weather, poetry, songs about doomed love, and breakfast
It's snowing out. Well, it's not so much snow as sleet crossed with hail. The roads look terrible. I'm actually rather fond of nasty weather when I am inside with a cup of hot chocolate rather than out in it. So I'm quite happy. I like living where there is weather rather than just climate.
I sat down to work on poems for a week from tonight. I wish I could say that I have a large pile of poems in progress, but that would be a tangled web of lies. In fact there are just ten.
Two are nearly finished; both have something wrong with them but I can't figure out what. Every time I read them in public I figure out a little bit more about how to revise them, so possibly I should read them; but I'm getting tired of them now, and I'm not sure one of them is really worth the effort -- it's going to be slight whether I get it fixed or not.
One was, I thought, finished, and then I realized that it was trying to be something much more interesting and I had cut it off in the interest of being finished; so it's back in the "in progress" folder waiting to be taken apart again.
Two are poems for particular people, whom I need to get back in touch with for the poems to go anywhere.
One is a sonnet that I started a long time ago and that is simply not very good (which makes sense, since formal poetry takes a kind of patience that I don't have and a quantity of practice that I haven't given it). It's there mostly as a reminder that I would like to start working regularly on formal poems, as exercises if nothing else. They're a good excuse for producing crap; I can always blame the crappiness on the form. [whine] "Sestinas are haaaaaaaaaard!" [/whine]
The one I most want to work on, and am most afraid of, is ostensibly about the basement of the British Museum. At the moment, it's just pages of notes about, literally, the experience of being in the basement of the British Museum: how beautiful things don't make sense when you can't get far enough away or clear enough space to see them properly, but they're still beautiful. Context: I was there with someone I was trying not to realize was not going to be my life partner after all. They're both messy things to be trying to write about. I keep trying to make them safe, which they aren't and won't be. Cowardice 1, here's luck 0.
One is about e-mail -- well, it's about e-mail in more or less the same way that the sunchokes poem is about sunchokes, which is to say probably not really in anybody's brain but mine -- and is not as stupid as it sounds, but is stalled; I've taken a wrong turn with it, and I'm not sure where. Two more are just tiny fragments, a couple of lines each, with long prose addenda about what I want to go next and not a jot of inspiration about what language to use to make it happen. They may need to go back in the scrapbasket (which is a whole separate file), but I can't bring myself to give up on them yet.
Not helping matters is the fact that I am actually in the sort of hyper-aware-of-language state that usually helps me work on poems, but I am also tired, and I think my brain needs to be defragmented. I have these bits of phrases, these little combinations of sound, rattling around in my head, but I write them down (or rather type them into the scrapbasket file) and they don't mean anything and don't connect. Which is fine -- I might need them later and now I've got them -- but there are so many and it's just frustrating.
And along with the bits from my own brain, I've had The Blue Aeroplanes' "Your Ages" going through my head all day, especially the last part:on the bank, the grass made marks that could be seen,
your hair came loose. pin your hair up, on the grass,
closer, closer. how young, how young, lie to me
and name your ages.
...and it's pretty much drowning out everything else I try to focus on. Possibly I need to go listen to Swagger and do some knitting. Or maybe I should go try to work on the Blue Aeroplanes vid. Or perhaps I should just suck it up and keep working on The Vid I'm Actually Working On, which I know from experience I will actually enjoy once I get started.
Welcome to my brain, in which even the simplest decisions can be made impossible through incessant overcomplication. This is why I must never take to drink; in moods like this, the temptation is very great to knock back a bottle of zinfandel and call it a night. Never ends well.
On the plus side, I have everything I need for a very good breakfast, including some rather remarkable plum preserves made by my brother's rather remarkable girlfriend, technically given to my mother at xmas but with full expectation (according to my brother) that I would make off with them, which, being an obliging sibling, I promptly did. So I'm thinking about tomorrow's breakfast, complete with interesting jam and strong tea with milk in -- a good sturdy breakfast for a snowy morning.
And am feeling unexpectedly better.
I sat down to work on poems for a week from tonight. I wish I could say that I have a large pile of poems in progress, but that would be a tangled web of lies. In fact there are just ten.
Two are nearly finished; both have something wrong with them but I can't figure out what. Every time I read them in public I figure out a little bit more about how to revise them, so possibly I should read them; but I'm getting tired of them now, and I'm not sure one of them is really worth the effort -- it's going to be slight whether I get it fixed or not.
One was, I thought, finished, and then I realized that it was trying to be something much more interesting and I had cut it off in the interest of being finished; so it's back in the "in progress" folder waiting to be taken apart again.
Two are poems for particular people, whom I need to get back in touch with for the poems to go anywhere.
One is a sonnet that I started a long time ago and that is simply not very good (which makes sense, since formal poetry takes a kind of patience that I don't have and a quantity of practice that I haven't given it). It's there mostly as a reminder that I would like to start working regularly on formal poems, as exercises if nothing else. They're a good excuse for producing crap; I can always blame the crappiness on the form. [whine] "Sestinas are haaaaaaaaaard!" [/whine]
The one I most want to work on, and am most afraid of, is ostensibly about the basement of the British Museum. At the moment, it's just pages of notes about, literally, the experience of being in the basement of the British Museum: how beautiful things don't make sense when you can't get far enough away or clear enough space to see them properly, but they're still beautiful. Context: I was there with someone I was trying not to realize was not going to be my life partner after all. They're both messy things to be trying to write about. I keep trying to make them safe, which they aren't and won't be. Cowardice 1, here's luck 0.
One is about e-mail -- well, it's about e-mail in more or less the same way that the sunchokes poem is about sunchokes, which is to say probably not really in anybody's brain but mine -- and is not as stupid as it sounds, but is stalled; I've taken a wrong turn with it, and I'm not sure where. Two more are just tiny fragments, a couple of lines each, with long prose addenda about what I want to go next and not a jot of inspiration about what language to use to make it happen. They may need to go back in the scrapbasket (which is a whole separate file), but I can't bring myself to give up on them yet.
Not helping matters is the fact that I am actually in the sort of hyper-aware-of-language state that usually helps me work on poems, but I am also tired, and I think my brain needs to be defragmented. I have these bits of phrases, these little combinations of sound, rattling around in my head, but I write them down (or rather type them into the scrapbasket file) and they don't mean anything and don't connect. Which is fine -- I might need them later and now I've got them -- but there are so many and it's just frustrating.
And along with the bits from my own brain, I've had The Blue Aeroplanes' "Your Ages" going through my head all day, especially the last part:on the bank, the grass made marks that could be seen,
your hair came loose. pin your hair up, on the grass,
closer, closer. how young, how young, lie to me
and name your ages.
...and it's pretty much drowning out everything else I try to focus on. Possibly I need to go listen to Swagger and do some knitting. Or maybe I should go try to work on the Blue Aeroplanes vid. Or perhaps I should just suck it up and keep working on The Vid I'm Actually Working On, which I know from experience I will actually enjoy once I get started.
Welcome to my brain, in which even the simplest decisions can be made impossible through incessant overcomplication. This is why I must never take to drink; in moods like this, the temptation is very great to knock back a bottle of zinfandel and call it a night. Never ends well.
On the plus side, I have everything I need for a very good breakfast, including some rather remarkable plum preserves made by my brother's rather remarkable girlfriend, technically given to my mother at xmas but with full expectation (according to my brother) that I would make off with them, which, being an obliging sibling, I promptly did. So I'm thinking about tomorrow's breakfast, complete with interesting jam and strong tea with milk in -- a good sturdy breakfast for a snowy morning.
And am feeling unexpectedly better.