Category — Personal

Last night at band practice our bass player surprised me with a nifty setting to Tuesday’s triolet. I think we’re going to add it to the repertoire.

And I’ve added a link to Jingle Monster‘s very nifty Times in Rhymes, rhyming couplet commentary on the (mostly Australian) news of the day.

My band, Fractal Folk, on You Tube, doing part of a song Krys Baker set from a poem I never finished. Thanks, Tess!

Counting the trips from there and back to there,
To there and back to here’s two thousand miles,
And every mile I drive, no matter where,
Counting the trips from there and back to there,
I think of you back here, and can’t despair —
While I am yours, such paltry exile smiles —
Counting the trips from there and back to there,
To there and back is just two thousand miles.

But I think I’m done pretending that I give a shit about contemporary poetry. Sturgeon’s Law wouldn’t begin to explain the situation were it not that the law also applies to theories and schools, and poetry is as beset by that noxious pair of hydras as any human activity—more than most since there’s no market for poetry. A grant-and-university-supported art is an art with no consequence, and if even those institutions fail the young poet, the Internet makes it so easy to find a thousand like-minded fools that each can believe himself or herself in the vanguard of a movement.

Of course there are living poets, many younger than I, whose work I admire, and I’ll be glad to name a few of them: A. E. Stallings, Tony Barnstone, Jill Alexander Essbaum, R. S. Gwynn, Catherine Tufariello, Dick Davis, Annie Finch, Marilyn Nelson, Kim Addonizio—I’ll stop before anyone thinks I’m trying to be exhaustive. These are just the ones who occurred to me waiting for dinner to served at the banquet for English-learners in the St Mary’s County schools. And I’m hungry.

And here’s what I hunger for in poems: the sound of a human voice or of human voices, speaking to at least one other human, to a reader at least, expecting to be understood, or at least expecting some human response; speech that exists in at least the penumbra of a story, of human action; speech made memorable by craft, by the rhythmic organization of stress and repeated sounds.

I hunger for slam poets and sonneteers.

Yesterday it rained and they closed the schools and sent us home from work and the rain never stopped while I was conscious. This morning, no rain, but neither was there sun. This morning I took Lew Turco‘s (here’s his wikipedia page) The Book of Forms from the shelf and opened it at random to the cyrch a chwda, a nearly mono-rhymed heptasyllabic Welsh octave with a cross rhyme from the penultimate line to mid-syllable of the last line, and gave myself two hours before stopping to prepare for tonight’s gig (more later). I made one:

That Rain

From first light the light was drowned
And all day the only sound
Was water always earthbound
Or spilling from the high ground
To the low until it found
Some way inside earth or wound
Itself in stream, pond, or lake,
And could retake the world around.

The third word of the last line changed just now, from “remake.” The day was really quite sinister.

But today was quite different. I’m pleased with the poem, and a 3/8th fraction of Fractal Folk, just Krys, our trombonist/flautist Greg DiCristofaro, and I, did a damned good job playing the sidewalk outside Larry’s Comic Book Café (but the Leonardtown Location).

I’m a happy man.

NaPoWriMo’s not going so well for me. “The world is too much with us …” But I like 2 of the 3 sonnets, and I’ve got drafts for 3 or 4, so maybe it worked out OK after all.

In other news, Victor Keegan at the Guardian has produced a nifty iPhone app, City Poems, which uses location services to display poems associated with where you are in London. Which I am not.

Lewis Turco, a wonderful poet both under his own name and as Wesli Court, is the author of The Book of Forms, the first edition of which first introduced me to real formal possibility. He’s started a collection of “Odd and Invented Forms” and he’s asking for contributions. Submission information is on the page.

I’m very pleased that Lew has included a form I concocted for Twitter, the twiplet (formerly twinnet). For a little while at least it’s the last item on his page.

Update 2/22/2010: Changed the URL to Lew’s new location,. Thanks to greywyvern for the heads up.

I never realized how central a laptop is to my writing life. I’m not very good at using them to actually make poems (or even blog posts), since the screen is too damned small on any laptop I care to carry. At a minimum, I need to be able to see several versions of the poem I’m working on, my ancillary notes, a rhyming dictionary, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a search window — fortunately Apple’s Dictionary.app, which references wikipedia, combines the last 3. I also like quick, searchable access to my commonplace book and to all my previous poems, drafts, and manuscripts-in-progress, which right now means MacJournal, NoteTaker, DevonThink Pro, and Pages running in another Space. (One day I’ll consolidate all that. One day.)

But I don’t get to sit down to that labor till late in the day. I work at work, but all day long little things happen which give me ideas, and since I can’t read my handwriting, my laptop is where I’d make a quick note. I don’t eat lunch most days, and I used that time to organize what I’d entered and to drop in on poetry boards and science blogs, which are always great sources of material for me. I can still do the latter at lunch, but without my personal laptop and its 3G connection, there’s no good way to save the things I want. I thought email would serve, but another thing I’d do at lunch was to check my personal email, which is blocked (for good reasons) on work machines. Now I have 600 unread messages and I can’t seem to catch up.

I’m going crazy. And it’s going to be like this for nearly a month longer.

but my laptop died June 9 (wah!) and my desktop has been dedicated to production of a video promo pack for Fractal Folk (yay!) and the computers at work are for, weIl, for work (sigh), and my handwriting’s gotten worse (wtf!), so I haven’t done any writing done this month: I’ve completely forgotten how to work with pen and paper.

It will be August before I can replace the laptop, but Krys should finish the promo pack in the next few days, and I’ll be back to work. I have been reading poetry I bought at West Chester, and I haven’t forgotten Julie Kane. But the most exciting thing I’ve been reading, at least in terms of something I might use in my own work and thinking about poetry, is Annie Finch‘s The Ghost of Meter. I feel the earth move.

There was a lot of both at West Chester, but I’m talking Julie Kane‘s book, one of two of hers, and one of about 40 altogether that I purchased at the conference. I’m a poor man now.

Late last night I picked Rhythm & Booze as the first of those forty to read, mostly because it was selected for publication by Maxine Kumin (I wished her a Happy Birthday a few weeks ago). It was late, and I didn’t intend to do more than browse a bit, but I ended up reading the whole thing twice, so I’m a sleepy man, too.

I love the book, particularly the first two thirds or so, which is filled with fabulous villanelles. Her other book, Jazz Funeral, was published last January and I intend to read it for review this weekend — tonight I’ll be busy with the last rehearsal before the first real gig (tomorrow!) for Fractal Folk.