hold the relish, hold is forget in american

http://shipthathollandaise.blogspot.com/

i was lost at sea

HOW COME NO ONE EVER TOLD ME

ALSO by the way you guys! some poems that have been up on the low log by me and others.

happy birthday, w.h.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

pure poetry

soon part of me will explore the deep and dark floor of the harbor

look, ma! i'm on the internet!

low log is a site that was started up officially just yesterday by two sarah lawrence grads. have a look around, and spread that link far and wide. there is some good writing on there.

hmmm.... a longer, more real, and less self-promoting post soon to come.

like a brown bird nesting in a texaco sign, i got a point of view

my best friend, stephanie, future politico/high power attorney, is taking her first poetry class and i get to hear about it!

i can taste that diploma

you would think that we would know the present when it came

trailer for room and a half, a new movie based on the life of joseph brodsky. do you speak russian? i don't speak russian.

what if it cost 25 cents to wake up in the morning?

elizabeth bishop was a total recluse loner, which i like. also she only published about 70 poems or so. don't quote me on that number, but i know her collected work is of modest quantity. that's not to say she and her poems aren't awesome. most people probably know the poem "one art." great momentum. i guess i would describe the tone as eagerly destructive. then it slows down in the first three words of the last stanza and something more emotionally complicated seems to be happening.

anyway. i like this one more.

First Death in Nova Scotia

In the cold, cold parlor

my mother laid out Arthur

beneath the chromographs:

Edward, Prince of Wales,

with Princess Alexandra,

and King George with Queen Mary.

Below them on the table

stood a stuffed loon

shot and stuffed by Uncle

Arthur, Arthur's father.

Since Uncle Arthur fired

a bullet into him,

he hadn't said a word.

He kept his own counsel

on his white, frozen lake,

the marble-topped table.

His breast was deep and white,

cold and caressable;

his eyes were red glass,

much to be desired.

"Come," said my mother,

"Come and say good bye

to your little cousin Arthur."

I was lifted up and given

one lily of the valley

to put in Arthur's hand.

Arthur's coffin was

a little frosted cake,

and the red-eyed loon eyed it

from his white, frozen lake.

Arthur was very small.

He was all white, like a doll

that hadn't been painted yet.

Jack Frost had started to paint him

the way he always painted

the Maple Leaf (Forever).

He had just begun on his hair,

a few red strokes, and then

Jack Frost had dropped the brush

and left him white, forever.

The gracious royal couples

were warm in red and ermine;

their feet were well wrapped up

in the ladies' ermine trains.

They invited Arthur to be

the smallest page at court.

But how could Arthur go,

clutching his tiny lily,

with his eyes shut up so tight

and the roads deep in snow?

as jerry seinfeld said, "we don't understand death, and the proof of this is that we give the dead a pillow." this poem completely captures a feeling that is very specific to remembering childhood. it's the feeling where you remember something happening, but you're not really sure what the whole story is, or even if it really happened.

since there is no god, you have to be both you and god

in reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. the writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself.

-marcel proust

do i dare to eat a peach?

really, this poem is so much more awesome than the wasteland. ezra pound said that with the simile that compared the sky to "a patient etherized upon a table," modern poetry was changed forever. i love the lines where the speaker seems to unravel a bit: "The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,/ And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,/ When I am pinned and wriggling on a wall,/ Then how should I begin/ To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?/ And how should I presume?"

the whole poem is so mysterious. it's full of alienation and mobility, like you're walking through a haunted house and peeking inside each bizarre room. everything is anthropomorphized. love song? who is j. alfred prufrock?

i grow old. i grow old. i shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

he slit a zoo full of animals

something really special happened today.

i was reading arda collins' book on the metro north this morning. it was picked by louise glück (swoon) for the yale series of younger poets prize. as i was reading the book, i realized i really can't read exciting poetry in public anymore because i just want to jump up and down/punch myself in the knee/clap and make other weird noises. another thing i really want to do is grab people and say, "please let me read you this one poem!!!!!!!" on second thought, maybe i should just go ahead and grab the stranger and force him to hear the poem. maybe then people will stop with all this "i don't understand poetry" business. that would make a great documentary actually. me, reading strangers poems in public places, punching myself in the face because the poems are so good, and trying to redeem their poor souls. i'll be like one of those jesus guys on the subway. yeah!

but anyway... back to arda. i'd never read this book before, and let me tell you i was loving it. as i was reading it i kept thinking that i felt some connection to her, like we have a lot in common. then i got to a poem, and one part of it seriously blew my mind. she put a sandwich in her poem. BUT NOT JUST ANY SANDWICH. my staple, go to sandwich that i always get in delis when i can't get down with an egg and cheese. and i quote,

"I could move away

I could get in the car right now

and drive all night,

if I had a sandwich.

Turkey, tomato, mayo,

Swiss, lettuce. It was exciting."

exciting indeed!!!!!! i was freaking out. i bounced up and down in my seat. i'm sure it was really embarrassing, but i didn't really notice. do you know that i love sandwiches? of course you do, because 1) everyone who reads this blog is probably my best friend, and 2) who doesn't love sandwiches!?!?!?! i have entire relationships built on the appreciation of the sandwich, as many of you know and have experienced first hand. and there it was. my preferred sandwich. in poetry form. look at how she pairs the sound of the "tomato" and the "mayo" and then also the the "swiss" and the "lettuce." from now on i will always order the sandwich by listing its components in the most poetic form i can think of. it was too much. it was all too much. other things arda and i have in common are that she is scared of her microwave and she hates showering (there i said it.) i am going to write to her and let her know that i love her book and i love her sandwich.

here's a poem.

