Thursday, January 31, 2008

Folded Imbalances Underway

Paper stacks, untripped wires which
sing snickersongs and cordial orderlies
press

Underfacings

A Cigarette which is also a Condom

Talk about multipurpose, as she sucks
thorough graftings, tallow waftings shunting
underslims

shudder fins unmark the kleptomaniac
crevice from which shunt undertow
slick

Why shunt undergrown aspects and
shun the followback fire lungfire outfire
fevertongue

Fevertongue flicker start the divergent
processes of (shunt) inhalatio and its fresh
eloquence

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Careful, before it snaps

wishfully awkward it smiles an anthem
cordial notes in stark tones and ridges
arcs and intervals, cuts, chords, twisted
snarls of sound

carefully carving undertones, cavern
faces distended warped and lifted
forward arrows arguing in steel
clangs and klaxon echoes

warped shivs unbend and clash
in corrugated rhythm unknown
edges force concaves shunt long
wavelengths deep in syncopated
lungthuds

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Accidentally Behind

So it struck me today that I have read two quite interesting books, and completely neglected to review them. Granted they were both poetry collections for my Advanced Poetry Class, but I still feel they merit my attention. I suppose I'll do that in the v. near future. Perhaps tomorrow.

Prompts

So, I got a new set of prompts from my Advanced Poetry Writing class and since I'm all for sharing prompts I'll share these.

1. Write a poem based on email spam

2. Find a person with your name on the Internet and write a poem about that person or using that person as your persona.

3. Do a google search for a combination of words and write a poem based on the text that comes up in your search results.

4. Go into a space (either virtual - a web site, a book - or real - such as a supermarket or some store of some sort) and use the language you find there to write your own poem. (Like in Mullen's example)

5. Write a poem that is "distracted."

Personally I think that many of these could prove very fruitful. I'm going to take a hack at them if I can, my progress will be posted as per usual

Monday, January 28, 2008

So I wrote a book

Apparently I recently wrote a book. It's called Johnny Astronaut. Here's a link, support my namesake, who apparently is doing much better in the world of commercial writing than I am.

Slowly, I am falling back to sleep

and in a few moments will be finally
underwater guitar, where you could play
yourself perfect surfing weather, or another
Tsunami, depending on how much
you liked Nirvana.

One day I would smile at you and consider
carefully the absenteeism implicit in congregational
homogeneity, and you would probably be baffled

Thinking this sort of thing seems to distract

Perhaps another sortie punctuation, spelling, capitalization
another guitar thing would be to find the perfect equation
for deriving, from chord mutings, punctuation. I would use
this technique to programmatically derive the exact musical
texture of the Declaration of Independence.

I suspect that this tool would discourage conventional musicians
who were likewise attempting to derive the precise and unambiguous
texture of the Declaration of Independence.

But I would not mind the sitar, it has tones we have not
properly accounted for.

If played under water it might conjure a mystic cycle of sea urchins
or spike your drink
or call my brother late at night
and ask him whether he's ever had sex

Fadeback Machine

the very specific reasons undertow and lab trumpets formulate
this response. Know with stiff certainty the marsh-water proclamation of driftwood calculus, waiting only coordinate-systems away.

imperfect mapping contorts along beetle brows gesturing at
shift-sand continuities and limits approaching
anything but evening rain and
tide swept shins

strangistortivating
under unbalanced
Buddhas

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Fallow Cities Lay in Florid Decadence

Where ellipses waved in the long grass
glass shimmers under ordinances evoked
by impassioned belly guns

Smooth worked arguments, sanded away
under epoxy undulations thoroughly
shifting this cold and ungrammatical construction

Departed orientals make flippant breaks
subtle languishments forward backtraces
establish close rapports and nod in
copulation

Fellow fortunes undermine

Saturday, January 26, 2008

A Navigation of Salt

I built a restless house, where triptych smiles
emblemed the arguments of slinking ferrets
and tweaked the sextant windward

driftclouds hunch flustered monks

what island principality will wake me tomorrow
with its selfish shoals, holding all its earthbits in

Dunn iragables flow swiftly to me

Here we think of something less manageable: the acreage of desire

What trappings must we then consider? Let us calmly evaluate
Deriving establishments and erroneous echoes, find me myself
unflattered. Follow down, these sychophantic trips of tongue.

