Theme Index: (Dara Weinberg, 1982 – ?)
Theater
Travel
Sweat
Rain
Rot / decay
Missed Connections
Sublets/roomshares
Apartments For Rent
Men Seeking Women
Women Seeking Men
Furniture For Sale
Free
jobs: writing
Conversations W. The Poem
Family
Los Angeles
Nature (but only in relationship to Los Angeles)
Cars
Cali
Guitar-driven rock music
The Greek Dramatists
Overheard Dialogue
Did I Say Theater Already?

(thank you Rachel for the list idea.) Very narrow, isn’t it – and limited to the topics in my own life. Knew this, but realized it more strongly when I saw how much better the fiction writers were than the poets at trivia. Doing fiction leads you into research, to knowledge. Poetry – at least contemp., at least most of it – often leads you to your self.

This is a problem, isn’t it? There should be more poems that lead you to knowledge, to news, like a novel – nouvelles – news.

But I am learning that coming into writing with the attitude of “I should be doing X Y Z” is ineffective. The only way to write is to write the poems you have to write.

Still, I am going to give myself extra points for every poem that expands the topic list.

So it is Wikipediaed: couplet, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sextain, septet, octave. Throws me off a bit…I would have guessed quintet, sextet, and octet instead of quintain, sextain and octave. Also, I want names for one and nine-line stanzas.

I have to learn the names of everything, now, to teach. This is a pain. It’s not that I don’t like stanzas, or meter, I just find that calling them by their proper names removes both my enthusiasm for them and my ability to execute them. I love lines that have eight syllables and four beats, but use the word “tetrameter,” and my interest in them shrivels up.

I do like the names of form structures (sonnet, sestina, etc.) for some reason. But I don’t like theme categories (lyric, narrative).

Anyways, this is beside the point. It is not about what I do or don’t like, any more, it’s about being a teacher of poetry stuff who knows what they’re talking about. Terms, terms, terms. It is only within the last two years that I have memorized the difference between simile and metaphor – and it’s about as shaky as my ability to go back and forth between stage left/stage right and house left/house right.

I think you could probably replace (Write it!) with (Wait for it!) in the E-Bish villanelle. Did I mention that in the writing class I observed, the students were trying to guess what a villanelle was, and one of them called it a “tritina” – like a sestina but in 3’s? Awesome guess. Someone should make up a tritina.

Anyway, this is the rewrite I’m proposing:

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
The art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Wait for it!) disaster.

You have to read it with a lot of emphasis.

A: Can you make the ‘wait’ more operative in ‘wait for it’?
B: (horrified) Are you giving me a line reading?
A: Uh…no. I’m telling you the line reading.

Actually, playwrights/poets/writerthings italicizing/bolding/underlining words that they think should be emphasized almost always leads to bad line readings. It trips up the natural rhythm of the line. It inevitably makes the delivery sound very fake. I’ve never seen it work. In fact, “(Write it!)” is the exception that proves the rule.

But “(Wait for it)” is much better. It now only remains to add the phrase “Oh, snap!” to a famous contemporary poem.