Category Archives: poetry

poetry

collection agency

A few hours of restorative DAOTC* has left me in better shape to comment on my current shmintellectual pursuits.

I’m working on something which I have irreverently titled The Dara Anthology of Contemporary Poetry in preparation for my MFA program. I am making a list of all the poems that are most important to me: both those other people have written, and those I have written myself. When I get a printer, I’m going to print them out and put them all in a binder, in chronological order, so I can refer to it easily. Credit for this idea goes to LaCona, who once told me to make a list of everything I had done. Ten years later, I’m doing it.

One of the things I need to remember but have often forgotten is that when I was a freshman, having a lonely fall semester, I wrote a 365-page, 365-poem document, tied together through the loose narrative of a plucky but misguided antiheroine. I showed it to one person, an unfortunate Stanford professor, who never commented on it, and then I lost both the original and the computer on which it was stored. This is probably a good thing.

364 out of the 365 poems in this document were TRASH of the TRASHIEST variety, but there are one or two that I think are worth remembering. One, in particular, contained this one line that I thought was really good. It was a semi-sonnet. It used a limited sound palette. It was the first thing I’d written in some time that could be descrbed with the word “restraint” as opposed to “excess.” It was derivative of Sara Teasdale, but it was still, to my mind, the best poem – and the best line – I had ever written.

I still kind of like it, honestly. But remembering how I thought it was, like, THE GREATEST LINE OF POETRY ANYONE HAD EVER WRITTEN BEFORE OR SINCE gives me humility. You never know what is good when you are working on it. It takes forever to get perspective.

About eight years later, I rewrote that poem. I didn’t choose to rewrite that particular poem, but I wrote another little semi-sonnet about failure and wanting to be alone which had a very similar tinge. Except this one didn’t suck as bad.

So perhaps, in another sixteen years, I will rewrite this same poem, and it will be good enough to be something. But by collecting the things I have written which remain important to me, I can see what my subjects are. (One of them is the word “rot.”) And I can get a sense of where I am going by surveying where I’ve been.

This poem to which I have been referring is not good, or even interesting, to anyone but me. But to see it, and know that at one point, it was the best thing I had written, gives me a lot of perspective. So it’s going in the Anthology. As is a lot of stuff that just makes me laugh now.

* dicking around on the computer

Standard
poetry

almost convinced of his freedom

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

Can’t reread this enough. There is a nice long Slate Auden: Discussed conversation from 2007 that I just found a few days ago. It’s great.

Standard
chicago, location, ovhd, poetry, writing

Speaking of roses

After a long dry heartless and unfathomable spell of silence I thought of another line of a poem last night – I thought that the stars were scars on the sky’s face. Although this is a personification, it does not bother me, because it is a comparison both in rhyme and in content.

It’s probably not good for anything. When you take time off and have to start up again you always think of such bland stuff. Stars, roses, the moon – too much poetry about all of them. Blah.

Speaking of roses, I was in Letizia’s on Division last week, which may as well be last year for how different it is from this week, and a man was handing out pink roses from his garden to all the girls in the muffin line. Chicago springtime – exuberant. Excessive. My friend from the yoga studio calls it “overcompensating,” and she makes it sound like she’s talking about a short man with a big car.

I took a rose, and the man behind me struck up a conversation about roses, and he couldn’t remember the Shakespeare line he wanted to remember, which I was able to supply to him, having assisted on ROMEO AND JULIET.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I said.

He looked at me like I had memorized the OED. I have never impressed anyone so much with so little.

Sometimes I think that if I could only remember everything everyone has said to me, all the conversations with strangers – like the guitar player in the Seattle train station, like the Coors employee in Colorado, the woman in the bathroom in the basement of the downtown Chicago library – I would have enough material to write for the rest of my life.

Standard
poetry

What could have made her peaceful

It’s not Friday but here’s a poem anyway. Maybe it’s Friday somewhere in another world.

NO SECOND TROY

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

– W.B. Yeats

I gravitate between wanting to write small perfect poems, like this, and long messy ones. The things I have written lately have been of a more in-between length. But I have always loved poems that are compact and intense. Like Epitaph on a Tyrant or Western Wind or so much of Larkin or Cope.

