A little madness in my method

I've found lately that my poems have been originating in two distinct ways: from free-associative/stream of consciousness writing (I got this from Julia Cameron's Morning Pages idea, although being more of an afternoon/evening/middle of the night person, I just call them "rambling rites" and do them whenever I have a free 15 minutes and something to write about it. And of course, I use the computer. This is the 21st century, after all. So yeah, basically, it's nothing like Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, but that was the genesis of it, anyway.)

After the free-writing, the next step in this method is to highlight the better parts and then delete the parts between; then start moving lines around, coupling, quatraining, or otherwise stanzafying them and seeing what fits where, before finally trimming around the edges; letting the finished piece sit for a day or two and then re-reading to see if it resembles an actual poem.

And the other method is just writing down two or three lines that come to me and then expanding and building a poem around it. This is the way I wrote for my entire life (well, ever since I started writing poetry regularly, about age 14, I guess) up until I first tried the rambling rites about three years ago. But it was still my primary method up until this year. Now, I'm leaning toward the other.

I think the reason I'm leaning this way is that the free-associative method tends to yield a more dreamlike, lyrical product, whereas the latter produces more narrative stuff. And since the writing program I'm in strongly favors more formalist work (neither too narrative nor too lyrical) I've naturally rebelled and wanted to run in an even more informal direction than I was already headed. We'll see how well that goes over with this summer workshop (I'm guessing not that well. But this is my last year and my skin's grown pretty thick. Nobody's going to beat the free verse out of me and turn me into a meter-head.)

And a little poetry humor...

I didn't expect to see Robert Pinsky hosting Stephen Colbert's metaphor match with Sean Penn on Thursday's Colbert Report. It was pretty funny.

A Good Day

I woke up with a hangover this morning, but the sunshine lured me out of bed. It was 81 degrees today! This after it being like the middle of February for most of the last few weeks.
I wrote a poem, one that doesn't particularly suck (it seems odd that, on the past two occasions of having hangovers, I've written poems that I'm happy with. What's up with that? Did I kill off the brain cells that were getting in the way of my poetic process?)
Anyway, then I went outside and tilled the soil for the garden, and D. and I planted the tomato and basil seedlings, and sowed the seeds for the cucumbers, lettuce and dill. Also, he put up a fence so the dog can be outside unsupervised now, without getting into mischief. And right now, he's making us boiled red potatoes with olive oil, sea salt and dill (I loves the dill), and my head will soon be aching less.
A good day.

The last word on Spring?

I came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay on another poet's blog, but here's a link to a copy on Poetry Archive:

"Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I guess the answer to my question is no, because The Waste Land wasn't published until the year after Millay's collection Second April, available online in its entirety, appeared, and as unfashionable as it is to admit, I love The Waste Land. But notice the congruence of themes between this short and sweet number and that tortuous epic: a zeitgest of the cynical times, I guess, a time in which "signification" was everything, because it was still expected that there just might be something hiding around some corner, hope against hope, waiting to be signified. I guess it would be a relief to find out that there was nothing after all.

In any case, Millay's poem just seems to sum up the season so well in a 20th-century nutshell that it makes it that much harder for those who come after to say anything original about it.

What would a 21-century poem about Spring sound like? Many have been written and published. I've tried a bunch myself (none so far published.) But with any success? I dunno.

So yeah -- a daunting task, the April poem, but not one poets will give up very easily.

My kind of people, poets are

The NewsHour just aired a series of profiles, "Poetry of the Middle East," over the past two days, featuring Israeli and Palestinian poets, respectively. It made me interested in reading more of their work, each of them.
It also reminded me why I'm glad I chose this profession (or rather, this way of life, since I guess "profession" implies a livelihood.) But these are the people I want to be counted among, or with whom, I guess, I feel most kinship, far beyond tribe and creed.

Some quotes:

GHASSAN ZAQTAN (through translator): I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I feel that's not my place. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse. That's my attitude.

AHARON SHABTAI: The world is big, and there are many big things, and poetry is tiny. But this tiny thing, it's like a small knife that you have in your pocket. But this is something that can say very important things.

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.

(And that last is profoundly good advice, summing up the crucial trick that I'd been trying to find words for recently.)

Reading List: Last Thoughts on "Green Squall"

I just read the last six poems in Jay Hopler's Green Squall and all but maybe one of these ended the collection on a strong note. In fact, everything I liked about this book (and very little of what I thought made it overall uneven) is here in these last poems.
My favorite poem in the book is the next-to-last, which, if I were a proper poet, I would refer to as the "penultimate" poem, since, if one is a proper poet, everything that is next to last in any group of things is referred to by this term, which, though admittedly useful, I find somewhat irksome and therefore refuse to use just now.
So, anyway, the next-to-last poem :)
It's called "A Book of Common Days" and is grouped in seven parts, spanning three pages. I think this poem also suits my stirrings of early Spring Fever state of mind. (See my other blog for a happy rant on this year's early start to Daylight Savings Time.)

These are my favorite lines, from parts four and five:

When the good and the violent are sleeping
When the city moon looks out on the streets

When the soul lies down in that grass
When spring comes back

When Judas writes the history of solitude
When I was young and miserable and pretty

When the green field comes off like a lid
When it prays --

I keep a blue bottle.
It convinces me I have seen my soul.

P.S. The new Yale Series book is coming out next month, but I'm wondering if I should run out and buy it the minute it hits the stores, having been exploring the world of DIY and small-small press poets in the blogosphere lately, and struggling to re-think my all-or-nothing attitude toward publishing. Struggling.

A habit of submission

No, I'm not talking about my personality (that would be another blog, which currently does not exist, thankfully :)
But on the digital front, I've found Google's calendar to be a wonderful, magical thing. If I add an event to it, out there in the analog world, the thing in question generally gets done. So it is written...
So if, for instance, I research journals to submit to, in Poets & Writers, which has a great classifieds section (not available in their online edition, it doesn't seem, unfortunately), or from an online resource, and I type something like "Submit to Such-and-Such Journal on Sun., March 3, then, most amazing of all, I will send stuff out on that very same date, electronically, of course (we'll see if this holds up for next month's planned submission, which actually involves a stamp and envelope.)
After years of hopeless slack with respect to trying to publish, it seems incredible how easy it is. Getting accepted, by comparison, seems less than half the battle, especially since it's out of my hands. Once I have something polished to the point where it seems worth the effort, the important thing is to give it an honest try -- am I right, self-help gurus? (This should be a commercial. I could dress like a winsome slacker poet chick and talk about how Google changed my life. Fortunately, I don't think Google makes commercials like that... last time I checked.)