The textsured effluence undermines us. Watching weaves irrigate
the unfounded desires of flesh, and simply evaluated leave the
underquotient finality

Flippant toggles hold together the arguments of cloth and cold
worship briskly at the fingertips, film of water and skated simplicity

Disengage the outlaw smiles that water us down
Disengage the long shore pipes of plastic preference
Disengage the meaning of these emblematic instruction sets

Flatly Singing the May Poet Smiles

The May Poet Smiles under elderberry branches
where turtle edges argue and slump from their
endings and else

Watching carefully the flatly singing esotericisms
mellow an worry away our melifluous influence
and what else

gratis, elevated and unread, undone, where, withall
there is some structured odour some catalystic evidence
some secret strike under lost doors. Finally, it is undone
and else

Friday, January 25, 2008

Thoroughly Waiting in Absense

Thunderous epigraph allowing
what we have wondered for so long as
which

follow low the dervish spins the
arrow row in fence hedge grow

creeping reel simply evening
awkwardly we embrace, kiss,
fall back down again

mandarin grins rim our courtyard
where the shadows postulate upon
our true natures, discuss our relation
to the cloth-thick night

disjointed sounds, I listen to your lips
and tongue quarrel, three wicked sisters
writhing

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Final Blow

So tonight I'm going to try to ace the two un-addressed prompts.

Ready Go!


I take it back, I'm just not interested in doing those prompts anymore, I have thought about the set of five for too long and have grown great with boredom. I think I'll just write whatever sort of poem I want, I've been jotting down random phrases and nothing certain thoughts in my various classes, and I do believe I shall attempt to utilize them. Here they are, unedited for your viewing pleasure:

lots of disturbance of soil
not much stratification
thin soil

You can tell from the
isotopes in your teeth
where you come from

A Rational Planet

Reading the Land

the earth grows thinner
as we near the edge
of heaven and hell and earth

Human

We are Human enough

I measure with my tongue
the length and breadth
of this cavernous language

Now, let's see if we can do anything with that.



He is human enough, measuring with tongue
the length and breadth of some rational planet

reading the land as the earth grows thin,
near the edge, by heaven and hell this thin
soil, not much stratified, disturbed

salivary shapes murk the thin isotopes
of his teeth, enamel geography,
from the crushed bicuspid they extract
a place of paleolithic origin

where you are from, human

(thin) enough

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

decidedly meh poem

Metronome blocks talk. They talk about
where they were when you were where
they are.

Swinging back and forth through their
rhythmic temporal necessities
Niceties

Burrow-animals, moles and badgers
brush dark dust in your rolling slouch

Slump in time to the rhythmic rhyme
august bodies april smiles simple textures
simple tiles

Slump shuffle the awkward ellipse of
circling limbs and
shunted smiles

april climbs the live
wires
slipped through mole-holes
through power-lines
to tick, talk, tock

Monday, January 21, 2008

Dear Father

Father,

The elbows of the ground are bending now.
The slipstream earth bowls down. Berry red
boils down, the firebed.

I am not crying. Shifted silt is merely finding
salt lines in my suede shoes. Topographical
etchings mark my rise and fall.

Loosely the marks of map burn away, under
my lens-light. Sharp glass cuts the fission air.
Fire flirts under the political oracle, smoke.

Somewhere oceans are receding, peeling
under this new mountain's pretensions. Peak
tops jut, cut. Scalpels mark red lines in some
fecund cadaver. Its hundred thousand maggot
children crest like sea foam round the flecked
face of the knife.

