my vocabulary did this to me

poems in levi's commercials!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

poems in the newspaper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it's all happening, you guys!!!

poetry is trickling its way into the lives of many. the ny times op-ed asked nine poets to write something inspired by the fall of the berlin wall, which was 20 years ago today. i like this trend of poetry as a means to communicate about history/current events.

check out the poems here.

each year harder to live within, each year harder to live without

anyone happen to catch this article by daniel nester? it's about poets in new york city. siiiiigh.

what nester writes about is his own experience as a young poet in new york. basically his bubble burst. he moved out of new york and stopped writing poetry. and who does he blame for this? other new york poets. siiiiiigh.

here's what i think. i think he shouldn't project his own experience onto every other poet living in new york. i think he blames the fact that he stopped writing poetry on the social scene that surrounded it, but why should you renounce poetry because of the social scene that surroundsit in one city? here is one part of the article that got to me:

"In New York, it is a self-licking ice cream cone that depends on untalented poets to keep the system going. The more paranoid poets regarded their skills as a threat to those toward the bottom of the Ponzi scheme, whose worship of higher-ups were not adequate enough to rise a level on the Poetry Chain of Being."

um, ouch? and also, what? can you really just say that about Poetry In New York? wait, self-licking ice cream cone? is that some kind of, uh, euphemism?

"I wanted to embody what one of my heroes, Allen Ginsberg, called candor; I wanted to give Too Much Information. But TMI was out of fashion; what was in fashion was aloof disengagement.... So I became a mimic, lived in fragments, forged together lines like everyone else was doing, played word games, engaged in what Keats calls, "unpleasantness without exciting any momentous depth of speculation," and crossed my fingers, hoped I would pass as one of them."

i believe it was rilke, and probably a lot of other poets, who said that you don't become a poet because you want to, you do it because you have to. i know that this is a romantic notion, but it also makes complete sense to me. so i have to conclude that daniel nester was never a poet. i think he really, really wanted to fit in with the new york poetry scene, but ultimately couldn't make a space for himself, and he blames it on the "scene" because his poetry wasn't trendy enough. basically because his poetry was meaningless, and he was trying to be like everyone else, it must mean everyone else's poetry was meaningless. a likely story, nester.

so he moved out of new york. problem solved, right? get on with the program! no, he still stopped writing. of course the new york poetry scene is frustrating. have you been to the bowery poetry club lately? sometimes i just want to shudder, other times it's great. when i go there, i just like to listen. talking to people is hard. i have to put on a poetry mask and everything i say through the mask has to sound imaginative and fresh. siiiiiiigh. but then you see them get up there and do an open mic, and it's oh yeah, why did i care about impressing these people in the first place?

the thing is, real poets are freaks. the good ones, in my experience, always seem the most socially awkward and twisted. so why get hung up on what it's like to go to a bar with other poets? i'm looking to insert some clever joke here about poets walking into a bar...

3 poets walk into a bar and start to cry....

2 poets walk into a bar. first poet says "i'll have a beer." second poet says "i'll have a scotch." bartender (also a poet) says, "nice anaphora."

ok, these are terrible. someone throw out some good poets in bar jokes.

the ball poem

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,

What, what is he to do? I saw it go

Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then

Merrily over-there it is in the water!

No use to say 'O there are other balls':

An ultimate shaking of grief fixes the boy

As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down

All his youth days into the harbour where

His ball went. I would not intrude on him,

A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now

He senses first responsibility

In a world of possessions. People will take balls,

Balls will be lost always, little boy,

And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.

He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,

The epistemology of loss, how to stand up

Knowing what every man must one day know

And most know many days, how to stand up

And gradually light returns to the street,

A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark

Floor of the harbour . .I am everywhere,

I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

With all that move me, under the water

Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

this is JB, but it's not one of the dream songs, like we talked about earlier. this is one of his early poems; before the sonnets, before the dream songs, before mrs. bradstreet. at this point he still wanted to be just like yeats. weird. i like that the grief "fixes the boy." i like the end of this poem where the narrative unravels, and suddenly the poem is in first person. everything dissolves, there's water, the ball is "out of sight," we are not talking about a ball anymore; "i am not a little boy."

could not life continue on earth without wind or must everything tremble, always, always?

michaux.

i'll die. i won't die.

so, it seems to me that a lot of people like to tell young writers who are just starting out, just learning, that in order to become a better writer you have to write everyday.

