9 to 5 Poet

I’m doing a virtual victory lap around my computer today, because I made it through the gauntlet. I’m certainly glad that I signed up for NaBloPoMo, because I learned something about my blogging and writing habits, but I feel a little like hibernating for a couple of days. Okay, a lot like hibernating.

What did I learn about myself through nanabooboo? Well, there were some positive things, like:

* I can commit to writing something every day.
* It helped that I journal on the bus every day, because it helped me gather ideas.
* I got to read and watch a lot of other talented bloggers slog through NaBlo too.
* I can make time to blog every day, because it only takes 15 minutes or so.
* Memes are not cop-outs, they are saviors.
* It’s fun to do a writing challenge with my husband.
* When I have to post something interesting every day, I do more interesting things. Sometimes.
* I only need to whine once a month.

But there were also some challenges (or opportunities for growth, as I used to tell my students), such as:

* Not everything in my life is bloggable. In fact, there are some days that I don’t have anything exciting going on in my life. And that’s okay.
* Really, my ideal pace is 4-5 posts a week. The extra two to three were difficult.
* When I blog too much, I’m less excited about writing poetry and articles.
* When I blog too much, I also don’t read as much. Or watch as much TV. So, this is both positive and negative.
* Sometimes external pressure doesn’t create brilliance. Sometimes, it just stresses me out.

I’m definitely thinking of doing this again next year. It’s better than the alternative.

Click here to see my whole nanabooboo, in all its “glory.” Also, visit the NaBloPoMo site and tell everyone that they’re cool.

Feeding Habits of Foxes

In my poems, I leave you
scavenging in decent people’s garbage cans,
pacing behind a zookeepers glass, loping
across other people’s lawns. Hungry,
I never let you feed.

Why do I leave you
at the end of lines, picking
at some family’s thrown out food?

Another writer
leaves you scraps outside
her door, allows you to ask
why you’re not being fed.
Not me.

I know this isn’t right, know
you hunt alone. You sink
into tangles of sun dried brush, disguised
in your mottled red and white pelt,
invisible to your prey. Even now,

I can’t bear to write
that you kill. In flashes of white
knife teeth, you kill to feed
your sleeping family,
to feed yourself.

I think I am afraid
of my own natural red hair,
point of my teeth, my silent
stalking ways. I never know

when I will leave home
hungry, ready to inflict
necessary wounds to feed
myself. No matter

which cage I put you in
I cannot escape
our common name, our common
wild instincts, afraid
as I am of the animal inside.

****

This poem is a rewrite of a poem from my thesis manuscript. It’s about 2/3 of the way into the book. One of the first poems is this one, which is a ghazal. In ghazals, you have to name yourself or speak to yourself. Since my maiden name is Fox, I put foxes in my ghazals. I rewrote this one several times, and my advisor asked me why the fox at the end was always hungry. When I started thinking about it, an earlier version of “Feeding Habits…” came out.

I’ve rewritten this poem a zillion times, because it always feels un-done. I don’t know if it is still unfinished, but here’s version number one zillion and one.

Waiting for the Bus

In the absence of
snow, our bodies cave inward,
shrinking from the cold.

****

I’ve been writing these haiku very sporadically for the past eleven months, and I’ve noticed something about living with a form. While my goal is 100, I’m taking my time getting there, because I’m waiting for the right image. It feels like I have an invisible set of antennas that are attuned to only the ideas that will slide inside the form.

For haiku, you need to have seventeen syllables (5-7-5) and traditionally they contain a reference to the season. It’s this last bit that’s been challenging. I feel like certain seasons are more conducive to haiku than others. (Summer was pretty dead for me, despite all the time I spent reveling in the sunshine.) I think that the seasonal element needs (for me) to have an emotional resonance, and I just seem to find more within Spring, Fall, and Winter.

But now, as I go into my second winter of haiku-ing, I’m finding that my winter imagery is changing. I’m spending more time outside (due to my bus commute) and less time observing from the window of my car or condo. Even as I write the poems, it feels different. I’m now participating in the cold, rather than just observing it. I’m hoping that this shift in perspective comes through in the poems.

I also wonder how other poets who participate in a commitment to a traditional form react to this experience. Sometimes it feels like I’m reading the same book over and over again. In some ways, it’s positive because I’m learning new inflections and resonances. But in other ways, I’m just juggling the same words (or images) around.

Today was a long day at work. I knew it was going to be a long day. I had six days off for Thanksgiving (and because I work Saturday) and in the back of my mind I knew that today was going to be long. Those six days off are now a fleeting memory.

Since I knew what was coming, I did a little preventative retail therapy yesterday. I visited my local paper shop and did some buying. I got myself a Paper Palette, which is a huge combination of scrap papers and two different paper color packs, blue and red. Hands down, the Paper Palette is way better.

I sorted it all yesterday into color piles yesterday, while watching Bones Season 1 on DVD. It was so much fun to just sort it, because I couldn’t tell from the package what was included and I was constantly surprised by the papers. Ooh — orange and blue floral! Wow — black with pink paisley! Purple and lavender zebra stripes, cool!

While there are lots of colors represented, my favorites are these deep wine-y magenta fuzzy floral patterns, that are paired with gold metallic relief. It’s fuzzy and pretty. So while I was running around my school like a chicken with my head cut off, I was secretly dreaming of purple paper.