It Is Daylight

by Arda Collins

I called my house from a pay phone

down the street before I went home.

I needed to check on the empty situation.

It was daylight,

still here.

My shadow looked large and unschooled.

The sidewalk was yellow in the sun.

I was thinking that I wasn't anyone

and that my future would be a trajectory

leading further away.

The lilacs were out. They looked like a detail

from a bucolic story or tableau

where people are naked, eating picnics,

grapes, kissing, and drinking wine

while playing musical instruments. It seems made up,

but it's not. It must be based on a world

something like the one that's here while I'm walking.

Many houses are abutted by hedges.

I don't like this, but I wouldn't take them away.

The hedges are often surrounded by beds of woodchips.

The sight of them is a silent story about the dead.

I was filled with yearning

to sit against the side of the house

between two hedges.

I don't know how to pray but I would try.

I felt somber and excited about to go into my house.

Some people come down the street.

They're very dressed up.

I can see them from my bedroom window.

My house is quiet,

as though it isn't mine

but was given to me

by something other than myself.

The dressed up people cross the street

and walk under the lilac trees.

They look very nice and awful. The young woman

wears a peach dress with cream-colored heels.

She's with a young man wearing a dark blue suit

and a turquoise shirt. How unfortunate

that they have to go out in the daylight

and see themselves

out among trees, streets, and open sounds.

Walking through my house, I love the doors

best. Waking up the other day I went downstairs

and banged my face into the doorframe

of a closet. It hurt. It was an accident,

but I ended up in tears.

Now with this bump on my forehead,

I'm grateful.

I wash the dishes, clean the bathroom, vacuum.

Over the course of several days

I feel satisfied that my apologies have run themselves out.

I don't know when it's time to stop

but eventually I do, and I do other things.

for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you

today i went to a free poetry workshop in the bronx. the workshops are every sunday, and you don't have to sign up in advance, or any silliness like that, which i like. they also come across really great people to teach them. the workshops are mostly for generative purposes, meaning the teacher throws out exercises or prompts and you work on those. i'd never been to one before, because i kind of figure i get all the poetry i really need up at sarah lawrence, but i have two poems "due" on tuesday and hadn't written any, so i figured this was a good time. and you know, i did write and it was a good group and all, but one thing was sort of strange to me.

in the beginning of the workshop the teacher passed out index cards and we each had to write one secret that related to ourselves or not, one secret that did relate to ourselves, and one thing that we're afraid of. so then we passed them back in and he read them aloud, but before he read them aloud, he told us to write down the ones that we found striking as we heard them. so we did. and then afterwards he told us to write starting from the lines we liked.

now WAIT A MINUTE. this was weird. the poem that i wrote didn't end up using any of the lines that i had heard off the index cards but some people who read their poems at the end had my lines in them, and i didn't like it. all of a sudden you see your "secret" in someone else's poem, but also, like, fuck! that's my line motherfucker!

yeah, alright. it's ok because everyone took what they took and made it their own, but i had a sort of uncomfortable feeling about the whole thing. like i just wrote down three lines for other people to steal them. whatever.

i know poetry is all about stealing. i steal all the time. sometimes my friends say things that wind up in my poems, but i only do this to my nonpoet friends, because whatever, it's not like they were gonna write a poem anyway. and we steal from the world don't we? blah blah blah BLAH.

the lesson is obviously that the only thing you should ever steal is a hamburger, and even then, even then, man.

happy 50th blog post, you guyz!

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."

i cannot care forever

the word sentimentality stirs a lot of negative connotations, especially when we're talking about poetry. i would never want someone to read a poem of mine and say, "oh, how sentimental." i guess i'm thinking about this because i just got a paper back from a teacher who said to me "what a personal essay, this must have been hard for you to write." WAIT, ACTUALLY, i didn't really think it was that personal and it wasn't that hard for me to write, but now i'm just gonna turn red and back out of your office while saying "see you in class" like 40 times. so yeah, i didn't like that. but WHY didn't i like that? the teacher did not mean that it was bad or wrong, she was telling me she enjoyed it, but i still felt like i'd written something too "emotional" and that "emotional" really means BAD.

sentimentality and personal are very very not the same. for example, let me refer you back to our friend louise, who is real personal, but not real sentimental. she seems kinda freaky in that way though, right? right. but i dig her filtration system. her poems are clean, linear, and what she makes is the opposite of sentimentality.

questions for you, reader: is sentimentality the same as emotional? is sentimental writing bad? always? really?

moving on, some people do sentimentality right. i would in this case point to pablo neruda, and one of his poems from his book "20 love poems and a song of despair." yikes, love poems. that's a dangerous edge to walk on. anyway, there's one i really appreciate, which you have probably read/at least heard the line "love is so short, forgetting is so long." yeah, that line is from this poem, which is great. AND sentimental, at least according to my definition of sentimental. and speaking of definitions of sentimental here's something interesting. sentimental is defined as "of or prompted by feelings of tenderness sadness or nostalgia." but sentimenality is defined as "excessive tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia." EXCESSIVE!!!!!!! what, how'd we get to be excessive?? but anyway, i think that's where that negative connotation hales from. because no matter what's going on in your writing, surely you never want someone to call you "excessive."