9 to 5 Poet

So it must work, or something. 

The Man Next to Me Reads a Book Called Investigating Your Anger

I begin writing the book in my head.
Chapter One: Swallow your pride. Tips include:
Ignore the itchy tingling in your skin; erupt
in flashes, then apologize profusely.

His book says we sit in silence
while Janet looks at her open hands.

Chapter Two: Know someone who gets angry
well. Remember your parents yelling
or not and burying their rage. Watch your husband
sit in silence for hours. Feel observed all the time.

I wonder if Janet is angry or only
interested in the folds of her skin, the whorls
of her finger prints, braiding and branching
of her heart, head, and life lines.

I write Chapter 3, hours later, waiting
in an empty plastic conference room, while
everyone else is late. Does this make me mad
or do I like the distant clicking of the clock?

I wonder why we are staring at Janet.
What are we waiting for? A whimper. A wail.
An admission of anger. A body that suddenly caves,
collapses in on itself, from all the pressure.

His book was thin and used, page corners
spotted and curled from turning. I wanted
to rip the cover, unravel the binding, scatter
the pages behind me as I step out, into the street.

I just want to mention that I never win things.  My dad and my brother are both really lucky. Before I was born, my dad won a bunch of stuff of game shows, including a car.  My dad would challenge my brother to all sorts of ridiculous long shots and my brother would win. 

Me, not so much.  A game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit every now and then. But never a sweepstakes or contest. 

So I’m incredibly excited that I actually won something today.  Sheri, over at one of my favorite photoblogs Today is Pretty, hosted a freebie contest. All one had to do was comment on a specific post and she would draw names for people who won a print of one of her awesome pics.  And I won!  Something I can actually use, beautiful photographic art!  Yay!

You can check out the photo I won here (mine’s the one in the middle).  I’ll post a pic of where I hang it, once I find out where it goes in the home. 

This weekend, Soulless Machine and I got to attend an art festival in our neighborhood, Red Hot Art.  It was probably the most punk art festival I’ve ever been to.  (I felt very uncool — no tattoos or dreads on me.)  There were several clusters of musicians, slack rope walkers practicing on a small slack rope tied between two trees, and very affordable and cool cutting edge art, including…

• There was one gentleman (who’s name I didn’t get) taking votes on two of his paintings. The winner “lived” and the loser was going to be whacked with an ax. 
• Cody Kiser, who had cool Picasso-ish paintings
• William Hessian, an illustrator and painter
• Elizabeth Montgomery, mixed media collage-y type paintings
• Lucas Glusenkamp, really awesome sci-fi/horror inspired art

Looking at the list of artists, I noticed that cris t halverson, whose very cool digital images got published in the first issue of Asphalt Sky, attended, but I didn’t see his booth. Bummer!

I am also a little bummed that I didn’t buy a very specific painting.  It would have looked so nice in our living room, another red item to match our red couch, curtains, chair, etc., and now I can’t find it online. The moral of the story:  buy it now. 

Despite these two disappointments, I was really impressed by the Red Hot Art Fair. It was partially supported by the local arts organization, Steven Square Center for the Arts, and I’m wondering: why am I not a member?  Something to ponder for later.

This weekend, my husband and I took a road trip to Madison, WI to visit some close friends.  As a pit stop, we hiked in Devil’s Lake State Park, a gorgeous state park that surrounds a large lake, but also has an oak forest and a huge rocky hill you can climb. 

The weather was perfect — sunny but not sweltering and we hiked several interlacing trails, including one up some stone stairs built into the rocky hill. The top picture is of the “Devil’s Doorway,” a rock formation at the top of the hill.  It was nice to stretch our legs, take some pictures, and get some much needed sunshine in before we finished the drive.  Check out my husband’s blog for more pics from the weekend!

SARK, one of my favorite writers in the universe, has a new book coming out this August. I was disappointed with her last book, Fabulous Friendship Festival, mainly because it wasn’t an engaging topic for me.  But her new one is entitled Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper: Gifting the World with Your Words and Stories, and Creating the Time and Energy to Actually Do It. Now that sounds like a book for me! 