I have seen you for the first time, as she bleeds
out around my hunch-form.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Mia Copa Mia Copa Mia Maxima Copa

Note to the people coming here from a search engine:  The phrase you are looking for is spelled Mea Culpa.  This title is a play on your common misspelling.  Since I get a ton of traffic on that search term, I figured I would provide the information you are most likely looking for.  Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mea_culpa

My fault, My fault, My most grievous fault.
I cannot even spell my failure.  Culpa cramps and must be a captain.

I have failed, I have sinned, I have not written in such a time that I think I might die. My apologies. This weekend has been a hectic one, and I have not been as diligent as one might hope. Here, though, is the very thing to get started again, some poems.

1. Write a letter to a famous or non-famous personage (historical or living) in cinematic montage.

2. Write a poem that defamiliarizes a common experience (skiing for example, as in Tranströmer's poem) (Feel free to expand on what you wrote for the in-class exercise).

3. Take a common experience (riding the subway for example, as in Notley) and make it allegorical/symbolic.

4. Create a metaphorical portrait (such as Plath's portrait of "Death &Co").

5. Pick two very different objects. Write a portrait (or a self-portrait) of someone using descriptions of the objects.

The above five prompts are the options from which my poetry class must choose. The poem is due this tuesday. In the spirit of my resolution to write regularly I think I'm going to try to knock off all those prompts before the end of the week. I will try for 5 today.

Pick two very different objects. Write a portrait (or a self-portrait) of someone using descriptions of the object.

Harsh lines this elegant machine spins
hard sparks and with brute mechanic
marks a path through future flurries and
on -- a snow machine

Smooth swan shapes, the curvature of
clouded desire and drake dreams slip
soft structures shifting smoothly
snow brushed -- a feather


I'm not really sure how I'm going to combine the two, but I like the starting place

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Two Death Poems

Poetry class again, and this time the prompt was to attempt to write a poem personifying death. I feel like that's a very cliche subject matter, which made it difficult for me to address. Here are the two attempts:

They hold an able tooth
which, ancient, gnaws and
gnarls their ruddy hands

When asked they only
answer "Time will tell"

They court in silken shadows
and embrace with spearmint
tongues

seeking their
moment sublime. Block-water
at strange pressures
purses, steams cold

They too



So that's one (the first one I wrote). This, I suppose, is the second:

Soft looks surround
his patient face
eyes, alluring linger
long

He tongues the cut
of his harbour
hut with a broken
wooden wand

His house door opens
empty beds, unshelves
his ardor, gleams

He curls in lonely
hours,
his plush robes
warm him sparely

alone he laughs
and sometimes sings

drinks gin, washes,
grows lean



I have no opinion regarding either of these poems really.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Architectural Language

So, my professor (Johannes) from my Advanced Poetry Class described the most recent poem I created as "Architectural Language" a term I have decided quite adeptly sums up a lot of what my recent poetry is doing, or trying to do.

Architecture seems to be a fusion of engineering discipline and art, which has great resonance for me as a computer science and english major. It exists in a space between formal design, where control, structure, rhyme and rhythm are paramount, and that smooth flowing aesthetic place of natural grace and easy beauty. It recognizes a sort of intentional, man-made, and sometimes awkward flavor which has been injected into my poetry, while still understanding the aesthetic principles of pure sound and idea which govern my perceptions of value within my work. For me, my work is about creating aesthetic structures, places constructed to contain, epitomize, and direct aesthetics and ideologies. The structure of the poem supports the meaning and aesthetic (form follows function) and cuts a new path for language to flow into. Interest, depth, complexity, these I build, I engineer as best I can. Sound, meaning, these I draw, paint, scratch into the patient page. I can imagine the walls and windows built from assonance and consonance and alliteration, and watch within them the flow of striking words and slim images.

