Conditional Poetics

I know I have sometimes said that people who post their poems on the internet really bother me. Usually that poetry is not very good and the poet posts it explicitly to gather praise from the internets. What I'm about to do pains me ever so slightly, and may be laden with hypocrisy. I am going to share with you, dear readers, one of my poems.

It's still pretty rough, this is about the third draft. I will not claim that it is any good (I like it a lot, but I'm far from impartial, and it's really fresh, so I'm even less impartial than I might be about another poem). The reason I'm posting it now is because I think it really needs a good title, and I can't think of one.

My dad suggested "Bread Pudding" because the 1970's pop band Bread came out with a (really terrible) song called "If" and the poem is like a pudding, especially bread pudding, because it is melange of material. He also suggested "Blue Universe... O" or something like that.

I've considered calling it something like "Empirical Condition" or "49 Conditions" or something like that. The poem is made of a series of half conditional statements so... that's where I got those titles. I don't like them much though.

Anyway, here is the poem:

if the poetry of science can be found in the stars
if the universe is, at its core, blue
if blue is nothing more than a wave-length
if the stars vibrate with cries of O
if silence (not sound) is the foundation of (English) language
if poetry has the power to teach the erring man
if I whisper secrets into blue clay mugs
if blue becomes onomatopoeic
if the prefix “demi” means one half
if poetry can be empirically dissected
if all possible scientific questions can be answered
if poetry is an experience of imminent revelation
if the (English) language can be picked apart and stripped to essence
if the scar exactly bisects my back
if I change the details (you) to improve the story (us)
if it is possible to write blue poetry
if there are some (many) questions science can’t answer
if we don’t speak over tea
if scar tissue is blue
if scars can be empirically dissected
if I use the blue clay mugs for tea
if poetry and science are at odds with each other
if O is a scar on the (English) language
if the prefix “hemi” means one half
if rocks can resist the sky
if poetry and science cannot be separated
if blue has the power to teach the erring man
if stars are rocks that didn’t resist
if we (I) must obey the (English) language
if blue is a rock on the surface of the universe
if the (English) language once meant something else entirely
if the rock and the sky are each half
if O hangs, silent, in the air between us
if blue always points south
if I write everything down and hide it
if the prefix “semi” means one half
if the story (us) is deeply scarred
if love can be empirically dissected
if paper beats rock
if it becomes possible for the writer to have, like Picasso, a blue period
if O is set aside for later
if one is rock and the other is sky
if the stars are made of blue clay
if every scar clutches a story
if Carolina, Cobalt, Sky, Steel and Midnight are all shades of blue
if O falls off the edge of the universe
if the (English) language can be sculpted in blue clay
if science has the power to teach the erring man
if we (I) throw implication to the wind and use only “if” but never “then”

Please post any ideas you have for a title (or anything else you want to say about the poem) in the comments. Or us whatever other means you have to communicate with me.

Thanks for your help, cyberfriends!

Death Becomes Me

I didn't post yesterday, you might have noticed. I had a good excuse though: I was fighting for my life. Yes, your humble authoress was nearly the victim of really terrible poetry.

Anyone who has read the Hitchhiker's Guide knows that bad poetry can be deadly, or at least very very torturous. Last night I was reading two sets of 5 poems for my creative writing class. They were by two different classmates and I had to read them because we are workshopping. Of course, because we're workshopping, I had to read them carefully, closely and more than once. It was literally painful.

These two writers could give to Vogons a run for their money. It was worse than blog -poetry, though I wouldn't be surprised if they would put it on their blogs if they had them. It wasn't even poetry, really. It was fresh dog-shit dressed up in broken lines and declared "poem." It was an amaturish attempt to take the clay block and sculpt it; resulting in a "brilliant" exhibit titled Block. It was the poetic equivilant of the awkward acne riddled teenager drooling on his desk while sitting behind the hot, blonde, popular cheerleader. It was the prattle of an inarticulate idiot whose vocabulary is limited to the drivel picked up in kitchens and back alleyways (bad use of ordinary language, is to me, more vulgar than any profanities that you could throw at me).

I'm having way too much fun with my metaphores, it's getting out of control.

On an interesting, and completely unrelated note, I saw HotFedExBoy on campus today. I didn't talk to him because he was on one side of a window and I was on the other. It was odd seeing him though.

This is Just To Say

I was discussing with a friend of mine how I'm kind of stuck for things to write about here every single day. I've decided that I don't like posting every day, and I feel like the quality of my posts goes down when I'm posting just to post, not because I have something to say. But that is beside the point. My friend suggested that I post some of my writing (poems or short stories). It's not like I would be the first blogger to put up his/her own poetry, and it would be a easy, little effort thing to do (as long as I did stuff I've already written rather than write something new each day. Which is what I would do, because I would want to post stuff that's been milling for a while and might actually be good).

I'm not going to post my stuff. I am generally against blog poetry. Why? Because it is almost always completely terrible. And people who don't know any better leave comments on it like "zomg wow that was so amazing and deep your like the best poet ever" which only encourages bad poetry. The logical side of my brain says that just the act of putting a poem on a blog doesn't make the poem bad. The other side of my brain sticks its tongue out and says, "you don't know that for sure. What if it does!" I don't like it when my brains fight.

My friend made the argument that, even if the poetry is not very good, it serves a purpose. It conveys a message to people who know the author really well. It exposes the author in a safe, kind of personal level, to those who he is comfortable exposing himself to (hee hee, exposing oneself). To that I say, why not just write your close friends a letter/e-mail/text message. Or, here's a radical idea, call them if you're Feeling enough to write a poem.