WTF EVERYDAY!?!

okay, wait.

i want to believe that the more you write, the better you get. i want to believe that there's a clear cut path to getting better, and i want to be on that path. especially when the people who endorse that path are people that i really really admire, like lorrie moore and many others. and you know, i do believe it. i believe that if you write everyday you will become a better writer. i mean, why wouldn't you? but i don't write everyday, and as a teacher told me sophomore year, we do not live in a writer's world. what she meant by this is that everything in our environment prevents writing. i realized this was true. even ipods stop me from writing. not paper writing, but thought writing. the kind where you come up with lines, sentences, what have you, in your head while just walking around or riding the train (these two activities currently take up 98% of my time.) you spend that time walking around with someone else's words in your head instead of your own, and it gets in the way.

the other tough thing about writing is that no one really cares if you do it. i don't mean this in any kind of self-effacing way, but really. no one cares. if you stop writing, no one really cares. i have a lot of friends who write, a lot of friends who i care about deeply. but if they stopped writing, no. i wouldn't care. and i don't think that they would care if i stopped writing. and i don't think my teachers would care if i stopped writing. and after a few years, i probably wouldn't care either and THAT IS A SCARY SCARY THOUGHT. writing is very fragile. luckily i live with a writer, one of the ones i care about, who understands and lets me eat her left over spring rolls while i complain when i get home from work, and i know we're all afraid.

i want to do a better job as a writer. i haven't been "showing up for myself", as a teacher put it freshman year. i went to talk to this teacher about my situation, and after i explained in a convoluted, "oh it's not a big deal, whatever, you knowww," but actually pretty concerned way, he advised me to go look for it.

so maybe the way you look for it is by writing. and how you write reflects how you're looking. sometimes writing is something that's lost like your keys, and you HAVE TO FIND IT RIGHT NOW or else you can't leave the house, and you're frustrated and you're making so many piles in order to find it. other times i think it's lost like a shirt that you want to wear, but you can't find it so you just watch 8 episodes of 30 rock, i mean, uh, wear a different shirt. other times, it finds you and this feels like a snow day. like class getting cancelled. like an accident. and then you're not sure how it happened, or if it will ever happen again.

midnight chaos noon chaos eternity chaos

obsessed

i really have a lot more to tell you about louise glück.

i've long been in search of information on her personal life as not told by poems, and i looked for this where else but the internet, which yielded nothing. then yesterday my friend natalie gave me the best present ever: a personal essay written by louise glück on her life/development as a writer. i purposely say writer instead of poet because as she writes, "'poet' must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation." the essay is full of pithy statements such as this one. also, so you know, it's called "education of the poet" and it's from a book of essays that she published under the title "proofs and theories." this particular essay is the only one i've looked at. the essay was an actual lecture that she delivered at the guggenheim museum in 1989.

personal biography aside, glück gets to some things about the torment known as the writing process:

"it is very strange to want so much what cannot be achieved in life. the high jumper knows, at the instant after performance, how high he has been; his achievement can be measured both immediately and with precision. but for those of us attempting dialogue with the great dead, it isn't a matter of waiting: the judgement we wait for is made by the unborn; we can never in our lifetimes know it.

the profundity of our ignorance concerning the merit of what we do creates despair, it also fuels hope."

i could quote this essay all day at you, but what i'm gonna do instead is just jump ahead to my favorite part and then go to sleep. i think it calls for proper capitalization.

"I remember an argument I had with someone's mother when I was eight or nine; it was her day for carpool duty and our assignment in school had involved composition. I'd written a poem, and was asked to recite it, which I readily did. My special triumph with this poem had involved a metrical reversal in the last line (not that I called it that), an omission of the final rhyme: to my ear it was exhilarating, a kind of explosion of form. The form, of course, was doggerel. In any case, our driver congratulated me: a very good poem, she said, right till the last line, which she then proceeded to rearrange aloud into the order I had explicitly intended to violate. You see, she told me, all that was missing was that last rhyme. I was furious, and especially furious in that I knew my objections would read as defensive response to obvious failure."