I'm getting carried away, I know, but I think that I'm going to categorize the poetic phase I'm in for the moment as Architectural Language, Architectural Poetry, and see where that takes me.

Impromptu Poem

So, Cathy and I are taking a Poetry Writing class, and our professor gave us a poem by Tomaz Salamun, let us read it, and then told us to write one like it. Mine isn't very much like it, but I'm somewhat fond of it, so I will show you the two poems.

This is the original:

History

Tomaz Salamun is a monster.
Tomaz Salamun is a sphere rushing through the air
He lies down in twilight, he swims in twilight.
People and I, we both look at him amazed,
we wish him well, maybe he is a comet.
Maybe he is punishment from the gods,
the boundary stone of the world.
Maybe he is such a speck in the universe
that he will give energy to the planet
when oil, steel, and food run short.
He might only be a hump, his head
should be taken off like a spider's.
But then something would then suck up
Tomaz Salamun, possibly the head.
Possibly he should be pressed between
glass, his photo should be taken.
He should be put in formaldehyde, so children
would look at him as they do at fetuses,
protei, and mermaids.
Next year, he'll probably be in Hawaii
or in Ljubljana. Doorkeepers will scalp
tickets. People walk barefoot
to the university there. The waves can be
a hundred feet high. The city is fantastic,
shot through with people on the make,
the wind is mild.
But in Ljubljana people say: look!
This is Tomaz Salamun, he went to the store
with his wife Marusk to buy some milk.
He will drink it and this is history.

--Tomaz Salamun

Here's mine:

There found they him
his Rory was a
wistful wash the
long twists of his
hair undone the
carmichael cost
almost nothing, just
a promise, a bedroom
breaking, a golden ring

His absent art showed
conspicuously round
undecorated walls

We do not remember
or forget

Knowledge knocked, etched,
edged round our doors
and managed itself away.
Of him, Rory, we unknow

He will be as here today as
gone tomorrow; hearing adjacent
asylums he ceased

I will reserve judgement for the time being.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Today I will write some more

In keeping with the recent spew of writing short poems in short periods of time, this post. I realize that that was not exactly a common or correct construction. However, I don't particularly care. In conclusion, here I go again (on my own).


Tripped on lines
the fast thinking thuds
and stumbles over its
overwheeling feet
and falls to simple
slushing stuttered stop

Wherein we stay

Stagnant

The empty pond gathers
its soiled serpents
its falling flies
its dark clouds and muck-moss

Pardoned and lost
Absent times go forward
and earth fills slowly
those gaps which cannot run
to clean sea

Friday, January 11, 2008

Live Edit Again

I once caught two trees kissing
as I looked out my frosted window
listening to autumn winds and
watching coquettish trees, comely, blush
and flirting expose their slender limbs

- she (blushing red) leaned
in to him, they intertwined
his thick trunk holding him
upright against her

when morning came I noted
- she still bent a bit his way
a lonely branching caught
in his wicker fingers

So my Dad thing read over this and gave me some interesting comments, the results of which you see above. Basically he said that the first three verses were kind of unnecessary, enough anthropomorphizing appears in the bottom half of the thing to get the sense of distance and the wistful narrator does the work of the first bit with contrast. I kind of agree, but my attachment to the verse "the trees, comely, blush, and flirting expose their slender limbs" is impeding my acceptance of his advice. So, I go to this, the drawing board.

