Mission Accomplished

I am so relieved that the whole reading poetry experience is over, but I have to admit that not only did I thoroughly enjoy making a complete fool of myself last night but I also woke up this morning feeling a huge sense of accomplishment. For those of you who have your own bands or do poetry readings or other public speaking on a regular basis, you probably cannot begin to understand (or remember) the level of intimidation that can occur in a situtation like this if you are a novice.

Two things: thanks for all of the constructive help throughout the semester in improving my poetry. I feel like I was very lucky to be with the group of extraordinarily talented, funny, and amusing souls who shared 305 this semester.

Good luck in all of your endeavors. I've decided to keep this blog going, though the contents may shift more to creative endeavors in general and not just poetic ones. Feel free to keep in touch.

Jodi--thanks again for a great semester.

As We Approach THE END

So I am waking up in the middle of the night wondering just how nightmarish reading my poetry in a coffee shop is going to be, and hoping that it is something I enjoy so much that it inspires me to write GOOD poetry and do it again. I wish I was taking poetry again next semester, but I'll have to live vicariously through my husband, the newly-published poet whose poem appears in the 2007 edition of In Other Words. Yeah! Someday I hope to be the wife of the poet laureate...and I don't mean that in a sexist, I-want-to-remain-in-shadows-and-support-my-man Thayne version of myself. I mean Dave has the serious minded-ness to fill the role in a deserving manner. Everything I do is just a little less than completely serious...and sometimes a little less than completely sane. But I do love life...unfortunately, I have discovered that happy-go-lucky touchy feely is the downfall of a poet who needs to be able to tap into some raw-er emotions like depression, despair, moroseness, anger...and I've spent a great deal of my life (not that this is a good thing) learning how to pretend those emotions don't exist. BUT, my solution is clear. They've legalized absinthe, and it sounds not only delicious and fun but also mind altering. When you can have mind altering AND legal, well that's a combination I can live with. I can't wait to see whether or not it does for me what it inspired in Picasso and so many others. Either way, it's the weekend and since I have a lot of work to do, it's a good idea to escape from reality.

Inspiration

I know I tend to be one of those touchy-feely emotional people with a bunch of gooey uncomfortable feelings...so it shouldn't be too surprising that I'm the one writing to say WOW!! I am so totally impressed with the imaginations and creativity of the class in terms of the "pageless" poem assignment. I felt like everyone's project seemed to really represent the person/poet so well and it was a lot of fun for me. This class has been really great for me -- I've not only had the pleasure of reading some really fine poetry, but our differing perspectives and comfort level during discussions are great brain food.

I have been exploring my goals as a poet and as a writer, especially as we come closer to having to turn in our chapbook projects. I have a definite sense of who I am & what I want, even though those things are very fluid and change quite a bit...but I have noticed that in both my prose writing and my poetry, I've got "stuff" rolling around inside me that has to get out. This is a horrible metaphor, but it's kind of like when you're carving a jack o'lantern and you want to have this great image and the ability to light it from the inside, but first you have to scrape out all of the slimy guts and seeds. It's sort of a purge, I guess, that I've been in the middle of for a while...and possibly will be forever. I'm 36 -- nearly 37 -- so there's a lot there. I wonder, though, if that isn't what makes the writing have more depth; while I haven't mastered the ability to completely communicate it the way I want to, the stuff that I have rolling in my head isn't fluffy white clouds floating through a rainbow world, either.

I have also made the distinction between writing for money and writing for soul purging. While the two may eventually coincide, the good stuff isn't the stuff I'm worried about selling. I sell writing/editing/translation to pay for the other stuff I do. I am just lucky in that I love playing with words enough that even the "work" is fun and tends to open new avenues to experiences that help with the good stuff. Most recently, I've been writing passages for a new English book for ESL students. I've been working with a professor at UNM who contracted me to help, and it's been really invigorating. The passages I've had to write -- arbitrary topics like seahorses, W Celphei A, rap music -- have forced me to really focus on a topic and be consistent and clear in my writing. The other contract I've been doing is interview writing -- a business journal and a couple of music mags. Interviewing is an amazing skill to develop, but the real exercise comes in taking the interview and turning it into a brilliant story. I'm not brilliant yet, but the exercise is good.

Thanks to Cheryl Hindrichs and English 275 and Howards End, the idea of connection is way more powerful to me than ever before. In light of our discussion of Alice Notley and detachment and the ability to connect, the other thing that has been pretty heavily on my mind these days is the value of friendship. I have a lot of acquaintances and friends and people I socialize with or see occasionally or have a comfortable relationship with, but there are certain people who seem to end up being more meaningful than most. I've been trying to analyze what it is that makes these particular people so important. It's not physical, because two of them I've never met in person; it's not location because one is across the country, one is in Algeria, the others scattered around the country. It's not even length of time, because sometimes people come into my life and aren't there for long but have a major impact. It's about connection, I guess. I just think it's really important never to underestimate the value of friendship and what it can mean to you.

