After completing WriSems boot camp, I am much more comfortable using the words “poetry” and “poet” to refer to myself. We had to identify which genre we were in so many times that the words lost some of their preciousness. I went to a party with a bunch of med students, and got to be part of this conversation:
“What’s your specialty?”
“Gastroenterology. What’s yours?”
“Poetry.”
Imagery – the use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions, or ideas. It seems obvious, right? But I couldn’t think of this at all today in boot camp when we had to come up with a def. for imagery. All I had was “A group of words that is supposed to make you think of something else.” Sigh.
Today was Day 2 of the WriSem department orientation / boot camp. The grad students are all giving short fifteen-minute presentations on poems or short stories from the syllabus of the undergraduate class we teach. I go tomorrow – mine is Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Sunday Afternoons.”
Last night, I dreamed that I was giving my grad student reading, and that instead of reading poetry, I read some AC/DC lyrics in a slow, poetical voice. It was fabulous.
She was a fast machine,
She kept her motor clean…
Conceptual Poetry? Conceptual Poetry! It can’t be a coincidence that after stumbling out of today’s orientation (so much literature…so much literature..) I had a two-bar stretch of Round And Round stuck in my head.
I knew right from the beginning
That you would end up winning…
I can only assume that this is all a last-ditch effort on the part of my brain to avoid finishing a poem I consider good enough for workshop, which starts next week. Other similar avoid-the-issue-entirely ideas I have had this summer have included setting a junk-mail letter from Stanford into lines and bringing it in, or showing up with a blank page. Not good ideas. But fun to contemplate, in the same way that you contemplate setting a mattress on fire.
Today was the first day of department orientation for my writing program, and the first time I met the faculty and my cohort of first-year poets. It was very exciting to put names and faces to the email addresses I’ve been seeing for months.
I came home after the presentations, took an online language placement test, and fell into thinking about where my writing had started and where it is now. I read aloud my entire portfolio – the ten poems I used for grad school apps – just to hear and remember. I haven’t looked at them in months. Much of it is stuff I would change now, but there is something there I still like.
It’s nice to feel a sense of my own history with poetry, and feel that there is a trend for the better. It’s even nicer to think that I will be in an environment, for two years, where I can actively and publicly experiment with ideas that have mostly just been bouncing around my head.
There is something about hanging out with other writers all day long that makes me really language-high. The way everyone uses words seems so mellifluous, or deliberate, or dizzying. It’s not like people are dropping references all the time. It’s not like a Ginsberg poem. But it is like being in a play, a bit. To clarify, hanging with actors is like being in a play in terms of the drama; but hanging with writers is like being in a play in terms of the language.
I am at home and at something as close to complete peace as my life ever approximates.
Concluded the Single Carrot Stones process on Sunday. That was great – I’ll get to go back and give them designer-run notes in a bit.
The program starts tomorrow. I have spent more time in the library than is reasonable or prudent in the last few weeks, in preparation for something for which you can’t prepare. I am going to iron some shirts, and then I’ll be as ready as I’ll ever be.
Another good rehearsal last night at Single Carrot. I had an hour alone with the Stones before we started incorporating them into scenes with other characters. We found some great physical actions, like knocking into each other to roll each other over, that were very Stone-like. This chorus has a lot of humor.
The movement style we found worked well in the scenes. B had also found some little rolling seats, like mini skateboards, so they could move around but still be low to the ground. I want one for myself.
In the back room, some other actors from the same company were developing a Poe piece, and we kept distantly hearing the word “bells.”
1. In September 1938, Very, a tutor of Greek at Harvard, had a mystical experience; he told his students that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him and that the end of the world was at hand. His employment at Harvard was terminated, and he was sent briefly to an asylum, though many considered him sane. Both of these poems date from his visionary period.
– Footnote on Jones Very’s poems “The Dead” and “The Lost,” from the No5thed.rton AnPoetrythology (1044)
…while nature seems to award brilliance equally to men and women, society does not nurture it equally in the two sexes, and thus leaves the women more discourageable. Nor, in females, does the world reward selfishness, which, sad to say, artists seem to need, or so one gathers from the portraits of the men in these books. One can also gather it from biographies of the women who did not lose heart—for example, George Eliot, whose books were the product of a life custom-padded by her mate, George Lewes. (Phyllis Rose, in her “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages,” reports that for twenty-four years Lewes screened Eliot’s incoming letters, together with all reviews of her books, and threw away anything that might distress her.) Then there is Virginia Woolf, whose novels would never have been written had she not had non-stop nursing care from Leonard Woolf. Virginia knew this, and seems to have decided she deserved it, or so she suggests in “A Room of One’s Own.” But, male or female, once the artist walks into that private room and closes the door, a lot of people are going to feel shut out—are going to be shut out—and they may suffer.
– Joan Acocella, “A Fire In The Brain,” from her 2003 New Yorker review of the Carol Loeb Shloss Lucia Joyce bio.
Facebook/blog simultaneous-posting is in effect. Very nice.
(If you’re wondering, I joined, after years of abstention, to be able to see my friends’ pictures.)
Dara Weinberg 