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Friday, June 29th, 2012
This morning, riding the train from Mountain Station,  I happened to be looking through a notebook of mine, having a hard time pushing myself to write, so just rereading some pieces I've written over the past year or so and fretting about how they are not good enough... I found an early draft of the poem "Morning", which I really enjoyed reading, was even having a hard time picturing anything that could be changed to make it better -- a nice time reading. (But can also be a bit worrysome, like "Hm, well it is not good enough and yet I enjoy reading it; ergo my taste in poetry is poor.") Happily(?), it did not take too many repeated readings to start hearing missed timings and improper tones... Then this evening, back home, I was looking at my blog and noticed a referral from Orbis Quintus (a READIN-editorial-favorite blog for interesting links about archæology and more, which has been dormant for a while but is back in a big way this past week or so) to an old page of mine, one which coincidentally features midway down a later (second?) draft of the poem in question. Well! It did not take much to persuade myself that that was what I should be working on this evening. It's getting better, the poem, and it was pretty good to start with I think, with just a couple of semi-glaring flaws that came out to me a little more with each rereading. I will post the version I'm working on now a little later.
posted evening of June 29th, 2012: 1 response
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Lauren's wishing Peter would just
Drop this false persona, would just
Break this patterned silence
Where he's built a lonesome castle. Now she
Cries out in the morning when she
Wakes and finds him gone. She wishes
He'd reach out and touch her, wants
To hold him in his grief -- she wants to
Have back these long years that
she's been waiting for his voice. Peter's
Walking in the garden, where his
Winding paths are laid,
Blooming crocus in the springtime, blooming
Hostas in the shade, he wanders
Down the road to town, but nothing's
Open Sunday morning, now he
Rubs his eyes and wonders if he'll
ever find his home.
Expectation conquers knowledge and the
Evidence of senses; what I
see and hear and feel
I'll never grasp, I'll never find;
For all I cogitate and pray I'll never
Sit beside your bedside, seeing
Gauzy patterns traced out
On the page of wounded time.
She gets up, groggy, runs the water,
Steaming up the mirror, she hears
Peter downstairs in the kitchen,
hopes he's making coffee,
Lauren's tired out, she didn't sleep well,
Combs her hair and squints and in the
Mirror she can see the look of
anguish on her face.
She's downstairs with a cup of coffee,
Looking quizzically at Peter,
Peter's solemn face that just
can't seem to meet her gaze.
A question's in the air and they both know it, but the
heavy silence keeps their lips held tight; keeps
Heavy thoughts drawn back to yesterday.
 Still having some trouble figuring out where to take this. It seems like it could potentially make a really good short story in verse; but (a) how fucking pretentious would that be? and (b) I don't have a story, just a setting of the scene and introduction of characters. I guess that's as good a place as any to start at a story, but it's not any significant portion of the whole task.
posted evening of June 29th, 2012: 3 responses
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Saturday, June 30th, 2012
I want to think about this story (or poem, or poem-story) I am trying to write, without actually working (right now) on writing it -- analyze what I have, what I'm looking for, how to get there, whether it is worth while. Suddenly realized this morning that this blog would be an agreeable venue for such a project -- a journal is the right place for thinking about the writing process. Maybe I'll come up with something useful, maybe not.
What I have right now, what seems like a well-crafted kernel for a SOPOPS† -- a lovely fun, sing-song meter that is reminding me a bit of "The Raven" and occasional rhyme; two characters Lauren and Peter in a stable, complex relationship, living together, maybe not connecting with each other quite as much as they'd like to, needing and not always finding each other's support; I have the setting as a smallish town, maybe upstate NY, maybe Maryland, and the house they live in, not far from the commercial district of the town. A garden, the the street they live on is not really described yet but I have a vague picture of it in mind -- small houses, the lots are not super-wide but not cramped either. When the story opens it is early morning on a Sunday late in Spring, still pretty dark out but getting light in the east, streetlights are still on. Peter can't sleep, he is walking down the street wishing something was open in town, a shop where he could buy a pack of cigarettes, longing for a little human contact -- and this longing is strange because after all his (wife? long-term girlfriend?) Lauren is back at home, realizing he's not in bed with her, (and the understanding here is that this has been a habit of his, insomnia, not being around early in the morning). Scene changes are kind of loosely spaced here, she's in the bathroom, she hears him downstairs, hopes he's making coffee, then they are both downstairs in the eat-in kitchen with a coffeepot, he's not meeting her eye. But so now what happens? I'm thinking there was some transaction between them in the last day or two that made the two of them uncomfortable, drove them a little apart, but I'm not sure what it was, quite, and anyway that is more scene-setting, what needs to happen is a plot of some kind that will unfold over the course of the day. Structurally it would be nice to have three chapters, named maybe Morning, Afternoon, Evening, with maybe a Yesterday in between the last two. Hoping the result of whatever happens in the story will be Lauren and Peter feeling a bit more of a connection in the last scene, where they are going to bed Sunday evening, here I could see putting a short bit of conversation, just a couple of lines, and a pleasant visual description of the shadow on the wall by their bedside, possibly even hinted-at hanky panky. So no earth-shattering revelation in other words, just a day in the life, a minor resolution of a minor clash. (Yeah, still nothing in focus, but at least the sense that there is an image there to come into focus.)
