Too much caffeine and too little lyricism.
It was sad, a couple weeks ago, when Adam was moving everything out of the living room to steam-clean the carpet (we are nothing if not particularly ambitious apartment dwellers) and had to blow a layer of dust off the thin purple plastic cover of my paper journal before he sat it on one of the wicker chairs on the balcony. I can tell myself a million times that I need to get back into my writing and later shrug it off as the latest evidence of me letting my idealism and wannabe-busybodyism tread too hard on the rest of myself. But when one's husband (hm!) pointedly says, "I really wish you'd get back into your writing!", you know you've been caught. Even when I was scribbling my way through a lot of pages in that journal a couple months ago, I wasn't creating anything very pretty. Rather, I was just killing time between lessons at work, sitting at Panera or Borders with a nonfat cappuccino, working out on paper whether or not I should accept that NYC Teaching Fellows position, or committing one of my most ridiculous habits, writing about how I cannot write.
(It's midnight. Rabbit rabbit!)
There is some vague evidence that I am literarily clever, such as last night when I dreamt of the love child of poets Denise Levertov and Howard Nemerov, and it turned out that it was my Brazilian student D., who once called our class a "perfect triumvirate" and somehow manages to regularly use "tenacious" in the general descriptions of the evenings he spends as a waiter at a Brazilian steakhouse (one of those all-the-meat-you-can-eat places). I was sitting with a bowl of oatmeal and D.'s TOEFL practice essay early Friday morning, wondering whether I would have used half the vocabulary he had used had I written on the same topic. If his second-language poeticism is not the result of genetics (and I don't think it is), then I need to keep him in mind as someone who reminds me how rewarding linguistic wankery can be, even in my first language. Especially in my first language. D. and MJ are in the advanced class, which is three hours that are technically based around the textbook, but laced with an ever-increasing number of questions about the subtleties of English. On Thursday, it was the difference between "swirl," "twirl," and "whirl." MJ generally brings up the latest song lyrics he can't decipher; last week it was a couple 50 Cent gems that involved variations on the word "bang." I think the guys are beginning to understand that, besides queries that lead me to having to explain banging (though D. got a chuckle at my very tactfully worded explanations), I thoroughly enjoy the questions they fire at me. It keeps me constantly teetering at the philosophical edges of the language, and keeps me feeling refreshing guilty about not using enough of my non-class time experimenting with it.
Pulling out some of my poetry books tonight made me remember my poetry workshop during fall semester 2000, which is curtained by the excuses I made for not trying my hardest at expanding my writing to include some passable poetry. Because there was a girl in the class who could make lyrical masterpieces out of observations on Chik-Fil-A and Disneyworld. Because my workshopping partner was the one person in the class whose poetry inspired absolutely no opinion in me. Because Marg sat next to me and wrote poems about high school and flowers and Paris. Because I was twenty and skinny and brunette and more earnest than irreverant and always self-consciously clad in striped t-shirts from Old Navy. Now I am married and almost twenty-five and more afraid of poetry than I was in that warm and unsteadying fall of 2000, when I was afraid of pretty much everything else. The poetry books are mindful little scrapbooks: oh, I remember having to read this Charles Simic poem out loud, and I remember when I started trading Anne Sexton for Elizabeth Bishop, and I remember being intellectually trampled upon by John Ashbery when I tried to read just one collection of his over winter break. They are relics, reference points.
I want to make it relevant to me again, to reclaim it for myself and make it so that the mere act of seeing my Elizabeth Bishop books doesn't immediately put me on the mental path to room 61, Park Hall, the University of Georgia.
William Carlos Williams: "It is hard to get the news from poetry, but men die every day for the lack of what is found there."
(It's midnight. Rabbit rabbit!)
There is some vague evidence that I am literarily clever, such as last night when I dreamt of the love child of poets Denise Levertov and Howard Nemerov, and it turned out that it was my Brazilian student D., who once called our class a "perfect triumvirate" and somehow manages to regularly use "tenacious" in the general descriptions of the evenings he spends as a waiter at a Brazilian steakhouse (one of those all-the-meat-you-can-eat places). I was sitting with a bowl of oatmeal and D.'s TOEFL practice essay early Friday morning, wondering whether I would have used half the vocabulary he had used had I written on the same topic. If his second-language poeticism is not the result of genetics (and I don't think it is), then I need to keep him in mind as someone who reminds me how rewarding linguistic wankery can be, even in my first language. Especially in my first language. D. and MJ are in the advanced class, which is three hours that are technically based around the textbook, but laced with an ever-increasing number of questions about the subtleties of English. On Thursday, it was the difference between "swirl," "twirl," and "whirl." MJ generally brings up the latest song lyrics he can't decipher; last week it was a couple 50 Cent gems that involved variations on the word "bang." I think the guys are beginning to understand that, besides queries that lead me to having to explain banging (though D. got a chuckle at my very tactfully worded explanations), I thoroughly enjoy the questions they fire at me. It keeps me constantly teetering at the philosophical edges of the language, and keeps me feeling refreshing guilty about not using enough of my non-class time experimenting with it.
Pulling out some of my poetry books tonight made me remember my poetry workshop during fall semester 2000, which is curtained by the excuses I made for not trying my hardest at expanding my writing to include some passable poetry. Because there was a girl in the class who could make lyrical masterpieces out of observations on Chik-Fil-A and Disneyworld. Because my workshopping partner was the one person in the class whose poetry inspired absolutely no opinion in me. Because Marg sat next to me and wrote poems about high school and flowers and Paris. Because I was twenty and skinny and brunette and more earnest than irreverant and always self-consciously clad in striped t-shirts from Old Navy. Now I am married and almost twenty-five and more afraid of poetry than I was in that warm and unsteadying fall of 2000, when I was afraid of pretty much everything else. The poetry books are mindful little scrapbooks: oh, I remember having to read this Charles Simic poem out loud, and I remember when I started trading Anne Sexton for Elizabeth Bishop, and I remember being intellectually trampled upon by John Ashbery when I tried to read just one collection of his over winter break. They are relics, reference points.
I want to make it relevant to me again, to reclaim it for myself and make it so that the mere act of seeing my Elizabeth Bishop books doesn't immediately put me on the mental path to room 61, Park Hall, the University of Georgia.
William Carlos Williams: "It is hard to get the news from poetry, but men die every day for the lack of what is found there."