from April Inventory by W.D. Snodgrass

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

Read whole poem here.

Shortlist

I am going to make my own anthology of poems I love. Here are a few titles I'm including:

Dark and Dark by W.R. Moses (p. 72 of The Wesleyan Tradition)
Utter by Don McKay (p. 34 of Strike/Slip) - unless I find a new poem that I like.
Myths, mountains by Jamie King-Holden (from Chemistry)
The Day the Perfect Speakers Left by Leonard Nathan (p. 96 of TWT)
The Hermit Crab by Mary Oliver (and Wild Geese)
Anne Frank Huis by Andrew Motion (from Scanning the Century)
The Unseizable Elegy by Erin Moure
You Can't Have it All by Barbara Ras
Between yesterday and your mouth by Rosa Alice Branco (New European Poets)

And something by Peter Gizzi, Borges, and other favorite poems. I guess I can put up to three poems by a poet if I have a hard time choosing. So much material to go through, though, which is the fun part.

Internal Conversation

Should writing poems be about associations or should I structure them like I would an essay? I suppose that depends on what you want to accomplish with it. Poetry I believe is something you learn by doing. There are too many contradictory models out there. You can't always choose the tradition and aesthetics you inherit. But you can break your own rules. The only rule you must not break is that you must own your poem, take responsibility for every word or sound. If you can do that, then you can abandon it and call it done.

---

A long time ago, I wrote a poem that was published in our high school paper. It was an insipid poem, but it had a title that intrigued the editors, and still continue to intrigue me. It was called "Metanoia" which means something like a hundred eighty degree change.

So today I tried writing another poem that lived up to that title. (I'll keep it to myself, thanks.) It's strange to trace your own journey. When I was young, I loved to rhyme and thought the entirety of poetry was rhyme. Some of my poems from high school and college were unliterary. My sense of humor was there, but it wasn't anchored into the senses. They were thought-poems.

Then I learned about a different kind of poetry, ones that were vivid and sensual and anchored in the real world so that one enters it like into a dream.

Now I'm still struggling to marry both kinds and to expand my own abilities and sensibilities.

---

I believe poetry is a habit. It's not one shared by a lot of people out there, though when you see the number of aspiring poets you might think otherwise. Yesterday I downloaded some poetry podcasts and spent my half-shift at work listening to them. Were they useful? I'm not sure I gleaned anything of import, but they did serve to remind me of poetry, like it was a neglected long-distance friend knocking on my door.

The other day I tried recording a few poems from a book, and was dismayed at the tremulous quality of my own voice. I run out of breath, and end up whispering the final words of a line. It's also a matter of confidence. There were other people in the house and I felt like I shouldn't disturb them. It's like running a hand through a length of rope and unexpectedly finding a knot. I know I have self-esteem issues, but it's a shock to realize how it affects me physically.

All through high school I was quiet. I remember a lot of conversations where the other person would lean forward and ask me to repeat what I said. Where did this come from I wonder? This fear to speak up and be judged. Maybe it's just that I grew up surrounded by judgment, and my voice was quelled. It might be one reason why I was so enamored of writing, of the private nature of it.

It's a little unfair to blame it all on my parents, who raised me like they did my more outspoken siblings. That's one of my lifelong goals by the way. To stop blaming my parents for my faults and do something to change them or else take responsibility for them. So maybe I need some shouting lessons.

Actually I improved in college, mostly because I was studying literature and was comfortable with the topic. I remember answering in class because nobody else was raising their hand. I remember a lot of positive reinforcement from my favorite professor when I got it right. I also had a lot of opportunities to speak to strangers, speak in front of a crowd, and even dress as crazily as I could get away with. Ah! The heady nostalgia for my youth.

I'm turning twenty nine in two days. Isn't it about time I shed all my preconceived notions about who I am?Reinvent myself? Bare my soul for judgment? Tell the truth, or portions of it?

Strange Quest

I flew to Melbourne to visit my sister after Christmas. I ate at a lot of Asian restaurants, went swimming a couple of times, walked around the city, visited a couple of museums, took pictures, shopped for summer clothes and chocolate. And I went in search for poetry.

