Author Archives: weinberg

poetry, quotes

don’t change a thing this time

…Take Charlie Parker’s grave all overgrown with weeds in Kansas City. Add nothing,
Except an ocher tint of shame. May all your Christmases be white & Bird be still
in L.A., gone, broken, insane. Take Beauty before her habit mutes & cripples her,

Then add some grief. But don’t change a thing this time, not even a white gardenia
Pressed against her ear. Not even one syllable of her name. “In my solitude”
Is how the song began. All things you are, & briefly, as, in solitude, it ends.

– Larry Levis, excerpted from “7. Coda: Kind of Blue” from “The Perfection of Solitude: A Sequence,” Selected Levis, 161

What I like most about this is the way he’s telling you how to interpret the scene even as he’s showing you the scene.

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Uncategorized

a middle-aged man, next to a half-finished obelisk

"The months that followed were hard for Melville. He tried valiantly to secure appointment as a U.S. consul in Florence, Italy, but never stood a chance. In March, he even traveled to Washington to advance his cause, and waited in a very long line to shake the hands of the new president. He was possibly the worst self-promoter of all time, and said nothing to Lincoln, though he admired him (“Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow — working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord”). Later in the visit, he sat in the park opposite the White House, “sunning myself on a seat,” and noticed that the shrubbery was starting to bud. Then he tried to get into the Washington Monument and failed. He was a middle-aged man, next to a half-finished obelisk, with no idea where he or his country were headed."

Ted Widmer, NYT, "Misgivings," http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/misgivings/

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dance, music, musicals

I have often asked myself

what the point is of having visions of choreography every time I hear a musical theater song (or any kind of music that takes me to a theatrical place) if I am cut off from the prospect of realizing that choreography.

It is only recently, perhaps in the last six months or so, since working with Single Carrot on the one hand, with the Parallel Octave spoken choruses on the other, and writing poems that I am pleased with on a third, that I have some kind of an answer.

It is not possible for me to realize all the movements I imagine. Far from it. All I can do is realize some of them, and leave behind me traces that will infect the minds of other people with similar desires. What can’t be cured must be shared. What can’t be caged must be contagious. Something like that.

I defy you to listen to this (Druha Trava, “Brazos Bottom,” from Czechmate):

and not be beset with a desire for dancers. Personally, I like to imagine twins on Hoverboards, surfing the air over Malibu Canyon, but it’s your music video.

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poetry, quotes

enterprise

To High Spirits

You have taken the vodka
That I was probably
Saving for tomorrow.
Go on and take it
For there’s more enterprise
in waking naked.

– Kenneth Koch, New Addresses, NY: Knopf, 2000. (62.)

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gradschool, poetry, writing

this week

I turned in a draft of my MFA thesis. It’s a compilation of the poems I’ve been writing over the course of this program.

There have been many times in the MFA where I’ve felt that what I’m writing wouldn’t quite hold together, somehow, as a cohesive manuscript. Seeing it all together, though, makes me happy. I have even allowed myself the indulgence of rereading it just to read it. They do read well together. It’s going to work out, I think.

I didn’t need any help with the whole generating-material thing when I came here. I’ve always been what Dan Chumley called a “fast typer.” First draft a minute. But the time it takes to revise, and the confidence in yourself to believe that revision is something your work deserves, is something I definitely needed support from others to get better at. No one has ever showed me how to revise. It’s only that, here, it is expected. So I’ve done it. More revision than ever before.

My first drafts were good enough for me. Here, I have had to make things that are good enough for others.

If all the MFA does is give you the expectation that you will take your own writing more seriously, then that’s a lot. For me. It has been.

I think of the poems as revised as kinds of performances. I half had a thought the other day of laying them out as if they were in a script, which is how I think of them. But I think there might be something to be said for conforming to the typographical conventions of this genre.

At any rate, I am happier and more relaxed about the thesis now than I expected to be. I am going to revise much more, and generate new material, and probably find a way to get stressed out about it. But I’m proud of what I’ve done so far, and I like looking at it. The feeling I have reminds me of the feeling I used to have in rehearsal when the scenes would get to the point that I could just enjoy watching them. I’m not quite there yet, but I can feel it.

This will be such a good thing to have done. I’m so happy I’ve done it. Am doing it.

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