Stay away from the person and leave the park. Tell a grown up
So it’s been a while.
The current status:
I am living in a house off-campus at Kenyon with Missy, Nikki, Gump, sometimes Colin, and a new gray kitten cat named Maus or Mr, Outang or Dr. Pompusous (a real doctor in the phone book). It is nice not living in a dorm, not sharing a bathroom with 15 people, have a kitchen, a porch, a backyard.
Missy used to have to drive 45 minutes to work, but now she gets to do the same job from home-doing copyedit stuff for what is supposed to be one of the best physics journals in the country. Her job gave her to big flat screen monitors and a computer. She gets to work in pajamas all day and have a cat in her lap.
Many evenings at around 5ish, I have my cocktale and shoot bottles in the front yard with a BB gun. Kitten cat climbs the oversized bushes in the front, which are 25 feet high (and they are pine bushes) and gets stuck on the roof.
I had fleas for about a week and it wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be.
I am taking 3 English classes (The Reformation, Australian Indigenous Poetry and a poetry workshop) plus a digital printmaking class and a psych. research methods class. In addition to the workshop, I am in another intensive poetry workshop that meets 8 times in 2.5 weeks. The instructor is a visiting artist, Honoree Jeffers, and is a sassy black woman from Alabama who has adopted the role of old black women prematurely; she is 37. She calls everyone ‘honey’ or some other sugar-related product and talks a lot about back in the day and prefaces a lot of statements with “I’m old.” She wears National Geographic sneakers.
I learned that my journal is of public knowledge again on campus, a trait I don’t desire. It makes me less interested in writing my superficial secrets. I don’t wanna change my name and I don’t like friends only entries.
I drank many vodkas & amarettos last night and burned stuff in the backyard. I also fell down a lot.
I am probably going to publish a little book of poems with my friend Chris. We wrote the first epic sestina together. (a regular sestina is 6 stanzas with 6 lines each. The last words of each of the six lines are the same in each stanza, so there are 6 end-words that stay the same and cycle through.) Chris and I wrote a 9 x 9 sestina (with 9 stanza, nine lines each, nine words). It was overly trite to fit the needs of such a contrived form. When sestinas were invented by Medieval Italian balladeers, it was a way to show of their cleverness and lyrical prowess. Basically, a lame form of battling.
The Idiots Guide to Finding Wasteland:
A nine-step guide to publication
by Hythloday
body
Your Beatrice shouldn’t have a body;
Muses nowadays aren’t constrained by the female form.
They shed silhouettes and edges bleed, when known
They can show you how to forget a left right
When you stare, and their penumbras and your eyelashes play
Footsie, and your toeing muse and line for-
And -gotten, nudged closer and closer to ragged fray
Until the center is relative and restive inflate,
Exhaled, out into the figurine B., let out and posted.
post
You shall blindly stuff your faces with post
Simulacra, sustaining on the generic brands somebody
Recommended as just as good, a copy of a form
Mislabeled as healthy, good for bones and no
Carbohydrates, as if a certain diet were needed to write.
You will devour what’s needed, those sonnets and plays
All the while longing the partially-hydrogenated, red 40
Delicious taste of mimicry floating like a zeppelin atop the fray,
Spyglass drawn, safe under the canopy constant and undeflatable.
-flate
“I too America”, reflating
And up-puffing with pre-posted
Genius, it was once said, that embodies
Like four eon slippers (footformed
And sweatlayered): mingling ancient, re-known
Odors, “I drown my book,” a common rite-
Motif: conceive to raise through splay upon fashionable splay-
And may even be a stolen small portal, for
Even A Puddle At The End of Winter’s now enfrayed.
fray
With the foresight of Ulysses, the Norton’s epics frayed;
Pages skimmed with decent intentions only to be deflated
Translucent 2D arche-heroes dutifully noted with pink post-
Its adding to the illustrious canon of notes scrawled throughout the body
By students, whose indelible ink leaves your uninformed
Voice echoing the same paper murmurs said back then, but not now.
You will be taught that nothing you read is right,
Or wrong its about the original context, as if the morality played
On stage is unchanged, encaged, remaining for
for
The audience it was originally for.
Your forefathers are none the wiser, yet heard above the fray.
No one will listen unless your words are used to inflate
Your notions and must reflect the past to protect your posterior.
