Here is a link to pictures of BMC. I’ll post more to the set in the next few days.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
First Week at BMC
To be honest, the first couple of days I just decompressed. While other residents were saying things like “each day is so precious I can’t bear to waste a minute!” I was drinking beer & sleeping, doing some reading & note-taking. Then I flailed around with my work for a couple of days, then I was depressed by a couple of rejections from magazines, then, the last couple of days, I settled down to fairly steady work. My main concern now is to try to eat less & to skip desert from time to time. I’ve finished one poem & most of another, both featuring crows, and have begun to map out the manuscript for a book from a welter of drafts — the main reason I came here. The next book will not be just a collection of poems, but (somehow) one whole thing. (I’m thinking of it as being composed of “suites.”) The problem is that, while all the parts have roughly the same tone & use the same structures, I’ve been collecting them for so long that the settings range from California to New York to Vietnam, with several places in between. So my problem is how to organize that stuff formally & thematically. I guess I’ll have to make my bed this morning so I can spread the manuscripts out & have a look.
George Carlin (1937 – 2008)
There are various uses for anger, one of them being humor. I found Lenny Bruce via George Carlin, who was criticized for being angry. Anger is one of the major fuels of art, especially the verbal arts of comedy & poetry. Iusually found him mostly sweet-natured & amazed at the absurdity of the world, though. From the NY Times obituary:
Although some criticized parts of his later work as too contentious, Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,†he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.†Still, when pushed to explain the pessimism and overt spleen that had crept into his act, he quickly reaffirmed the zeal that inspired his lists of complaints and grievances. “I don’t have pet peeves,†he said, correcting the interviewer. And with a mischievous glint in his eyes, he added, “I have major, psychotic hatreds.â€
BMC
Writing from my secret internet connection at the Blue Mtn. Center — which I have because I’m teaching the last weeks of an online course. It is a fantastically quiet & beautiful place. I’ve been sleeping well — did I mention it was quiet? — and have begun getting my work organized: an essay and a book-length poem. I’ve taken these first two days to ease into a quiet frame of mind, but tomorrow is the first day of the work-week & I intend to start spending long stretches at my desk.
The food is wonderful at BMC & my fellow campers are lovely, an amazingly diverse & friendly & talented group. Sunday is the cooks’ day off, so we are responsible for getting our own meals together. Everyone improvises for breakfast & lunch, but dinner is a group effort. Tonight we grilled burgers — I volunteered to be the burger maker. Others made salads, cut condiments, toted trays of food down to the lean-to. Q. was the grill master & the whole thing came together without a hitch. Clean-up was just as easy: the food was put away & the kitchen spotless in twenty minutes. Just a remarkably sweet, cooperative attitude from everyone. Helping with dinner made me realize how much I love kitchens. Deeply human spaces. Maybe I can get a job cooking here when I retire from teaching.
Heading Out
Tomorrow I’ll be leaving idyllic South Colton for the even more idyllic Blue Mountain Center, a place where artists and writers spend a month working free from the distractions of . . . What? Exactly? Well, anyway, we call it work so our spouses will let us go. What was that old New Yorker cartoon? Guy with a pipe in front of a window with a woman looking through a door at him. Caption: “A writer is a man who has convinced his wife that staring out the window all day is working.” Anyhow, I do have a project — a big folder of drafts of poems in syllabics that I have been working on, off & on, for more than twenty years. I hope all those rough pages want to become a book — I know I want them to. We’ll see. I also hope to rough out some of my ideas regarding poetics & some of that stuff may show up here on the blog. Or maybe not. (I will have internet access, but I really want to focus on the writing & plan to stay off the internet for the most part.) There is one piece of prose I’ve been working on, about who is responsible for torture done in the name of Americans and about how we ought to think about such acts, that I’m going to post as a draft this evening or first thing tomorrow morning. It is a kind of writing I want to pursue, but for which I have had insufficient confidence until recently. It’s not that I’m all that confident now — I just don’t worry as much about how my thinking / writing will be received. Maybe that’s what confidence is in the final analysis.