Sleep Cycle

This poem stemmed from a prompt for Writers Island. The theme this week was renewal. I struggled with it a little bit, at first, but happened upon this image at the last moment.

Sleep Cycle

My body is a miracle, when it works.
Each night, it renews itself, replaces
dull skin with fresh, recycles

old blood with new. All while I sleep,
legs pressed to my chest, arm slung
over my eyes, shielding my face

as if from attack. Mouth slack
and snoring. My unconscious mind
discards old thoughts, shuffles memories:

my grandmother is still alive, six years
after her death, cooking me eggs.
My boss from two jobs ago hires me back,

asks me why I’m so late. I want to scream
that it’s Sunday, but my jaw is glued shut. My mind
rewinds and recoils and I call these dreams.

I ponder their significance, wonder why
I remembered this person, after so many years. I never
really notice all of this, until it stops working,

until I spend one night singing the same
old Indigo Girls song to myself, in one unbroken
verse, or I watch my cat chase the same

phantom moth in the corner. After nights like these,
I spend my days shaky and awake, crushed
inside my rumpled clothes. I stare too long

at my computer screen with caffeine jittery eyes,
replay memories of fourth grade heartbreaks and yesterday’s
mistakes, my heart pumping last night’s tired blood.

To Curse or Not To Curse

WBAI, a peace and justice radio station in New York City, self-censored earlier this year when they determined they could not risk airing Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem "Howl" on its 50th anniversary. They weren't worried about listener complaint or backlash from a conservative audience. They were concerned about the exorbitant FCC fines for swearing on the air.

The New York Times ran a very interesting editorial in today's paper about this radio station's act, and put it into the larger context of swearing in radio and television. Personally, I feel that the FCC should be putting swearing into a larger context -- if the swear is in an obviously literary work, like Ginsberg's amazing poem, then it should relax. If someone is swearing out of a desire to shock or offend, then fine the *^&%! out of them.

I think this is especially funny, since a few weeks ago I lectured on Howl's original censorship when it was published, 50 years earlier.

Weekly Word Count, September 30-October 7

This has been an excellent writing week.

In the poetry realm, I have written two poems this week, one for the wonderful Writers Island and the other for the now sadly defunct Traveling Poetry Show/Poetry Thursday. 1000 words for poetry.

Then, I found a new website that I just love, called Woman Tribune. It was started up by Holly at Menstrual Poetry and Amanda at Pajama Mommy as a forum for feminism and women's issues. She was looking for volunteers, so I signed up. You can see my first post pretty soon, so check it out. Since I plan on contributing there about once a week, I'll leave a little sidebar widget for all of my articles. At any rate, I wrote 590 for them.

That brings my total to a whopping 1590 for the week. 24,566 for the year.

Writing is fun, when it goes well.

Utopian Poetry

After a couple of weeks of missing the caravan in the Traveling Poetry Show, I've finally been able to catch up. Here's my interpretation of this week's prompt -- Utopia. By the way, the story that this poem refers to is Ursula Le Guin's story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." If you haven't read it, you should go. Right now.

Topos

I faced them, white board behind me,
blank unsmiling faces starting at me.

Only half had read the story:
an emaciated child, imprisoned in a basement

so that everyone else could live
in blind hedonistic bliss. The language

was difficult, predicates and modifiers
constructed in too tall towers. They gave up

by the end of the first page. I drew a line
on the board, wrote UTOPIA on one side

DYSTOPIA on the other. I asked them,
what does a perfect world look like to you?

The told me: no school, no worries,
money whenever we need it, no responsibilities

no jobs, no nagging parents, teachers or wives, no
children to feed. Their answers spun around me,

no, no, no. They slashed the ties that bound
their bodies to their heavy, weighted lives,

lives of waiting and listening and not doing. So,
I asked, how could this go wrong?

At first they were quiet, unable to imagine
how these limitless lives they just constructed

could topple. We wouldn't know anything,
we couldn't have anything, we'd get bored.

I imagined them drifting, experience to experience
like slowly deflating balloons, imagined

these driftless, half empty lives they try
to escape. I brought them back to the surface,

the root of the words, from the Greek:
topos means place. Dys means bad --

ruined utopias are bad places. U means
not, topos means place. Utopias

are not places, not realities
we can imagine existing, even for a while.