New Work Again

So, the last original poem post-under-time-pressure worked out so well that I thought I'd try it again. This is good for me in a variety of ways. First of all, I think the time pressure and different input format (the funny little blog editing tool) forces me into a different mode of thought. Secondly, the reason behind these increased updates is to force me to be more regular, consistent, etc, in my creative writing. This seems to be the purest form of that. Also, the introspective nature of this diary-like thing that is a blog changes the mindset of my work. All-in-all it's interesting to be working with new things and it should be . Anyway, without further ado:

Etched with sharp shards.
flint knife grates in hasty furrows
marks its place and tracks tracks
that twist and scrape the secret simple name

glass flows slowly- time tugs, contorts
and lengthens, lowers the watchword
the crisp ice of fallen frost forms in webs
catches on lingering letter's ledges

finally faded, the thick bottom bulge of
many centuries sitting shows a single twisted
syllable, long gone wrong, beyond the carver's reach

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Let's see how this works out

catalysts, these things, they're strewn about
a conscious stream unspurs and rounds
unsure, cocked, an angry hammer, a single sound
crashed and bludgeoned through the waiting
air and arrested the boy in its thunder

on falling he foamed at the mouth
and pink bubbles gurgled, trickled, slipped out
slick steps, bright vigor

Talking to Cathy (my girlfriend for those nonexistent readers who are less familiar with my personal life) we encountered a few weaknesses and oddities in this poem. They're first glance things, and therefore superficial, but we'll go for it. First thing I did was fix the typo (also fixed in the first post though, so that's not really saying much. Secondly, I feel like I use the definite article too much "a conscious stream" seems to produce a nice assonance absent from "the conscious" so we'll switch it to that. We also think that a comma after cocked might help things along a bit. I must confess that I didn't originally intend a pause there, but in terms of creating meaning it seems appropriate, so I shall do so. Those are all the easy changes. The difficulty starts here. First of all, it seems to both myself and Cathy that this poem is missing something, something that will complete it and give it greater depth of meaning. That's a large and difficult problem. The smaller and still difficult problem is that there seems to be something slightly off about the second to last line. I like the cascading verbs, but as Cathy put it the image seems to detract from the power of the poem. I'm just going to let those sit for now, since the require more deliberation and conscious attention than I have time for tonight. Ah well. Slainte.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Quick Post

Rather than doing any live editing tonight I thought I'd actually try to write something new. This is sort of spur of the moment and I have no idea how it's going to turn out, so wish me luck.

catalysts, these things, they're strewn about
the conscious stream unspurs and rounds
unsure, cocked an angry hammer, a single sound
crashed and bludgeoned through the waiting
air and arrested the boy in its thunder

on falling he foamed at the mouth
and pink bubbles gurgled, trickled, slipped out
slick steps, bright vigor


I'm not going to think too much about this one for now, or comment on how I feel about it. It took about 5 minutes to write, and is still completely raw and unworked. Perhaps tomorrow I'll address it and try to make it into something more polished.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

What to do

Green Men

Have you ever noticed that tree-buds
look like those diseased pustules you
sometimes see hanging from old men's faces

I wonder, if a person got old enough
would those pustules burst forth
into blossoms of bright exuberance
to liven their grotesquery to something sublime

God is a patient gardener

This is a poem I'm particularly not psyched about. It seems clear that there's something interesting at work in it, but the conceit is too plainly revealed and some of the language is repetitive. Pustules in particular does not bear repeating. After long discussion with Cathy there're a couple easily implemented first changes.

Green Men

Have you ever noticed that tree-buds
look like those diseased pustules you
sometimes see hanging from old men's faces

Long years and slow glances have yet to
unveil the fruits of their ripening

God is a patient gardener

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Roadsign: On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Well, I just finished up Jack Kerouac's On The Road for the first time. It's been popping up in conversations with various friends of mine for ages, and I figured it was about time for me to read it. This is part of my general attempt to become more acquainted with American writers.

Anyway, it was an interesting read, but it just didn't quite have that certain something that could make it great. I felt like it was very superficial, concerned with surfaces and events and appearances and experiences, which is fine, but without emotional, aesthetic, or intellectual depth to bring it into its own. The descriptions were consistently mildly evocative, but never stunning. The ideas bouncing around among the beats were silly more often than they were revelatory, and I was never able to really get pulled into the story and immersed in their experiences. That said, I'm very glad I read it, and here are a couple of reasons why.

