Pick a card, any card. April 1st is a good day to make up your mind, like making a bed, or a cake. I would say more but this blog has a strict anti-spoiler policy. But today, in yoga, after making a decision that has been unraveling me like Weezer’s sweater for months now, I poised on my arms in crow pose for a second – for the first time. I realized that I’ve probably been able to do this for months now, I just haven’t believed that I could. I’ll say more when I can, but I want so much to say, here and now, this: Follow, poet. And this: Thank you for waiting for me, poem.
Category Archives: writing
hoist ourselves atop the oblongs
I just got totally Gmail-ad-snatched by this blurb: “Isn’t it time you started reading The Straddler?” Well, I clicked over, and sure enough, it’s a litmag, they have Robert Frost’s Twitter page, and a bunch of stuff on architecture. Another example of successful advertising through guilt.
The Editors write:
If we are able to see more clearly the web of forces structuring, to a greater or lesser extent, our lives, we may be able to hoist ourselves atop the oblongs for a few moments—or even longer—and hear more clearly what it actually is that beats in our deep heart’s core.
now approaching
I have been riding a lot of trains lately, for job interviews. Chicago is linked by many, many train lines – not just the rainbow of the El but also the less-colorful veins of the Metra. And I find whenever I am on an above-ground train, I write. Below-ground trains make me want to go find the Minotaur, or fall asleep, but if I can see the sky, I can think of things to say. I sit as high up as I can, always in the second story of the Metra, and write and watch.
I like writing on trains so much that I almost, but not quite, accepted a job last week with an enormous multi-train commute package. It was a little excessive. But I do think I would get more writing done.
sputter sputter
Today, during yoga, the Random Rhyme Generator turns on again, and hands this over: “marzipan-pale, mandolin-frail.” What do I do with that? It’s so retro – those are the kinds of poems I was writing in 1999 – and if I ever wanted to describe women in terms of musical instruments (high-strung), sugar, and alliteration, I don’t want to do it now.
To be honest, there is a very, very regrettable and derivative poem I wrote that year, in high school, which is some kind of Rapunzel-Greensleeves-Shalott-courtlylove-clusterstuck, and that is SO a line from that poem, which I thought I had left composting in the backyard of my brain, to feed future poems but not ever to remerge. Surprise. It’s back, shuffling its overwritten zombie stanzas up the stairs, dropping rhymes like clods of earth all over the kitchen floor.
Maybe, as I write more poetry, lines from the poems I was writing ten years ago will keep coming back. It’s like you can’t turn it on without turning it all on.
I wouldn’t use a line like that now, but I’m still proud of myself that that skill, matching words to one another on as many qualities as possible, which I cultivated so exclusively and so extremely for twenty-two years, is still dormant in my skull. (No more rhyming and I mean it.)
The kind of thing I would do now, and I’m about to, is write a poem about thinking of a line you can no longer use.
when you find yourself in times of trouble
…as stock markets tank, newspapers go bankrupt, and city services vanish, the humble, bracingly personal act of trying to write fiction – preferably with the support of a writers’ workshop – appears more popular than ever.
– Philadelphia Inquirer: “In times of trouble, fiction thrives.” Via AJ.
it gives her the creeps
Here is the poem, A Different Story, by Denise Duhamel, currently published here, at the American Poetry Review.
you can’t do both
Two interesting things from a NYT article about SXSW and media:
it was obvious after a few days here that the people formerly known as the audience were too busy making content to consume much of it, unless it came from their friends. The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.
I’m very interested in this point – the (supposed) decline of the audience with the expansion of authorship, or, perhaps, the idea that everyone in the audience is now an author. That there is no separation between authors and audience members any more. And, even more importantly, this:
One participant [in a panel called “Sex Lives of the Microfamous”] said he had some very firm boundaries. If a first date goes well, and he is interested in seeing the person again, he sets out the rules of engagement.
“You can blog about me or you can date me, but you can’t do both,” he said to audible approval.
Exactly. You can’t do both. Same theme: the idea that you can’t simultaneously be experiencing and documenting something, whether that something is a person or a concert. A warning, a ultimatum, a cautionary note.
Unless, that is, the documentation is part of the experience. Somehow, I think that most people who consider themselves to be writers (bloggers, authors, humans) have already come to terms with this idea, the pillaging of experience for expression. But I, dissatisfied, am still circling it like a block in West Hollywood. I do not know where to park the car of my writing in the neighborhood of this idea. I am afraid of getting some kind of a ticket. There is a Denise Duhamel poem – but I’ll make it a separate post –
toss me a cigarette,
I think there’s one in my raincoat. Tonight is the last night of Dialogue Workshop at Chicago Dramatists. I’m going to be taking another playwriting class with them next quarter. For this one, I haven’t written much new material, only pulled portions out of a big long draft with no structure.
For the next class, I think I’m going to have to do more revising. The idea I have is that the 80-so pages of a bad two-character play I have will become a play-within-a-play about a theater company trying to produce the bad two-character play. That way you never have to see the whole thing, and I never have to write it, and never have to come to terms with its lack of a plot. But putting the 80 pages within the frame-play is something I have not yet begun to do.
Conversation with the CATHEDRAL
[You know, I tried to read CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL a couple weeks ago and couldn’t. And yet I wrote a post which was derivative of his work. I’m not Llosa, but here’s what’s left, after I took his style out of my writing:]
Chicago. Spring forward, sunny day, a conveyor sidewalk of cafes ending at a black metal bench at the northwest corner of Division and Damen. A bench without a bus stop.
Heading north, a woman in semi-transparent brown leggings with no pants and no skirt pushing herself, her husband, and her bushels of baby strollers up Damen. This is the second instance of Wicker Park-area exposure I’ve seen in a few weeks – the last one was a woman on the 70 bus with plumber’s cleavage.
Back to the present, a man on an electric bicycle is circling the block, proudly displaying his gut in his red jersey, not moving his calves one bit to move his body.
We sit, we eat, we observe other people’s bodies in motion around us, and we spend the day waiting for a bus that doesn’t come. Instead, the night does.
I say, elated, that I’m going to write a poem about the woman with no pants. I don’t. I write this instead.
[As I write this, gazing more and more inward, a little red-headed bird made out of burnt umber lands on the porch outside my window and squawks at me, as if to say “Get over yourself.” ]
Dara Weinberg 