September 17th, 2007 §
The 9th assignment from 30 poems in 30 days… A brief glossary of metre…
“Write a poem using a specific meter. The meter can be of your own choosing or even your own making, as long as you put a pattern into place.”
Sapphics of the Deep
Clams without teeth stopper their jaws and bind the
Currents; white flotillas of paper beach on
Tideless shores; I walk through convention, silenced,
Greeting the grey men.
Speaking nothing, language reduced by empty
Habit; sounds now mindless, unmade, like boats that
Drift in shallows, seeking no stormfront, sighting
No more the giants.
Leashed what once was swollen with Gods and Jung and
Darkness; thick, primordial waters made of
Words like squid, electric and phosphorescent
Colours in ink moved.
Never having worked with meter before (I don’t count bad sonnets) I chose, in my ignorance, to use sapphic meter. It had been my intention to publish just the one post tonight with all my “catch-up” poems and call it Bloody awful poetry… Instead, I am bloody proud of this and it gets to have a post all of it’s own.
Let me just say, Sapphics are hard.
Perhaps someone better-versed in scansion than me will find fault with what I have written. It is possibly imperfect. But I didn’t know what a trochee was before I started this and working with such an unnatural meter, in a language the meter was not intended for, I think I succeeded.
Not only that, but I have been frustrated by the simplicity of my previous poems and their lack of imagery. I used to write poetry in a very stream-of-consciousness way and it was dense with symbolism, not deliberately but because my mind thought in pictures.
Finally, I have written pictures with my words again.
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September 6th, 2007 §
There is a wonderful blog I found called the Writer’s Resource Centre which I haven’t yet even begun to tap the depths of. They’ve just announced a new project called, yes, 30 Poems in 30 Days.
Every day I will discuss a poetry-related concept and give out a poetry assignment along with a recommended poet to read. All of the poets I will recommend are working in the field today. There will be no Coleridge or Whitman to sample here. We will look to the present instead.
This series of posts has two goals. The first is to teach you a little about poetry and give you some things to think about. The second is to give you enough potential material to publish your own book of poetry. Thirty poems are enough to create a small book of poetry. At the end of the thirty days, I will discuss at least three low-cost ways to publish your own book of poetry.
I haven’t written poetry in a long, long time but it was what I first started writing as a child so I’m going to take up the challenge. As I’m currently trying to figure out who the hell I am through writing, it’s seems like serendipity.
The first two assignments have already been listed, so I’ll be playing catch up tonight and you should all expect me to post some pretty horrendous poetry over the next month.
It might be bad, but it will have purpose. You can’t write well if you’re too afraid to write badly.
*Participant’s work will be posted in the comments over at the Writer’s Resource Centre, so if you want to see what others are doing, you’ll find it there.
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September 4th, 2007 §
I have no idea who I am. I am in stasis. I interact with few people. I am not working. I do not see my friends. They are ghosts. They live in the world I used to belong to. The only human contact I have apart from my son is Big Sis whom I am both too close to and a world apart from.
Of course, I see other people. I pay the check-out clerk for my groceries. I say, Have a nice day. I speak to the Maternal & Child Health nurse as she weighs Caspar and checks his head circumference. I watch the audiologist as she moves the dials and records Caspar’s reactions on a photocopied form. I ask for a locker key at the front desk when I go to the gym. I say, Thank you.
But these people are nobody.
Because I am nobody.
I blame the suburbs, but it is I who is to blame. I am a snob.
I was always a snob. I liked large things. I liked words which could be capitalised. Truth, Beauty, Art. The people I loathed were those who went to the opera so they could say, “Last night I went to the opera”, those whose tastes were formed by magazine and newspaper reviews: What’s hot? What’s not?
I liked the way the world flooded my mind, rushing through it like a braided river, sometimes of water, sometimes of blood. Everything moved me. Everything was made of words.
When I read Henry Miller I would salivate. Even the bed lice and the pissoirs would make me salivate. Miller said:
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. Tropic of Capricorn
And I was.
I am no longer. I do not want to be aware of the minutiae of life. I reject it. I am self-destructive. I can no longer even feel the Nausea.
I want to feel ill again at the sight of my hand. I want life to be large again. I want to be that girl again, who, when she walked down the street, felt so huge that shop windows would explode and cars would burst into flames. Years ago, in my novel, I wrote:
...I have been trapped here in this silent inertia by my desire to drive earth’s gears into reverse and nothing – nothing! – can be unmade in this world of time. It will not devolve for me.
Writing is prescient.
There is nothing I can do except write until I am true again.
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August 24th, 2007 Comments Off
It’s too long since I’ve written. It was never this hard. It was never this hard knot in my chest that feels like tears. I’ve have too much to say. I have forgotten how to say it.
It was never this hard when I made myself jugs of coffee and brandy and typed through the night with the city lights creeping through my apartment, knowing all the while there were people still awake, still out in the streets, still living. It was never this hard when I was sitting in a corner of the Supper Club at 3am with my notebooks and a Pedro Ximénez, surrounded by people, alone but never lonely.
I hate living in the suburbs. When did I decide to stop being? I didn’t. It just came creeping and that’s far, far worse. It’s easy to live with the consequences of decision. You have answers to all your whys; you can respect your choices even when they’re wrong. But this creeping passivity, this loss of passion, this degrading slide into conformity…
I hate living in the suburbs. I hate this lack of will in me. I hate this non-entity I’m trapped inside. I hate being surrounded by clean concrete and new bricks and people who speak in nothings. I hate my hollow voice.
I guess there are things that have happened in my life, there are people, I could blame for where I am and I see the temptation but I refuse attribute my life to others. I refuse to abdicate. So instead, I don’t like myself. I am ashamed.
And after stating so categorically that I am a writer I cannot find words. There are times when reading breaks me down, breaks through that barrier freezing my fingers at the keyboard, but today was not one of them. Today, reading Girl’s Gone Child’s past and present futures, reading that she’s on the road again with a Kerouac quote in her pocket, I saw the sad echo of myself and had to face my stasis. Even her predilection for guitarists and Henry Miller was a mirror, an accusing reflection of who I am, or who I was, or that person I’ve failed by no longer being.
But the future is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and life doesn’t have to creep in this petty pace from day to day. Somewhere in me there is a breath. It is a hard knot in my chest that feels like tears and I will write it until I am no longer a walking shadow.
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