Category: side projects (Page 4 of 4)

SAM

Hi, Sam.

Sorry I didn’t pick up when you called.

I was busy.

You were waiting, I know.

You’re so patient.

You wait out in the sun,

Thinking up metaphors for birds,

Explaining with verbs the

Contours of trees.

You sing better than me,

Your voice big and wide

Like the clouds.

Me, I’m muffled.

The laundry has me choked.

Dirty dishes don’t smell as nice

As the wet leaves.

I watch you picking dandelions

And I’m jealous.

I want to braid strands of grass

And eat fresh peas.

I want to gab for hours with you

On the phone, then go for a walk,

Under your hat, laughing at the

Antic squirrels, looking out for hornets’ nests,

Singing songs, arm in arm.

I miss you, Sam. Come back to my pen;

Help me fill the page.

Nonsense or verse, you decide.

I’ll wait out in the sun this time.

[The prompt for this poem is as follows: “Give poetry — how you view poetry, what poetry means to you, your poetry — a name. Give poetry a personality. Maybe a gender. Personify poetry and describe him/her. Now write a poem that suits your view or vision.” I’m not sure I *quite* achieved what the prompt was asking. This poem is more about me and my relationship to poetry. I have no idea why I chose the name “Sam.” It was one of those instantaneous things. I needed a name and I just thought, “Sam.” I’m not quite sure who Sam is… Samuel means “name of God” or “God heard.” Maybe there’s something there? It’s also ambiguous. Could be man or woman. Anyway, it’s Sam.]

Today’s Howard Nemerov: “Fables of the Moscow Subway”

My poem was written from this prompt: “Write about something that scares you.” So far, I haven’t titled any of my poems, but this one I can’t help but call “Fear.” What I’ve written below is one of my absolute worst fears, something I pray will never happen. Even now, I pray to God that it will not happen. (I wonder if I should even share this fear. Is it too much? Too raw?)

Fear

When they sleep in beds at night,

In darkness, under cover cold,

I hope they’re warm, but not too much.

Too much of the furnace, aluminum stove

With cracks that spit scentless poison or worse,

And in those ever-heating rooms, a fire should burst:

The flames emerge like nightmare dragons

Their bed-sheets turn to piles of ashes,

And they, their faces streaked with tears,

Cry for me who cannot come,

A wall of hot hell between us runs,

And their shrieks die,

Rising with house-smoke to the sky.

Reading “Fragment From Correspondence” (Howard Nemerov).

Writing a poem using my list of the ten most beautiful words (beautiful-sounding), and ten ugliest words (ugly-sounding). I’m not sure these are really my “top ten” of either category, but they’re the ones I thought of this afternoon while my students and I worked in our writers’ notebooks.

Ten Most Beautiful:

Lyrical, aesthetic, lilting, ephemera, antiquity, bellicose, cliche, octagon, cinema, jive

Ten Ugliest:

Couch, ant, piss, volume, fat, tame, floor, socket, art, national

The Poem:

Judy went to the cinema. The floor was smeared in spilt pop and dried butter-salt.

She was going because she was tired of  witnessing cliche.

“Better to have artifice as an aesthetic than as a way of life,” she thought.

The lobby was a museum to ephemera: old movie posters hung like portraits in a gallery.

Garbo. Chaplin. Valentino.

“Why,” she wondered, “did the faded burgundy carpet stink of piss?”

This was an antique shop where the national past-time was embalmed.

Judy knew they wouldn’t ever screen a piece of art — only tame, fat celluloid.

Blockbusters sold tickets:

Like a wheel of cheddar, the red wax cracked open so we can watch the yellowed images crumble out.

It is tasty, though.

Fake butter doesn’t compare to real hot oil, but it has an addictive tang.

After finding a seat, the lights dim.

Not total darkness — the footlights live forever —

but enough to obscure Judy’s face, and her eye sockets deepen;

there is a glow within them as they reflect the half-images galloping across the screen.

“The volume is too loud,” she mutters as the bombs begin to drop.

The octagon pattern on the wall is the last thing she sees.

[Edit to add: There are lines in this poem that I like, but overall, this one is a bit of a mess. I posted it because I wanted to allow myself to have a failure, and to have it be “out there,” a.k.a. in public, so that I could get used to writing things that aren’t good. Maybe that’s stupid from a “career” standpoint, but from a creative standpoint, I think it’s important for me to get comfortable with failure. I know I have a huge problem with perfectionism, and because of my perfectionism, I’m paralyzed by fear. Any writer’s block I’ve ever had has been fear-based. The thoughts whisper through my head: “What if it’s bad? What if no one likes it? What if I suck?”

So posting this crappy poem is my way of saying, “It’s okay to suck.” I’m showing myself (and maybe others?) that bad art, bad poetry, bad writing is OKAY. And that’s why I needed to post it. I’ve written crappy stuff before in my notebooks, in Scrivener files that nobody ever sees, in old Word docs that I keep hidden. But to put the crappy stuff out there for others to read, that’s the scary thing. That’s the thing that often keeps me from trying anything new, or anything hard, or anything I don’t think I’m “good” at. Keeping my stuff hidden means that I’ve written a lot more than I’ve ever shared. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that I dwell on all those judgmental thoughts in my head. I’m constantly questioning whether something is good enough to share or good enough to publish. And it’s that questioning — that doubt — which inhibits me. Blocks me. Keeps me from writing.

But once I posted this poem, I was freed. I didn’t have to worry about bad. My bad poem was out in the world, and whether others though it was bad or good didn’t matter. The poem was gone: released. And I became free to write another one, and another one, and more things, and on and on, without having to worry if they would be bad or good, just that they would BE. Once I allowed myself to fail — and fail out in the open — it meant I was allowed to write without worrying. I posted the bad poem and lived.]

Still reading The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Still writing my own poem each day.

This time, I picked eleven words from page 29 of the book: immunized, glass, desecrated, suitcase, astride, dust, strangers, photographs, stones, tomb, and collapsed. Then I used these eleven words in my own poem:

The strangers

rode astride

the dust tombs,

stones collapsed

beneath their

pride, desecrated

by the weight

of glass,

a pound of photographs,

and nothing left

to be immunized,

only a suitcase,

empty of letters,

dripping with

sand.

I’m gonna try to read a poem a day, and then write a poem a day. Reading The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov; today’s poem was “Succession.”

My poem is below. It’s using a prompt called “Shuffle a Poem,” where you take five random album titles from your collection and use them to write a poem. The titles have to be used intact (although they can be separated by punctuation); no removing or changing words.  Here is my shuffle poem:

I watched rain drops

Bleed the clouds

Until all soil ran red

And the seed at zero

Started to labor.

Gypsy punks say

“The stakes is high”

And they sigh when I

Put on my watering can,

Soaking everything

Too much, wondering

When the earth will

Grow up, and I will

Grow down.

No use. The organic duke

Has cast off his mantle

And settled down with the

Industrialist’s daughter.

Their progeny is sterile.

The orphan’s lament

Is thus: “The rain

Falls on the just and

Unjust.”

So the poets say.