my wayward literary life
i've been attempting to focus on things that i'm actually good at here of late. like writing, for example. but i have to say that it isnt going well. i spent much of the past couple of weeks writing a short story that turned into a novella that chased its tail and wasnt worth a damn. it would appear that nothing really works.
but of course its all a disaster. in writing, like everything else in life (or so it seems), i have followed a path that has led me to a brick wall too tall to scale. and when that happens, one almost inevitably winds up turning around and going back from where you came.
in trying to rediscover the internal motivation for writing (while acknowledging external motivations no longer exist), i wind up looking back at what i have done before. a useless exercise, in the end, as i wind up using the same thinking as before and making similar mistakes. but sometimes i actually like what i did. i look at it and go, "hmm ... yeah, that was pretty good."
this is the last poem i ever wrote. i have about 30 poems altogether that i've published or contracted to publish (including this one, although the literary journal went out of business). attempts to publish a book of poems were fraught with frustration and occasional hilarity. so i wrote this poem while i was in Italy in August 2002, and after i finished it, well, i just sort of decided that i had nothing left to say, at least not in this genre. and maybe i still dont have anything to say, or maybe i just need to make more space - let some ideas go free so that new ones can arise. because in any art, once you pass it along to a patron, it isnt really yours anymore.
i may post a few more poems here from time to time. permit me this occasional act of exorcism.
Ferragosto
How absurd it is to travel to foreign countries
to smooth out rough spots in my English verse.
I booked passage to Italy, squeezed two weeks’
vacation out of the turnips in Human Resources,
and here I am, in Spoleto, thinking
in exactly the same ways. I eat a panini,
yet I write the word sandwich. I spill Chianti
on a postcard and apologize to the addressee
for random spatters of red wine. I aim to make
new metaphors but just recycle the old ones.
I substitute Venice for San Francisco,
replace desert terra cotta with green Tuscan hills,
and every time I solve for A in A = B,
B always adds up to heartbreak.
Not knowing any Italian doesn’t necessarily leave me
any more or any less alone. In fact, it’s sort of fun.
Everything rhymes here. A music in motion.
And every sentence sounds dramatic.
Politicos plagiarize The Inferno in campaign speeches.
Lovers speak to one-another in sestinas at cafés.
A semicircle of boys compose libretti
while juggling soccer balls with their thighs.
Of course, I could be Walt Whitman in short pants
for all they know. The diction and daily syntax
of our languages eludes and avoids precise translation.
Or so it might seem. I’m alone in a restaurant
with an obtuse, literally-translated menu.
I order “Eggs in a Shirt,” “Impressions of Salad,”
and “Fan of Steer to the Irons.” The bored waiter
folds his Gazzetta Dello Sport and sits down
with his one and only customer - the American poet
who dines too early. He speaks no English,
yet he pours himself a glass of my Montepulciano
and engages me in a conversation.
We read the novel’s worth of gestures evoked
in each other’s faces, expressing the contents
of our senses in inexact declarations.
He eats Benigni with marinara. I prefer Fellini.
Quentin Tarantino went medieval on his ass.
Bush is hard on the digestion, Juventus a beautiful
music. Smells like Nirvana. My kind green eyes
a Kind of Blue. We sip Shakespeares as Sophia Loren
sets in the west, a jukebox fills the universe
and St. John Coltrane plays a poem for everything
we cherish yet fail to understand. Left alone,
we gaze at the face of a sad moon, our lives defined
and exposed by the glow of magnificent, unreachable
stars we point at and name: there’s Isabella.
Amanda.
but of course its all a disaster. in writing, like everything else in life (or so it seems), i have followed a path that has led me to a brick wall too tall to scale. and when that happens, one almost inevitably winds up turning around and going back from where you came.
in trying to rediscover the internal motivation for writing (while acknowledging external motivations no longer exist), i wind up looking back at what i have done before. a useless exercise, in the end, as i wind up using the same thinking as before and making similar mistakes. but sometimes i actually like what i did. i look at it and go, "hmm ... yeah, that was pretty good."
this is the last poem i ever wrote. i have about 30 poems altogether that i've published or contracted to publish (including this one, although the literary journal went out of business). attempts to publish a book of poems were fraught with frustration and occasional hilarity. so i wrote this poem while i was in Italy in August 2002, and after i finished it, well, i just sort of decided that i had nothing left to say, at least not in this genre. and maybe i still dont have anything to say, or maybe i just need to make more space - let some ideas go free so that new ones can arise. because in any art, once you pass it along to a patron, it isnt really yours anymore.
i may post a few more poems here from time to time. permit me this occasional act of exorcism.
Ferragosto
How absurd it is to travel to foreign countries
to smooth out rough spots in my English verse.
I booked passage to Italy, squeezed two weeks’
vacation out of the turnips in Human Resources,
and here I am, in Spoleto, thinking
in exactly the same ways. I eat a panini,
yet I write the word sandwich. I spill Chianti
on a postcard and apologize to the addressee
for random spatters of red wine. I aim to make
new metaphors but just recycle the old ones.
I substitute Venice for San Francisco,
replace desert terra cotta with green Tuscan hills,
and every time I solve for A in A = B,
B always adds up to heartbreak.
Not knowing any Italian doesn’t necessarily leave me
any more or any less alone. In fact, it’s sort of fun.
Everything rhymes here. A music in motion.
And every sentence sounds dramatic.
Politicos plagiarize The Inferno in campaign speeches.
Lovers speak to one-another in sestinas at cafés.
A semicircle of boys compose libretti
while juggling soccer balls with their thighs.
Of course, I could be Walt Whitman in short pants
for all they know. The diction and daily syntax
of our languages eludes and avoids precise translation.
Or so it might seem. I’m alone in a restaurant
with an obtuse, literally-translated menu.
I order “Eggs in a Shirt,” “Impressions of Salad,”
and “Fan of Steer to the Irons.” The bored waiter
folds his Gazzetta Dello Sport and sits down
with his one and only customer - the American poet
who dines too early. He speaks no English,
yet he pours himself a glass of my Montepulciano
and engages me in a conversation.
We read the novel’s worth of gestures evoked
in each other’s faces, expressing the contents
of our senses in inexact declarations.
He eats Benigni with marinara. I prefer Fellini.
Quentin Tarantino went medieval on his ass.
Bush is hard on the digestion, Juventus a beautiful
music. Smells like Nirvana. My kind green eyes
a Kind of Blue. We sip Shakespeares as Sophia Loren
sets in the west, a jukebox fills the universe
and St. John Coltrane plays a poem for everything
we cherish yet fail to understand. Left alone,
we gaze at the face of a sad moon, our lives defined
and exposed by the glow of magnificent, unreachable
stars we point at and name: there’s Isabella.
Amanda.