Shower Poems

So I learned the hard way when writing for the Corning Leader that if you didn't write down a great idea when you thought of it, you'd lose it. We lived in this small little village in New York called Bath. Bath is a GREAT place to live, if you can handle the winters. There's only about 5,000 people in the village, the average age of the population is 65, there is only one primary school, one elementary, one middle school, and one high school and they are all on the same campus. The whole town roots for the same football team, and everyone pitches in to help out no matter the cause because they're all neighbors. Dave and I are moving back there next summer to raise our kids. There are four funeral homes in Bath -- same number of stoplights and fast food restaurants (Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Burger King and Arbys).

The next closest village is Painted Post and the nearest town is Corning. Corning is about 17 miles away and I spent a lot of time driving back and forth between Corning and Bath, for groceries or shopping or whatever. The mall was 45 miles away, so occasionally I would make that drive. It was in the car -- in my head -- that I would write my best stuff. At first I was always aggravated because by the time I got home with two cranky kids in tow, I would have entirely forgotten my masterpiece.

I don't drive much anymore...I venture from my house to take my son to school up the road, to stop at the grocery store, to occasionally pick up my daughter from pre-school, and to come to class twice a week ... but living back in Boise, I try to avoid driving. Boise's roads are still a bit of a deathtrap -- not much better than when I was going to high school here and people wanted to change our license plates from "famous potatoes" to "famous potholes."

Anyway, since I don't drive much and I'm at my computer, I have easy access to record my thoughts and ideas that pop into my head. So of course, I don't have that many.

But yesterday morning, in a hazy codeine hangover (I have bronchitis and have been living on cough syrup with codeine and NO cigarettes for a whole WEEK) I was taking a shower and composed an entire brilliant poem in my head. It was awesome. It was an ode to LeBron James, NBA basketball star of the Cavaliers. I don't follow NBA basketball, but I am LeBron's MSN website editor, so LeBron is always in my head because of my job, and I know way more about the NBA and basketball in general than I ever thought I would...but I was in the shower. Of course, by the time I got out, I could only just remember the gist, and by the time I'd dried off and wanted to jot it down, it was gone. Completely gone.

Dammit.

Tonight, I am going to try to recreate the codeine-induced hangover that inspired my creativity. Only this time, when I get in the shower, I'm going to have a pad of paper and pen nearby...

************

My youngest child turned 5 last Tuesday. It is a milestone for any mother to have their youngest child officially leave toddler-hood. It's a bittersweet kind of thing, too. On one hand, my kids are now independent enough to fulfill a lot of their own needs. They are all capable of thinking for themselves and having opinions. They are learning exponentially. I have more time to focus on my own needs. At the same time, for the last 8 years, my main focus has been that of M-O-M. As my kids get older and establish their individuality and independence, I'll be forced to redefine myself - AGAIN. That's a difficult process, but I suppose it will be an interesting one as well.

La tristesse

I am never going to be one of those morose, sad think about death all the time kind of poets. I am genetically wired happy. But I do have sad days, and today has been one of them as certain parts of my world have come crashing down and made me sad and then when I'm sad I start thinking about all the other things that make me sad and then -- well, when I get sad like that I get to this really great place for writing poetry. Not here. I hate workshopping bad enough as it is to think about posting a poem here...but yeah, I think being in this little dark place for a while might do me some good.

Poetic Influences

I could do this forever. I was thinking about what my poetics are and why...and where they come from. I started thinking about what influenced me most as far as language and communication. One of the first things that astounded me about playing with words happened when I was 4 years old. My aunt and uncle (I was 4 in 1975 and my aunt and uncle were those 'real' hippies who drove a van with a big dolphin on the side and were always high) came to see us for Christmas. They didn't come until the day after, though, and I said something about the present only being a day late. My aunt said, "or it's really early for next year." Don't ask me why, perhaps my brain was at its most impressionable moment, but that stuck with me -- that way of looking at things from the other side. That's why I like playing with form and style and words and meaning.

The other major influence of my life was music. I was never into writing lyrics; for me it was more about listening to the song over and over again and writing down all the words. I did this pretty obsessively. To this day I can sing every word of every song on Billy Joel's "Glass Houses" album, which was my first 8-track. I was influenced by my parents' taste in music -- people like Crystal Gale, Glenn Campbell, Charlie Rich; I was influenced by my grandpa's music, too. He listened to even older stuff like "Mac the Knife" and I was heavily influenced by my aunts and uncles who were only a few years older than me and listened mainly to REO, Styx, Journey, and Eagles. Probably the biggest influence on my music is my husband. With an album collection of over 1,600 albums, 1,000 cassettes, and nearly 2,000 CDs I have been exposed to everything from Barry Manilow to KISS, from Neil Diamond to Marilyn Manson.