I think the problem is that most people think that poems are all about feeling and/or things that happen. It's an easy mistake to make. Poetry, if it's done right, can be overwhelmingly emotional and can often capture very poignant moments. But, in the words of Stephane Mallarme: "you do not make a poem with ideas, but with words." Poetry is all about the language, the constuction, the process itself. All poetry is, in some ways, just about the poem itself. The subject matter of the poem is irrelevant. True poetry can stand alone without all the background information about the author and what he's been through. I know there are many literary critics who may disagree with that. But a good poem is still a good poem if you take the author out of it. You may not be able to interpret it exactly without some biographical information, but it is still a good poem.

I have never read a blog-poem that was good.

I've read some blog-poems that would make interesting songs for some hipster, obscure indy-band. And that has some merit, but it's a whole different thing. If any of my readers really want to read my stuff... well, let me know. I'm not above sharing my work, and it's always nice to get feedback. I'm just not posting it here.

Getting Ink

I'm blogging about my creative writing class again. The teacher guy recently collected our "writing journals" and today he gave them back, complete with his comments on what we had written.

There was one day I was feeling lazy and simply scribbled all over the page. I justified it as a "poem without language" by adding this quote from a Saussure essay I had to read in another class:

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas,
and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

What makes me laugh a little is the comment left in the margin beside this quote: "You should get this as a tattoo"

Granted, it is a very nice thought. I enjoy the concept and it's very well articulated. It even suits me, I think. As you all probably know by now, I'm a big fan of language and am very interested in finding just the right way to express my thoughts, ideas, feelings etc. I probably wouldn't mind having that tattooed somewhere... maybe on my back? I just think it's funny that it was the first place the prof went.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I absolutely love the idea of getting words tattooed somewhere. I like the idea of being able to read a person, literally, like a book. But the problem is, what could you get tattooed that would fit you for the rest of your life? If I picked a poem or a quote that I absolutely love today, that fits my entire philosophy on life and means a great deal to me now, who's to say it would still fit five or ten years down the road? Even if I choose something, wait and think about it for a year or two (which may seem extreme, but I for something that will be on my body for the rest of my life, I think that it's perfectly reasonable to do so) and it still is a perfect as I originally thought it was, I can't know that I will still even like it when I'm 50 and have twice as much life experience as I do now.

It's also possible that the meaning of whatever was inked would be diminished simply by having it with me all the time. To be faced with it every day, and to have to explain it to everyone who got close enough to read me, would leach all the specialness out of the words. Eventually they would start to feel like my own personal cliche. So maybe, to prevent that, it should be something that doesn't really mean much.

I don't know. I'm sure I'm over-thinking this way too much. Like I said, I really like the idea of getting words tattooed. Maybe one day I'll actually go out and do it. I will leave you with a question: If you were to get a quote/poem tattooed, what would you get and where would you put it? Or if you already have something, share that.

Toy for Wordies

I found a super cool new toy on the internets. Rather than try to explain it, I will just share some of the things I created with it:

This is part of "Not I" - a short play by Samuel Beckett



This is one of my favourite poems: "i carry your heart with me" by e.e. cummings



This is a short story about ducks that I wrote a while ago. It's just a bit of sillyness really.




And this is a sestina I wrote. I think that kind of poem really lends itself to this sort of thing.



Another sestina. I really like how they work with this. This one is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina" by Miller Williams

Lost Language

Some of the things that Manic wrote about on his little website yesterday (oh, he posted it on Tuesday, but I read it yesterday) really made me think about my own Writing and how little I've been doing lately. He doesn't really talk about writing much, but he mentions his process (third paragraph) and the way he describes it made me hunger for metaphor. I suddenly realised that I've been forgoing Writing much longer than I should.

I should explain what I mean by Writing. I don't mean the silly little anecdotes and quips that I write either here or in e-mails or for school or even in my journal. I do that kind of writing everyday and while there is something to be said for getting something down on paper (so to speak), it just doesn't count. There's too much casualness and informality to this kind of writing. What I've been neglecting is really constructed, careful, meaningful, perfectly formed Writing. The sort of composition that makes the best poetry and stories.

I used to Write every day- on top of e-mails and journals and letters and such- but due to a serious case of writer's block, I got out of the habit. Now I've recovered from the block, but I'm out of the habit of getting things out of my head, so I now have a massive population of poems and words and phrases floating around inside of me. I feel like I've lost some of my talent at translating them. Whenever I pick up a pen, everything tries to come out at once and nothing is quite as good as it was in my mind. I lose my courage and walk away.

Part of the problem is that I hold myself to a very high standard. Anyone who has ever heard me rant about "poets" knows part of the reason. Poetry, especially, is so deeply personal and there are so many "poets" out there who are so posturing and pretentious that their poetry (which is usually terrible) gets lost behind their image. I'm loathe to bring an imperfect poem into the world because I want to just be someone who writes poetry. I want my image to get lost behind my poems; that can't happen if they're just a bunch of empty bullshit. So I hide from Writing even though I know all it would take is consistency and some steady work at editing to produce some satisfactory pieces. Now there's so much backlog in my head that the idea of wading through it all is absolutely daunting.

It's high time I got over this! No excuses anymore! I'm going to Write something everyday. I'll force myself if I have to (and I'm sure I will) until I get back in the habit. I'm in dire need of a language laxative (gross). They say that real Writers simply need to write- it's part of who they are. How true it is! I feel like I've lost part of myself since I haven't been Writing. It's time to find Me again.