Where was it? The secondhand bookstore yielded only foreign poetry, and I read a bit of June Jordan's poems and Randall Jarrell's criticism. In the end I went online and found poetry, some bits glittering, and some bits fading away in my mind's eye.

By the time I actually found poetry in a bookstore on Lygon St., my suitcase was already too full to add a couple of literary magazines, none of which held anything that caught my eye. I found one good poem amidst the books on the shelves. (Will post it sometime.) And I walked and walked, eyes open wide.

And then I found another bookstore full of cheap stuff. And there it was, a five dollar book of Best Australian Poems of 2009. Dates don't matter. Good poetry doesn't date. I bought it and took it home along with a fantasy book and a children's magazine.

There. Mission completed.

And I have read the first few, and they were awesome.

Something that reminded me of a friend

California, This Is Minnesota Speaking
by Stephen Dunn
from A Geography of Poets, ed. by Edward Field

I tell my friend in California
I am so in control
my dream is
to be slightly out of control.
He understands, he's from California
and tells me
he has beaten up his wife at a party
and runs a nude group
and when he taught at medical school
dispensed drugs to hopheads.
(As kids in New York we played
stickball, drank Mission Orange,
ate Devil Dogs.)
I tell him I've been to the edge
of myself a few times,
and the atmosphere there is rarefied
and terrifying.
I ask him what it's like
to live there, on the edge,
and he says "Listen, I'm becoming a sad
old man, save your romantic bullshit
for some midwesterner,"
and, standing here on the flat land,
I sense what he means,
solid ground beneath me, never a chance
that the wild gesture you begin on Tuesday
will be more than thin air
on Wednesday, the perpetual safety
of unfinished business.
And I say "Listen, my shoulders
sometimes want to leave for the moon,
this peace in my gut is expensive,"
and he starts to talk about the price
of ecstasy,
the fact that there's no middle
where he is, no place to return to
except either up or down,
and I can hear seagulls on his end
of the phone, the surf, the daily redefinition
of the state he's in,
and I want to let myself drift
out of control, toward him,
toward the dumb, childish universe
where you open a door and walk in
and no one's there except yourself
and you say hello and see if you can survive.

Process (plus digressions)

No, it's not some secret line to instant creativity. I just realized I write better in notepad. Something about the lack of expectations. Then when I feel they're ready, I transfer them to word for future submissions. I usually type my poems, easier to rewrite on the screen. But brainstorming is better done longhand, on the page of yet another notebook that started out neatly printed and is now a big mess.

The mess is a good thing. When I write like that, it means I'm thinking too fast for my fingers. My handwriting has changed so much. It always reflects my mood and was always somewhere on the scale between neat and incomprehensible. But through the years, some letters have morphed. Lately my d has changed a little. What does that mean? I don't know. Except maybe that I have no final word on any matter. I'm the kind of person who's a little too open, my brains are liable to fall out.

Except to technology. Can't keep up these days. I'd say it was a sign I'm getting old, but really I like to keep things close to my chest. I like to edit and revise and I think too much before I speak. So posting thoughts on social networks is not my thing.

What is a sign I'm getting old? The fact that I read more of the same things and reread old favorites more than new ones. When I was young I read voraciously--everything from my mother's romances and self-help books to fantasy novels and obscure fiction and non-fiction rescued from the bins of the local booksale. I read YA and fairy tales, short stories, epic fantasies, even the occasional classic. I read one book a day in high school. And now I can barely finish one a month.

The fact that I rarely browse past the scifi/fantasy section and poetry section in the library is disappointing to me. It's like being offered a roomful of treasure just before losing your desire to buy anything. But the thing is, I still read everyday. I'm just more lazy about it. I have started so many books I haven't finished. That's why I read poetry more. It only requires intense attention in short bursts. But one poem can change your whole day. One poem can change your life.

I'm trying to write that poem. I'm trying to live that poem.

Dark Grove

Where I always expect to stumble
On a dead body
Today was razed

Metal claw pawing the earth
Playing pick-up sticks
Another monument man erased