Now if only I wasn’t too tired to play with it. *Sigh*

Sweet, Vidalia and Pearl

Cutting in to you, I know
I’ve tried too much to be like you:
transparent layers ever surrounding
a center with nothing
but a small knot. I never knew
when to stop peeling, when your paper
skin yields to yellow flesh, when
you become edible. Instead, I peel
away too much of you, waste
what could be saved
and dice the rest
into irregularly shaped squares.
My hands smell like fear
and exertion, a stink I will carry with me.
An all day reminder
of our defense mechanisms.

…based on this highly scientific test. I took it a while ago, when …deb and Whirling Dervish posted it on their site. It told me I was undergrad level, so I got so much smarter. I decided to grab it now, before I get dumberer again.

The nice thing about my mom visiting me is that she always bring interesting presents. This year, it was tangerines and avocados from her garden, a necklace from Tahiti, and something from my grandmother’s belongings.

My grandmother passed away when I was 20 (about) and my mom now lives in her old house. Every so often, my mom has to downsize my grandma’s stuff, so sometimes she brings them for me. (I’ve already laid claim to the steamer trunks filled with her letters, which I plan on adopting when I’m ready to organize them and do something with them.) This year, she brought a scrapbook that my grandmother assembled when she was in nursing school, around 1931.

As I’ve mentioned before, my grandmother was an amateur poet. This scrapbook contains some poems, notes from her studies, and articles she found intriguing. One of those articles in entitled “Is Kissing Wrong?” and another is a polemic against a woman president.

It’s really interesting to see what my grandmother thought about when she was in her early twenties. It’s also amazing that her handwriting hadn’t changed. As soon as I opened it, I saw the same handwriting that graced letters and cards throughout my childhood, but written in a surer, stronger hand. I didn’t know my grandmother as well as I would have liked, but artifacts like these help me feel a little more connected to her.

While this post contains very few details about the new Bob Dylan movie I’m Not There, it does talk about the themes of the movie. If you are spoiler-phobic, skip this post.

My mother and I went to see the new Bob Dylan artsy bio pic, I’m Not There. While a bit long, this Todd Haynes directed film stars 6 different actors as Bob Dylan during different stages of his life. The plot is loosely based on the events of Dylan’s life, a kind of fictional amalgamation of reality, speculation, and fantasies. Since many reviews have already detailed the creativity in the casting, I won’t go over it, except to say that they all rocked in their own unique ways.

The interesting thing about this movie is what it has to say about artists. Dylan was lauded as the troubadour of his generation and this was in many ways, quite unfair to him as a person. The movie’s main focus is how ultimately stultifying his reputation could be, especially when he wanted to evolve as an artist or a human being. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to search for yourself, when everyone wants to define who you are and what your life is about. Plus, the only outlet for expression you have is your art, which everyone analyzes, so that they can pigeonhole you more. Having six different actors play Dylan wasn’t stunt casting, so much as it was a way to address how he inhabited different incarnations and identities throughout his life.

This movie isn’t perfect, mostly because its long and has like 5 different ending points, it’s really interesting and well-done. If you’re interested in post-modernism, collage, or Bob Dylan, you should see this movie! Especially now that I’ve ruined it for you.

Today, I’m thankful that I get to see art and learn more about the artist’s inspirations.

Yesterday, my mom and I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit, Circling Around Abstraction. While I know O’Keefe’s work only marginally, I have always associated her with her quasi-representational flower portraits and desert landscapes. But what I learned yesterday is that she was committed to abstract art throughout her career.

Several things struck me as I took notes in my journal. First, it was interesting to me that she moved from more representational work, like these fruit portraits here, to ever more abstract images, like these paintings from the end of her career. If I happened on to any of these pictures at another museum, I don’t know if I would have recognized them as O’Keefe. It seemed that she found a happy medium between the overly representational and the overly abstract in her landscapes and flowers.

Second, I never really understood abstract art. I took no art classes in college and so I always feel stymied when looking at an abstract piece. But the exhibit provides an excellent O’Keefe quote that explains her aesthetic:

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, elimination, and emphasis that we get to the real meaning of things.”

At first, I rebelled against her statement, because in my writing, I focus on details in my poetry. But I don’t include all details — I emphasize and eliminate in order to distort and/or represent meaning.

Lastly, I was intrigued by her pelvis images, where the bones are used as a frame in which to view the sky. Somewhere on the explanatory passages, they used the phrase “bone as lens.” As in, O’Keefe used the bone as a lens through which to see the world. That has resonated and stayed with me, ever since I saw it. It’s an interesting movement from interior back out to exterior, and I wonder how that aesthetic informed her work. I also thought it was an interesting mini-trigger for a poem.

According to this article in yesterday’s Publisher’s Weekly, Minneapolis publshing house Milkweed Editions named Daniel Slager as publisher and Chief Executive Officer.

Milkweed is a respected independent/non-profit publishing company that produces literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s books, as well as books about the environment. They are perhaps best well-known and admired for founding publishing Emilie Buchwald’s reputation as a pioneer in non-profit publishing and champion of the little presses. Buchwald stepped down in 2003 and it has taken quite a while for the company to replace her.

Luckily, Daniel Slager has spent much of his career at Milkweed as an editor, so there should be a smooth transition. It will be interesting to see how he distinguishes himself as publisher, especially considering the reputation of his predecessor.