Heading Out
Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing |
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.
Comments
2 Responses to “Heading Out”
Hope you have a productive retreat. Drop a line if you need anything (to enhance the focus).
years ago 1974 i spent some winter months in the macdowell colony and wrote (and ate those lunches and drank the niagara grape) and was lonely for home (and almost burned colony hall down with a chimney fire)-(don’t ask me anywhere). now years
and chin hairs gone white, i’ve found since 70 the
blogs
(duemer’s http://www.sharpsand.net
sventitsky’s http://bigstarlet.wordpress.com
trinca’s http://napanest.typepad.com
and i blather in response (not always apparant
because my thought elide/glide on my/their own)
some times i go over there to manchester, eng.’s guardian blog (mark thwaite’s) & glob/glom posts at http://www.readysteadybook.com
what does an internet blog do with for me it is an itching in my thought box expressed as if in a letter or page hot from the churn.
it may never endup posted because in my fevered wing
my fingers falter and i mis-hit. or it is so strange and idiotic sounding the place i’m sending it mercy-kills it.
i could have just gone with the thought, and let it distill and clot into a set ‘piece’ but i am a bleeder and i spot the wind. be it surrender or the overactive peristaltic brain whatever issues may leave a stain to waft and drift that like even a bad smell dilutes away as the day wanes. even the ugliest blot’s an antipoem and is unremembered
without any need to foget.
here’s one of agroup a grope of small poems on the theme
DEW POINT
This far life has seen me out
even to gobswipe and guttershite
as the details interrupted the way
ideas abandoned themselves
the way I cannot change my pulse
as I stutter cooling to my dew point
rising higher or jelling my ideas
about words made up spittleshot
with drips, drabs, dribbles, drabbles
the way each generation harvests
its/my vocabularies erasing futures
their custody averted with crave/ leap.
edward mycue