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.

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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?