October Poetry Book Club -- We Have a Winner!

After two surveys, one typical and one sudden death, we finally have an October Poetry Book Club Selection.

We will be reading Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist. I'm very excited to read this book; it was my first choice, although I didn't rig the votes.

I will be ordering the book off of Amazon today, so I should have it soon. But to accommodate those people who may be scouring used bookstores or (heaven for fend) try to find it at their local big box retailer, I will be posting the discussion post on October 29. Hopefully, this will give you enough time to find and read the book.

If you have any suggestions for future Poetry Book Club books, or would like to have more information on the project, please let me know!

Happy reading!

Someone Else's Journey

This poem is part of a project that I am trying to transform. I originally wrote about 60 pages of a novel, set in the 1920's, about a girl who moves to LA from MN to be an actress, just as the talking movies began production. I couldn't sustain the novel, so I figured I would try writing her story in poem form. Enjoy!

Carrying Everything I Own
Train Ride from Minneapolis, MN to Los Angeles, CA
December 1, 1927

Sixteen hours ago, I took my seat
and faced my reflection
in the darkened window. Sixteen
hours and counting of rolling icy plains
and I’m not yet halfway there.

I haven’t slept yet, afraid
of losing my luggage or missing
the moment when frozen yellow grass
shifts to brown rock and the patches
of gray ice become muddy puddles.

I’ve never been further west
than North Dakota, but once I stepped
off the platform and into the train car,
I felt the rhythm of wheels
clacking against steel tracks
seep into my skin.

I’ve always been moving like this,
a faint reflection hovering
over half-lit houses and fenced-in yards,
ramshackle outhouses and neglected
corn fields, children bundled
in bulky black coats, playing outside.

This is the first time
I’ve seen myself so quickly, so clearly:

the empty landscape I’ve always known
flapping past me like a stiff white sheet
left out to dry in the winter wind

and me, smiling as I watch it go. I know
I’ll never miss it, after I arrive.

Poet is a Verb: Re-Structure

After leaving my old job on Friday, I felt like I needed to reorganize. I was feeling cluttered and disorganized, both physically and mentally. One place it was showing was my writing desk. So, as a way to honor my writing practice, I restructured my writing space.

What does this have to do with writing? I was feeling that my writing desk was a good metaphor for my writing life lately.

When I would come home from work, I would pile random crap on top of my desk. Junk mail and work files mingled with drafts of poems and my journals. Papers were precariously balanced on top of each other, until I couldn't find anything.

This was how I approached my writing. I would think of poems to write, then set them aside. I would bury them beneath thoughts of work and the responsibilities from my job that carried over to my home life. I would lose the impetus and the inspiration to write, because it was drowning beneath all of my other responsibilities.

As I was cleaning today, I was throwing away everything that had to do with that old life. All of my old lesson plans, notes from students, and graded papers got shoveled into a bag and dumped into the recycling bin. Then, I found filing systems for the non-writing things that I needed: condo association board documents, loose recipes I wanted to try, tax forms, and of course a lot of random crap. (You never know when you may need post-it notes, for instance, which is why I have 6 pads in various shapes and colors.) I segregated all of these things to the right side of my desk.

Then, I organized my art supplies and writing tools. I found several copies of my manuscript that have my editing notes written upon it, drafts of poems that I had been meaning to revise, and several half started journals. These things got segregated to the left side of my desk. Lastly, I got a nifty tiered filing system, so that I can organize my book reviewing notes and the drafts of poems in need of revision. These remain on my desk, where I can see them every day.

Now, my writing space is free and uncluttered and I feel a little bit lighter. All of my writing tools, at least the physical ones, are easy to locate and accessible. Plus, I've given myself a little peace of my mind and a clean space of my own.



* * *

My new job gives me every other Monday off, which allows me to have a day entirely to myself. I plan to devote a part of each of these Mondays to my writing practice, so that I can put in some time towards creation. I will be cataloguing my efforts here, as a renewed attempt at my Poet=Verb feature.