The Good of On The Road:

First of all, Kerouac does a fantastic job of depicting America, crawling over it all and catching the feel of the various places. I feel like I know and understand my country better now, having read this, and that's got to be good for something.
Next, I love the rise and fall of Dean Moriarity's influence among the beats, and Sal Paradise's sort of cosinal movement in the same dynamic. It's very realistic, and somewhat sad, and that sort of shift is all too rarely found in literature I think. Off the top of my head I can't think of a novel that better manages a natural change of authority within a group.
The ending was phenomenal. Not that there's a climax, there isn't, things just sort of wind down. But the Mexican journey is just right, and it seems both sad and fitting for Dean to go back to Camille after he marries the New York girl. But what really got me was the last paragraph.

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarity, I even think of Old Dean Moriarity the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarity."

That thing, that monstrous final sentence, saved this book from catastrophic mediocrity and elevated it to a certain strange wonder. It really woke me to that recurring theme of looking for Dean's dad, twisted it into a search for a father figure in general and God in particular, especially in light of Sal's insistence on Dean's angelic nature. Furthermore, it seems that Kerouac rises to the height of his descriptive prowess in this and really hits on some interesting imagery.

My next book is probably going to be Ulysses... it's been too long since I read it, and I need something structured and deep to throw this sensationalist Americanism that I've been immersed in.

Revision Results

Well, for better or worse there wasn't much I was able to change and rearrange from my musings last night. Perhaps I'm just out of practice doing self-critiques and revisions, or maybe the poem is just getting towards completion. Here's where I am now. I have to let it sit a few days and come back before I decide whether the changes are for the best. For now the poem both is and is not each version. Quantum Poetry! ... sigh.

Out of step with nature
couples blush and cuddle in early spring
- branches are budding, birds birthing

and in fall they bar themselves in
against winter snow

- the trees, comely, blush
and flirting expose their
slender limbs

I once caught two trees kissing
as I looked out my frosted window
listening to autumn winds

- she (blushing red) leaned
in to him, they intertwined
his thick trunk holding him
upright against her

when morning came I noted
- she still bent a bit his way
a lonely branching caught
in his wicker fingers

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Live Edit One

We are out of step with nature
as we blush and cuddle in early spring
it is budding and birthing
and in fall, when we bar ourselves in
against winter snow

the trees, comely, blush
and flirting expose their
slender limbs

I once caught two trees kissing
as I looked out my frosted window
listening to autumn winds
she (blushing red) leaned
in to him, they intertwined
his thick trunk holding him
upright against her

when morning came I noted
she still bent a bit his way
a lonely branching caught
in his wicker fingers

Alright, so that's the original. Whenever I start working on a poem, especially one that I have on a computer I always write it down in pencil in one of my notebooks. Just the act of writing it down usually produces some corrections, and at the very list forces me to think about it in a more distant way. Transcription sort of pulls me back, makes me really see and hear what I wrote. Anyway, here're the things that immediately strike me about this poem. I'm fond of the conceit, and I particularly like "a lonely branching caught/ in his wicker fingers" and "the trees, comely, blush/ and flirting expose their/ slender limbs". I find my seasonal notes somewhat weak however. "Frosted Window" is unbearably cliche, autumn winds and winter snow and early spring are all just uninteresting. Something needs to be done there. Also, the "we"s in the first stanza seem rather pretentious. Let's see what I can do.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Live Editing

So, I'm fed up with not having any readership, and also with not making any entries. In order to alleviate these two (potentially related) problems I'm starting a live editing process. Every day, I'm going to get on here, and work on a poem or short story from my wikispace. I'll be making comments about it and talk a little about my creative process. Additionally, when I finish a book or some such I'll write a brief summary of my thoughts about it. I guess this is going to make this blog into a log of my literary travels, a sort of benchmarking of my thoughts and feelings on the way. Travel Signs. So that makes sense. Anyway, next post should be a live edit.