What does this have to do with poetry? For me, a lot. It's not the song, or the sound. It's the feeling and meaning I get from the words. Of course I love listening to songs like "Hey There Delilah" that have a lot of repetition and nothing new or meaningful in the way the words are used, but the songs that stick to me and shift paradigms for me typically contain something incredible.

I took some time to pull some of my favorite phrases and lines from some of my favorite songs. It's a little side journey I'm taking to figure out my own love affair with words, and it's only a small sampling of what has touched me.

__________________________________________________________________

words pour like children to the playground

a cockroach leaving babies in my bed

now you're mrs. him

smiles a painted porcelain face

take possession of your stand

rage and hate and pain and fear of self

a purple umbrella and a 50-cent hat

making love to his tonic and gin

lime and limpid green

clouds of sunlight floating by

psychic emanations

love turns gray like the skin of a dying man

itchy feet and fading smiles

comfortably numb

warm thrill of confusion

light is changing to shadow and casting its shroud

America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition

Reflections in the waves spark my memory

keeping my eye to the keyhole

a prisoner in a king's disguise

12 o'clock news blues

cynical eyes

world in revolution spinning faster all the time

collision course with eternity

he hears the silence howling




Blue October
Blues Traveler
Led Zeppelin
Billy Joel
Pink Floyd

Styx

There once was a man from Nantucket

My husband is taking Martin's 405 poetry class, and they decided to do limericks for the fun of it. Limericks are by nature crude -- so of course, I like them. I decided to try my hand at it, just for fun. You might not want to read it if you are a die-hard republican or easily offended. :)





There once was a GOP-man named Larry
whose fear of gays caused him to marry,
but in the stalls his wide stance
gave most young men a chance
to show him he was such a fairy.

One day in the Minneapolis airport
Larry flirted too much with the wrong sort.
The man took out his badge,
Larry said, "I'm no cadge!"
The cop said, "Tell your story in court."

In Boise the truth here is well-known
The Senator has always been cock-prone -
Since his days as a vandal,
he's barely 'scaped scandal ...
Now he's reaping the the Karma he's sewn.

The moral of the story's quite clear:
there's nothing wrong with being queer,
but a senator must
keep control of his lust -
lest his cock cause more chortles than fear.

A Word is Worth a Thousand Words

Ok, I know we're not supposed to talk about workshopping, but I just have to say that for me, it was a really positive experience. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read and comment on the poem, and thank you especially to those who saw the flaws. I think Jodi is right--I am not done with this poem yet.

I've been working very hard for the last six weeks on a new project. I am the managing editor for six new magazines that are launching October 1. That in itself is irrelevant, but I am finding that my work as an editor is not. It has forced me to be so very aware of words and word choices and how the change of one word can change the meaning or direction of a piece. It relates to poetry for me. My immense respect for poetry comes from this need to have every word be meaningful. In my prose writing, my journal and newspaper articles--basically anywhere else I write, the focus is not so much on efficiency of words. In poetry, I want each word I write to speak volumes; choosing the right word becomes the most important part of the process for me.

On the other hand, I can't write that way, not at all. I was inspired to hear that Peter Riley basically writes down whatever hits his mind and flows to his fingers at the time and then it becomes a process of revision. I think that must be the way I work. The poem I handed out last night was like that, I guess. I was half way through writing it before I realized I'd stopped writing about what I'd intially started with and deleted the first six or seven lines of the poem.

Anyway, the word's the thing, isn't it?

My Chemical Romance

It's like when you're doing chemical experiments and you mix a little of this and a little of that and nothing happens, but then suddenly you add this new element and all the other things that were just sort of stirring around suddenly start reacting and new things are formed--things that never existed before, or things that you've been trying to get to come into existence but didn't quite have the recipe right.

That's kind of how this last six months has been for me, starting with the Alice Notley reading and ending with the elusive element being added in the form of Jodi Chilson, who "stirred things up" and decided to have us make a blog. As soon as she said we had to come up with a title, everything that had been stirring around in my head sort of took shape. I knew before leaving class last Tuesday what the name of my page would be and why, what significance it has to me, and what I wanted to focus my poetry on this semester.

Then I had to submit my first poem to Jodi. I've written poetry and studied poetry, but I'm not the typical 205 to 305 student, so I've never had my poetry "workshopped." I wrote the poem easily enough, because again, the right bits of chemistry happened and the words forced their way out of me onto the page...but to let other people see it? And not only see it but ask for their critique? Well, I didn't throw up, but before I hit the send button, I seriously thought for a moment that I was going to pass out, break out in a rash, hyperventilate...and then I shut my eyes and hit send.

I'm only dreading next Tuesday a little bit.