspiration, I'd probably have a psychotic break trying to deal with it. So I figure I will show my love for words (and their relationship with each other and with us) in the best way I know how--by respecting them and using them to their fullest advantage, furthering their "ends", as Kant would have it. Because for me, words are not just a means from point A to point B, they are things to be worked with and reveled in for themselves. Which might seem a bit odd, considering they're an arbitrary construct, albeit a monstrously important one.

But I'll cease my sentimental gush. Soon I will start posting work I've done this semester. Hopefully it will be revised, but as I'd like to start posting (much) more regularly, I'll probably throw some of the rawer stuff too. But now I must switch gears and work on Serious Critical Analysis, which of course has its merits, but often depresses me a bit.

On a lighter, unnecessary note: Sleeping kitties are the cutest thing in the world. Period.

Riotously Realized Dreams and New Friends

(A bit belated, as I'm easily distracted)

First: I am in no way a football fan, in fact, I'm pretty rabidly anti-football, but there is something to be said for a city, no--a whole state-- so full of electric ecstasy, of pure, shrieking feeling so thick and real you could swim through it, slather it on your soul. In the end, I still appreciate the story of the underdog's triumph. Also, it's nice to have Louisiana come out on top once in a while. So congratulations, Saints.

Second: I have a new best friend and constant companion, courtesy of my poetry writing class: Robert Lowell, father of the Confessionalist movement. Of course, he's dead, so I'll have to get to know him through one of his books, Life Studies, which I am to keep on me at all times. I am to converse with and consult him on various things (pizza toppings, life changing decisions, etc.). Again, this is using the book of course. Reminiscent of Ouija, I'm to ask the question, and randomly flip to a page and point to a line, which is his response. As dorky as it sounds, I was kind of excited when this was assigned. I like making friends! Luckily, we seem to be getting along so far. I'm glad my ghost oracle isn't Sylvia Plath, I heard she can be kind of a bitch. Here was our first Q&A session:

Q: So, Robert Lowell, what’s our relationship going to be like?

A: faced with this opinion, pored over his book of instructions

Q: Way to be literal, Robert. How do you feel about this inhospitable winter?

A: sensationally sober

Q: What did you think about the 50s?

A: At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street.

Q: Rather positive. How would you have lived your life differently?

A: it was the eroding necessity of moving with him, of keeping in step.

Q: What was most valuable to you?

A: Those dinners, those apologies!

Since then, he has also instructed me to go home because I was sick, laughed with my over the drunken antics of my boyfriend & co., and chided me for not doing my homework. I'd say we're off to a great start. In honor of our new friendship, I'll post one of his poems here.

Epilogue by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

Thanks, Robert. Rob? Bobby? Still haven't settled on what to call him. I'll ask him about it later.

Itch I Can't Scratch

Let's play catch-up:

I had a lovely domestic Christmas (there's a rant in there somewhere about the relationship between me and domesticity, but it's gotten all tangled up along the way), a cozy New Year's, and I just passed a year and a half with my boyfriend. I've just started in on a semester that looks like it will be somewhat challenging but informative and ultimately productive.

In other words, everything is going pretty damn dandy. Which means, of course, that some messy complication is about to round the corner full speed and knock everything out of my grasp. But these things do happen.

I won't lie; being content makes me a little itchy. I find myself idling over the price of airplane tickets or craigslist postings for apartments and jobs in more romantic cities. If no one is looking, I crack open unlocked doors just to make sure they don't lead to Narnia. (No, I don't do that--I'm too much a coward, and that's the problem.) I am torn between crazy week-long benders that end with me waking up in Toronto or Istanbul and plodding along to maintain my grade point average that they tell me will get me somewhere someday.

But this itchiness has been mitigated recently by my meanderings back into the world of poetry. If I can climb and adventure and do crazy loop-de-loops with my mind, then surely I can stay where I am with my body... for now.

Creative product wise: Planning to work on my formal poetry, hoping to improve my meter and general sense of things poetic. Taking a poetry writing class will force me to actually produce this semester. ...meybe?