Standard
philosophy, poetry

Think about it this way:

In Julian Jaynes’s THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, in the introduction, he says that to imagine inanimate objects as possessing consciousness is an error of understanding. Once I read this, it stopped the clockwork of my thoughts, and I read no more of the book.

I still don’t know how to think about it. Imagining inanimate objects as possessing consciousness is what I do all day. It’s how I direct. How I write. How I make the day turn from time into presence. Without that error of understanding, I have nothing – or a significantly reduced something – to understand. This has bothered me in every line I’ve tried to write in my head since. I think it’s what led me to stop comparing.

I mentioned this to no one for awhile, and then I brought it up to my friend B, who has the credentials to understand it better than I do. She explained to me, over fried fish at Navy Pier before a viewing of the STAR TREK movie, that even though Jaynes is right for philosophy, he does not have to be right for the purposes of art. I suppose I knew this already, but I needed B – a bona fide philosopher – to tell me. She essentially said “Carry on.” But I still feel as if there may be something that I am doing wrong.

I want to be informed by and aware of science. Otherwise what does it mean to be a writer who lives today, as opposed to yesterday? What good is my poetry if it can’t comprehend that paragraph?

I still don’t know if it’s really okay to think of the table as alive. But it’s too late, at least now, to read the rest of the book.

(Created a “philosophy” category w. this post.)

Standard
metablog, poetry

back out of all this now too much for us

I am deeply unsettled by all my self-descriptions being spilled in a sea of HTML on this site. How long has it looked like that? I don’t want to know. There is only one thing that will cleanse the space: Auden. The last lines of the last poem I memorized for a high-school acting class, these words are one of the last connections I have to a time of unquestioning confidence.

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Can’t be wrong.

Standard
poetry

here’s mint,

that’s for forgetting things that shouldn’t be remembered.

It was hard to post after that post because that post was so joyful that I felt like it couldn’t be followed. But here it is: I have thought of a new kind of poetic comparison which is appropriate for the New Poetic Comparisons mandate.

If you were talking about someone in a poem with big teeth (like me) you could say “A person with teeth like carrots.” That way you’re not comparing them to a rabbit, but to something once removed from it. It’s like that kind of slang where the rhyme connects the words. You know what I mean, right? British? There is an intermediary between the one thing and the other.

I saw a thin house today that looked like it had been squeezed by tweezers. That comparison, unlike the carrots, is not okay – it’s too easy. I don’t know how to fix it, which means that I don’t know what to say about the thin house.

Standard
poetry

post-compare

After a few days of trying not to compare things for the purpose of poetry, I have come up with some more refreshing sorts of contemporary comparisons, so that poems may still be written by me.

1) Comparing within the world of nature, but only with things being compared to things they are not at all like.
The sky, like a curdled fish. (This is even better because fishes can’t curdle.)
The cat, like a tectonic plate.

2) Comparing without reference to the world of “nature,” such as technology or human construct being compared to abstract concepts.
The window-panes, like a heap of syllables.
The Xerox machine, like a theory.


This train of thought I must purge all common comparisons from my prose as well! This syringe of thought led me to a new discovery today, at lunch.

I was sitting on a bench, eating a sandwich, looking at a tree. I started to reach for a comparison, and instead, I suddenly thought of this as a first line:
I am sitting on a sandwich, eating a tree, looking at a bench.

It’s perfect. It’s like a kind of word-level anagram. The right placement of nouns instantly flashes into your head. And through juxtaposition, somehow all three things are compared.

Standard
poetry, writing

past compare

Poems are comparisons and if you write too many poems everything starts to seem like something else. The trees, ringed with puddles, have pissed themselves after a night of drinking. The Hershey’s wrapper floating in the gutter, touching one corner to the concrete, is a fish nibbling at the reef of the sidewalk. It is starting to infuriate me. I do not want things to seem like something else. I want things to only be what they are. I want to release the visual world from the curtailment of my comparisons! Nothing is like anything!

To see a tree with a puddle under it and know it only for a tree with a puddle under it: that will be a new level of poetry.

Standard