August 5 can’t come fast enough!

At my workplace, I work with adult learners.  They joke a lot about “the R word,” or reflection.  In many of their classes, they are asked to reflect on ideas. They write reflective papers.  They complete reflective essays in tests.  They’re big on reflection.  Personally, I don’t think reflection is so bad, but it’s been a while since I’ve been in school and asked to reflect on things.

Since we are a Lutheran school, we have voluntary chapel as a service for our adult learners, should they choose to take advantage of it.  I’m not Lutheran at all, but I attend chapel on the days I work, so that I’m supporting a service for our students. (Most of the time there’s only three or four of us present, including the person who is leading.)  Today, the service leader handed out Buddhist quotes to us and asked us to, using that darn R word again, reflect between each reading.  He tried to match our quotes to our personalities.  Here was mine:

Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed. — Buddha

Now, I’ve met this very nice gentleman once. But man, has he got me pegged.  I can be a little rigid at times. (Okay a lot rigid. A lot of the time.)  I think part of it’s personality, part of it’s upbringing, part of it’s just habit.  Whatever the motivation, I can be very shielded with people I don’t know, and sometimes with people I do know. 

My rigidity is something that I work on in my writing, for sure..  I always think that I am being so vulnerable and unguarded in my writing, and I’m really just shielding what I really feel with language. I often confuse thinking through an emotional issue and feeling through it.  I’m so much more comfortable with my intellect’s capacity to connect than my heart. 

I guess that this is something that I have come to know about myself and accept as one of my opportunities for growth.  I just didn’t realize that it was so apparent to the outside world.  So today, I want to just reflect (there’s that R word again) on this quote and wonder at the ways I can open myself to the world. 

If I wasn’t such a dork when it comes to computer stuff, this would have taken much less time.  The blog has a new, pretty WordPress home.  You probably don’t need to update your links or feeds, but WordPress doesn’t use the www. prefix. 

In other random blog related news, my friends and I have started a new movie-reviewing website, Attack of the Movie Watchers, which is also a pretty spiffy WordPress blog.  So basically, I’ve been the domain purchasing queen lately.  (Asphalt Sky is on the docket, after I finishing laying out the issue.)  A stressful experience, but good.  I started this new blog because I wanted a space to review movies, but didn’t want to do it on this literature-related blog, so I made a new one and invited some friends. 

Oh, and speaking of literature and writing a lot, I’ve decided to commit myself to NaPoWriMo.  read. write. poem. is organizing some extra prompt-age in their sidebars and created a pretty button, which you can see below. 

So that’s my life in a nutshell.  How’s yours?

The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

– “To Be of Use” by Marge Piercy

Today, a professor at work sent me this Marge Piercy poem in the campus mail, because we had discussed it in passing two weeks ago.  He couldn’t recall the name or the author, just the ending image of the vases and bodies being of use.   It helped to inform my work all day today, since I hung it above my computer monitor.  I love working at a college.

A close friend of mine from college, Kate, has launched a new site with a friend of hers called Wednesday Machine Arts Collective. This site’s goal is to bring artists and writers together in a virtual arts festival. They plan on connecting artists of different genres together to collaborate on their work. How the collaboration takes shape is up to the artists.

To me, this is one of the best uses of the online arts community — to connect writers and artists from around the world to work together. I’m really excited to see how Wednesday Machine takes shape.

…our sun has finally returned. I never thought that a long stretch of cold weather would affect me so much. But now that the sun is returning, I’m having some serious spring fever.

Which leads me to creating. I’m starting a new project, which I’m not quite ready to unveil yet. (I want to make sure I stick to it first.) I’m finishing up submissions for Asphalt Sky, so the new issue should be out by the end of April. And, I baked muffins for breakfast last weekend. Even though they came out of a box, they sure are pretty.