 * Is this the right name for her? I had "Laura" for a while but last night came to believe that it did not sound quite right. I guess she could also be named "Kathy"... Her husband (or long-term boyfriend) Peter is definitely named Peter. Not sure why but it seems to fit him like a glove.
† The newly-dubbed genre of Story (Or Poem, Or Story-Poem)
posted morning of June 30th, 2012: 1 response
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Wednesday, July 4th, 2012
Here's a bit of how I'm imagining Maximiliano Josner's voice...
corta euforia ya no ciego
gustarÃa a mi abuelo ver
la cuerda corta que lo separa
de dios
del tuerto el juego de manos
sonrisa, rápido ofuscamiento
el robo consagrado
posted afternoon of July 4th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, July 6th, 2012
Está bien te dices
Déjalo sencillamente
Transpirar acerca de ti
Solamente hunde
En el momento ajeno
Luego harás.
Se llama ésto «técnica»,
Técnica desechable.
posted evening of July 6th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, July 7th, 2012
It's foreign, outlandish, in Spanish extraño,
the moving hand writes and escribe la mano
you play with your meanings and juegas con rima
built up from an image, imagen encima
posted morning of July 7th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, July 8th, 2012
Mi esperanza es (supongo) que esa especie de composición (intento decir, el movimiento de imagen vaga, abstracta, nada muy especÃfica, en combinación con ritmo escuchado -- justo al español, sin intervencÃon de inglés en la medida en que soy capaz de eso) vale la pena si nada más, en la instrucción idiomática... El español que hallaré con ese método de instrucción sonará muy ajeno, muy forzado, y de vez en cuando incoherente, pero también (tal vez) muy distintivo, una voz verdadera/engañosa. No tengo idea qué destinación busco, vamos a ver luego, cuando llegamos.
Mi tÃa descansa, su cara resplandece
Con luz infinita y magia y misterio
Viva retrato de dios
Hija
posted afternoon of July 8th, 2012: 1 response
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...Why did I write? At the end of the day, the normal thing is to read. My accustomed answer was twofold: that firstly, my poetry consisted -- though I did not know this -- of attempts to invent a personality for myself. ...And furthermore, that it was based on an elementary confusion: I believed I wanted to be a poet, but essentially what I wanted to be was a poem.
-- Jaime Gil de Biedma
quoted in Bartleby y compañia
Mi intenta en decir «últimamente sobre nada» fuera igual que cuando yo decÃa antes, «escribir sobre escribir sobre»; la iteración se puede infinitamente reflejar: una reflexión de la realidad y de una realidad reflejado. Si los espejos el otro precisamente alinean, si la recurencia puede proceder sin fin, últimamente se produce el contrario exacto de la realidad descrita, asà precisamente nada. (Lo anterior es válido en doble en relación a «hablar sobre escribir sobre...»)
posted evening of July 8th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, July 21st, 2012
Why no flowers:
Señor Josner your sexless poems your notes cry out
They plead for love
For love
Be loved
Then love
que yo escribo
que yo intento
que yo intento escribir
que yo intento escuchar
escuchar
escucharé
escribiré, iré, irÃa
posted morning of July 21st, 2012: Respond
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es mi favorito, el túnel el túnel del PATH a la calle 9 acon los tubos desciendo homeward bound
posted morning of July 21st, 2012: Respond
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