Words and Spaces
Writing — the words and the spaces between — has its place as therapy and confessional.
Posts
2011-05-16
I’m writing a short bio for something. Writing about yourself is difficult. At least it is for me. I don’t like sounding rambling (can’t help it) or boastful, but I also don’t want to seem coy or overly modest. Mostly, I don’t want to accidentally expose some horrible personal flaw… like my ability to misspell even the simplest of words despite the mighty power of auto-correction. Maybe I should enlist another to write the bio. Regardless, I have bio on the brain today. I came across this poem by Jerome Rothenberg. I think it’s genius. Like 100 snapshots or thoughts floating in air like snippets of overheard conversations at a party. Each is self contained and provides just enough image to launch the reader’s imagination on its own course.
2011-05-16
When I was younger I tended to look down my nose at the more traditional poetic forms such as the sestina. Part of this was the arrogance of youth, and I think part of it was an unwillingness to let the man (in the case of the sestina, that man would be Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel) tell me how to write my poetry. Now that I’m older I’ve realized that far from being the dampers of creativity these forms provide a scaffolding that an experienced poet can use to build an amazingly powerful work.
This seems like the right way for me to start
2011-05-10
I’ll begin with the poet who has been the most constant influence in my own writing, Anne Sexton. Steeped in personal demons and depression, her life was nothing less than, well, human. Though she couldn’t find a way through the darkness in her life, her work stands as a guidepost always reminding me that poem and poet are inexorably bound, each filling the needs of the other.
2011-05-09
There is no I in teamwork but there is a two maker there is no I in together but there is a got three a get to her the I in relationship is the heart I slip on a lithe prison in all communication we count on a mimic (I am not uncomic) our listening skills are silent killings there is no we in marriage but a grim area
2011-05-09
Nothing like starting off with a nice controversial Poet; with Pound you get the amazing writing coupled with his Axis sympathies during World War II, his anti-semitism, his arrest for treason at the end of the war, and his incarceration in a mental hospital. This is a man who Time magazine described as “a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children.” Yet he seemed to do well by his fellow writers and friends. Hemmingway wrote that Pound “defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. … He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying … he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.”