My heart, my soul, my aggravation, my inspiration, hope for the future of the world...I love you, Raleigh.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Monostitch versus Broadside (see the link)
DENDROCHRONOLOGY: A DEFINITION
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Finally, after six years of studying, teaching and writing poetry, I have written a one-liner. "Elegy" by Merwin, which is the epigraph for Cleave, inspired me. I wonder if there's a place for this new poem in my MS.
Another genesis of this poem was seeing my uncle Joe this week, remembering a natural history museum that he and his wife took my sister and me to visit, which prompted me to think about tree rings, how the thickest ones are formed by extremes--ice storms, lightning strikes, tornadoes that torque the trunk, bisect the branches into before and after...
Deciding to defer wearing my wedding band was prompted by circumstance, not desire. I've lost so much weight that it won't stay put, slides off my knuckle and onto the floor, spinning and spinning until it clatters flat.
Poetry: "A country where boundaries are never found." Stephen Dobyns (from Next Word, Better Word)
Poetry: Extremities, peripheries, hemlines, shorelines, quicksilver, quicksand. All of these. None of these.
Poetry: Reading Dobyns has caused me to muse, as he does, on what happens when a pastime becomes a passion, when this passion becomes a permanent part of life?
What happens to a writer when she loses her linchpin, when he slips, slips away; when, untethered, she slips and fall? Is poetry the umbilical cord that keeps her dangling over the precipice? Is there belayment? Is this the function of the poetic line?
As a poet, is she separate already?
Poetry: I want to give you the rose, not the Rose Garden Tour (journalism), not "A Rose for Emily." I want to give you the thing, not the facts, not even the epiphany. The dingedicht, Rilke's panther and not the caged cat.
What do I want? Am I vast? Do I contain multitudes? Am I Walt? Do I close the valves? Am I like stone? Am I Emily (minus the caps and em-dash)?
As a writer, who am I? A writer, am I? I don't feel like the same woman who wrote that broadside (linked above); I don't even feel like the same woman who wrote the monostitch. Am I?
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Polysyndeton, Asyndeton; Send It On...
"Every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”
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Heartbreak: A Conjugation
"I came; I saw; I concurred."
― Pamela Johnson Parker
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Wonder - Natalie Merchant - 1996
I am teaching and writing these days--almost don't have time to post anything post AWP.
I will be back after midterms are graded. Till then, listen to my credo.
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