My sleep schedule has become rather unfortunate in the past week--excessive and predominately nocturnal. What productivity I was building up has fallen away completely. Ah, well. Such is summer.

On the positive side, poetry wise, I'm now working for delta, LSU's undergrad literary journal. Also, I'll be reading my stuff in a couple weeks in the reading series they host. Also also, my poetry teacher solicited my prose poem for the journal he and his girlfriend are starting. So things are looking up, I suppose. Now I just ahve to make sure my writing doesn't fall by the wayside, too.

Erasures

Instead of crossword puzzles, I've taken to doing erasures (this is a hypothetical replacement time-waster, since I have not been tempted to do a crossword in months and therefore have not done any erasures instead, but that's besides the point). Erasures, of course, are those nifty little things where you take a block of prewritten text (a book, poem, newspaper article, etc.) and pluck words out of it to fashion new text (which arguably bears the most resemblance to a poem). See Humument, probably the most artistic erasure I've ever come across. Some people/artists are really offended by erasures; plagiarism and all that jazz. I think it's a fun journaling exercise, mind-diddler, time-waster, what have you.

Anyway, one of the first poems I wrote this semester was an erasure of Sylvia Plath's "Tulips". I later revised it a bit to make it somewhat more of my own, and decided to post the results just for kicks.

Oh, and added goals for this summer: grasp a basic understanding of Old English (and possibly Esperanto) and learn how to cook with some kind of confidence. Ambitious!

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Tulips by Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ----
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I hve no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Between (A Revised Erasure)

Excitable winter—
These explosions have given
my history.
I am propped
between everything impossible.
I am between.
I am impossible.

My body tends to numbness,
needles, a pillbox and hooks,
the slack mouth of my heart
stubbornly hanging bare.

I watch
and seem ridiculous
between the eyes of myself.

Utterly empty,
the dead dream
more quietly than I.
When the echoes of
slack, babbling mouths cavort
between my numbness and--

Enough.

The noise nags and dies,
sunken without committing.

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.