Distance yourself from yourself to find it again. Somebody
Said “Never to be yourself and yet always”-how reformed!
But Ms. Woolf always lived in a room of her own, knowing
Exactly what she wanted to write,
And we can’t be devices, as inpatients in her play.
play
Having placed in my mouth sufficient for 3 minutes’ chewing, I play
Something to shoulder-dance to in the car, reggae, close my eyes for
A few beats-here it is-this junky old seat-frayed
And rust-flayed car-apace, B. and I ecstatic inside, conflations
Of roadmaps flying out the windows and landing on signposts
Without significant blurs, map after map, laughter and our body’s
Tipped into the moment together, the lifting form
Not straining, if we still had feet they’d be dashboarded, knowing
How like comets falling home off the earth. . .
it’s all meta, right.
write
The trick is remembering that editors can’t write.
Knowing the rules and buying the clubs doesn’t mean they can play.
Their eyes scan the ground unless they hear “Fore,”
And cherry-pick the scraps like a bird of frey.
Use your references with haste, though careful not to over-inflate
The head of your audience with blatancy that will protrude like sign posts.
Keep in mind you are like everybody
Audacious enough to trifle with fixed form
In hopes to become re[k]nown.
know
The Speaker says to know
This is all a thin-writ rite
Stillmanaging, of course, in playing
The part of the whole-like the First - in for-
-Ever robes, sought out on all sides, but unfrayed
(Your blood can have been in their pens), the speaker’s metaflation
And puddling of vestments only respond to the wind’s riposte and
Emptying out into the air (he just breathed out until bodiless)
We’re by the edge of a prewritten river, dawn again, over the horizon - his uniform
form
Every afterbirth is pulled from bad form
Belly-buttoned predecessors always take what is known
From their academic Mothers and re-write
Their natal conception. Don’t play
Into the trap of circumvention, for
Ignoring heritage, you can never pursue the fray.
It’s never soon enough and always too late
And the ink will be smeared on the evening post
But you’ll still fake through it- just like everybody.
Your body of work will take no form
That is not played out or previously written
For B., or Us, beheaded, re-known
So they’re frayed and deflated
Until the next post.
By Alex Hiatt and Chris Miller
That's about it.
The current status:
I am living in a house off-campus at Kenyon with Missy, Nikki, Gump, sometimes Colin, and a new gray kitten cat named Maus or Mr, Outang or Dr. Pompusous (a real doctor in the phone book). It is nice not living in a dorm, not sharing a bathroom with 15 people, have a kitchen, a porch, a backyard.
Missy used to have to drive 45 minutes to work, but now she gets to do the same job from home-doing copyedit stuff for what is supposed to be one of the best physics journals in the country. Her job gave her to big flat screen monitors and a computer. She gets to work in pajamas all day and have a cat in her lap.
Many evenings at around 5ish, I have my cocktale and shoot bottles in the front yard with a BB gun. Kitten cat climbs the oversized bushes in the front, which are 25 feet high (and they are pine bushes) and gets stuck on the roof.
I had fleas for about a week and it wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be.
I am taking 3 English classes (The Reformation, Australian Indigenous Poetry and a poetry workshop) plus a digital printmaking class and a psych. research methods class. In addition to the workshop, I am in another intensive poetry workshop that meets 8 times in 2.5 weeks. The instructor is a visiting artist, Honoree Jeffers, and is a sassy black woman from Alabama who has adopted the role of old black women prematurely; she is 37. She calls everyone ‘honey’ or some other sugar-related product and talks a lot about back in the day and prefaces a lot of statements with “I’m old.” She wears National Geographic sneakers.
I learned that my journal is of public knowledge again on campus, a trait I don’t desire. It makes me less interested in writing my superficial secrets. I don’t wanna change my name and I don’t like friends only entries.
I drank many vodkas & amarettos last night and burned stuff in the backyard. I also fell down a lot.
I am probably going to publish a little book of poems with my friend Chris. We wrote the first epic sestina together. (a regular sestina is 6 stanzas with 6 lines each. The last words of each of the six lines are the same in each stanza, so there are 6 end-words that stay the same and cycle through.) Chris and I wrote a 9 x 9 sestina (with 9 stanza, nine lines each, nine words). It was overly trite to fit the needs of such a contrived form. When sestinas were invented by Medieval Italian balladeers, it was a way to show of their cleverness and lyrical prowess. Basically, a lame form of battling.
The Idiots Guide to Finding Wasteland:
A nine-step guide to publication
by Hythloday
body
Your Beatrice shouldn’t have a body;
Muses nowadays aren’t constrained by the female form.
They shed silhouettes and edges bleed, when known
They can show you how to forget a left right
When you stare, and their penumbras and your eyelashes play
Footsie, and your toeing muse and line for-
And -gotten, nudged closer and closer to ragged fray
Until the center is relative and restive inflate,
Exhaled, out into the figurine B., let out and posted.
post
You shall blindly stuff your faces with post
Simulacra, sustaining on the generic brands somebody
Recommended as just as good, a copy of a form
Mislabeled as healthy, good for bones and no
Carbohydrates, as if a certain diet were needed to write.
You will devour what’s needed, those sonnets and plays
All the while longing the partially-hydrogenated, red 40
Delicious taste of mimicry floating like a zeppelin atop the fray,
Spyglass drawn, safe under the canopy constant and undeflatable.
-flate
“I too America”, reflating
And up-puffing with pre-posted
Genius, it was once said, that embodies
Like four eon slippers (footformed
And sweatlayered): mingling ancient, re-known
Odors, “I drown my book,” a common rite-
Motif: conceive to raise through splay upon fashionable splay-
And may even be a stolen small portal, for
Even A Puddle At The End of Winter’s now enfrayed.
fray
With the foresight of Ulysses, the Norton’s epics frayed;
Pages skimmed with decent intentions only to be deflated
Translucent 2D arche-heroes dutifully noted with pink post-
Its adding to the illustrious canon of notes scrawled throughout the body
By students, whose indelible ink leaves your uninformed
Voice echoing the same paper murmurs said back then, but not now.
You will be taught that nothing you read is right,
Or wrong its about the original context, as if the morality played
On stage is unchanged, encaged, remaining for
for
The audience it was originally for.
Your forefathers are none the wiser, yet heard above the fray.
No one will listen unless your words are used to inflate
Your notions and must reflect the past to protect your posterior.
Distance yourself from yourself to find it again. Somebody
Said “Never to be yourself and yet always”-how reformed!
But Ms. Woolf always lived in a room of her own, knowing
Exactly what she wanted to write,
And we can’t be devices, as inpatients in her play.
play
Having placed in my mouth sufficient for 3 minutes’ chewing, I play
Something to shoulder-dance to in the car, reggae, close my eyes for
A few beats-here it is-this junky old seat-frayed
And rust-flayed car-apace, B. and I ecstatic inside, conflations
Of roadmaps flying out the windows and landing on signposts
Without significant blurs, map after map, laughter and our body’s
Tipped into the moment together, the lifting form
Not straining, if we still had feet they’d be dashboarded, knowing
How like comets falling home off the earth. . .
it’s all meta, right.
write
The trick is remembering that editors can’t write.
Knowing the rules and buying the clubs doesn’t mean they can play.
Their eyes scan the ground unless they hear “Fore,”
And cherry-pick the scraps like a bird of frey.
Use your references with haste, though careful not to over-inflate
The head of your audience with blatancy that will protrude like sign posts.
Keep in mind you are like everybody
Audacious enough to trifle with fixed form
In hopes to become re[k]nown.
know
The Speaker says to know
This is all a thin-writ rite
Stillmanaging, of course, in playing
The part of the whole-like the First - in for-
-Ever robes, sought out on all sides, but unfrayed
(Your blood can have been in their pens), the speaker’s metaflation
And puddling of vestments only respond to the wind’s riposte and
Emptying out into the air (he just breathed out until bodiless)
We’re by the edge of a prewritten river, dawn again, over the horizon - his uniform
form
Every afterbirth is pulled from bad form
Belly-buttoned predecessors always take what is known
From their academic Mothers and re-write
Their natal conception. Don’t play
Into the trap of circumvention, for
Ignoring heritage, you can never pursue the fray.
It’s never soon enough and always too late
And the ink will be smeared on the evening post
But you’ll still fake through it- just like everybody.
Your body of work will take no form
That is not played out or previously written
For B., or Us, beheaded, re-known
So they’re frayed and deflated
Until the next post.
By Alex Hiatt and Chris Miller
That's about it.