SubscribeJanuary 25th, 2012
from January 22 2012
My office is s space near the only window. I have a long L-shaped desk with my computer at the L’s foot. The riser on the L has a small shelf that allows a row of paper files underneath and stacks of reference books and a huge peace lily over top. The window sill is covered with mother-in-law-tongues which are growing so well that their top spears are bent over by the low ceiling. There is a small wall cut-out just over the end of the L of my desk which looks into the kitchen. Underneath that a small rolling shelf holds more reference books (non-English languages) and my scanner. Other than that, there are book shelves.
I catalog my books at LibraryThing.com and currently I have 1,865 books in this tiny “garden” flat. All the wall space is taken by books. I’ve had to put 4 tall book shelves back to back to make walls down the length of the living/dining room. I do have a small table but it is backed into a corner between a reading chair and another book shelf. The table holds plants which I water once a week and which the cats eat then disgorge in interesting places during the night.
There is always something that needs cleaning and my sense of obligation to that need is why I mostly start new ideas away from home.
When forced to think new thoughts at home, I retreat into my bedroom and start this way, by writing about something else altogether. Normally it would be just gobbledegook of the “I’m really annoyed at my fucked-up inner ears and why the fuck do I get dizzy every time I get so much as a sniffle and jeezus fuck I am upset because I really wanted to walk today and this means I can’t”. I keep going and more often than not something will surface that might turn into a poem.
On days when I can go out I will often just take my notebook. I prefer to write directly on a computer but there are days when I really just want to attend to what is around me so I leave books and computers at home and just take the notebook. I have learnt that if I don’t write down those phrases that surface, or those feelings, or odd images, then they will just float away and even if I can recall the sense they gave me, the specificity of the experience will vanish. So I take a notebook and pen.
On other days I will go to Waves or Calhoun’s with my my baby computer and just start typing what I notice. I treat reality like a dream and try to figure out what the dream characters (the table, the tree outside, the crow stealing crumbs from a cafe table) mean – and what this “dream” is saying. I wrote Rammstein like that, in a haze of migraine pain.
I only use music when working on a piece that has a specific feel to it. I’ve got the idea or phrase-seed outside somewhere and have brought it home to work it to what I call a first draft stage. Sometimes by the time I get home the feeling that came to verbal fruition as that particular bit of language has gone. If I can’t re-surface it, I go though my i-Tunes list and find something that is similar and write to that. That is often very successful. Other than than I prefer silence, or if noise, the kind you get on the street or up the mountain in a forest.
I seem to have two main areas of trouble when it comes to production. The first is that I am not a steady kind of person. I blow like steam in a high wind. I do not do routine well so some days I just walk, some days I just browse youtube, political sites, and photography blogs. Some days I read all day and stay under that particular sea. There are duty days too, in which shopping, cleaning, cooking things get done. So I can go many days without doing any serious writing. One of the reasons I started tailfeather was to make those breaks shorter. It works, but I still need to write more poetry.
I can say that writing poetry is hard, and that would be true. Revision is a bitch. But really, once I am in that quiet body zone, just attending to the world, the phrases surface regardless of whether I think I’m writing poetry or not. The trick is to go into the world prepared for that, to stop and write them down, to carve out time each and every day to shift from chore-world to attention-world. It really doesn’t take much to do that, but it does take at least intent.
January 25th, 2012
on the road again
heading south to the bead shop and to Powell’s but after that?
January 24th, 2012
writing journal
For a number of reasons I’ve started a writing journal. I won’t be subjecting you to all my ramblings, but since I find other writers’ habits utterly fascinating, you may be interested in mine. So I’ve created a new category called “writing journal” and will be posting to it occasionally.
As always, I would love to hear your habits, thoughts, feelings on the topic. How do you manage that dark spring?
Comment here or email me at mary@tailfeather.ca
January 24th, 2012
it’s all coming clear…
Oh good. More evidence of hypocrisy.
January 24th, 2012
man, where can I sign up?
The radical awesomness of girl scouts outlined by some conservative person.
via James Mouat (thanks!)
January 24th, 2012
What feels like empty waiting …
What feels like empty waiting can turn instantly to ecstasy by focusing your whole attention on the place where you are standing.
January 23rd, 2012
writing advice received
I found a wonderful article.
I knew it was wonderful when I read this.
Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.
Before that it was just great.
January 22nd, 2012
rule number 232: to be a politician you must…
exhibit these 15 thinking traits. It appears to be the single unbroken rule.
January 22nd, 2012
Ron Paul and public lands
Ron Paul Calls For Federal Public Lands To Be ‘Sold Off To Private Owners’
Imagine. He could excavate Old Faithful and put in a hot tub for his few close friends!
Gawd. For a man who seems to have at least some historical knowledge he can be such an idiot.
January 22nd, 2012
apparently Philip Larkin wrote bad poetry
Of course I know that he must have done so. I know Shakespeare must have done so, but it remains, in some ways, astonishing to think about.
There is a new book of Larkin’s poems – a “complete collected” by Archie Burnett. There is also a rather good article about confronting what “completes” reveal about a poet.
Burnett’s edition includes “all of Larkin’s poems whose texts are accessible.” These texts, meticulously checked against primary sources, are offered under four rubrics: the four volumes published in Larkin’s lifetime “preserved as collections” (117 poems); other poems published in the poet’s lifetime but not included in any collection (36 poems in order of publication date); poems not published in the poet’s lifetime (403 poems in chronological order determined by the date on which Larkin stopped working on each poem); and undated or approximately dated poems (10 poems).
Of the total, then, of 566 poems (some as brief as two lines), 413 are poems Larkin did not publish himself. Fewer than a dozen of these poems could conceivably make their way without Larkin; for the approximately four hundred remaining poems, their only claim to anyone’s interest is that they were written by Philip Larkin. He said himself, “If one is interested in a poet one wants all of his poems in the order they were published, not a selection according to his own idea reshuffled to conceal how bad he was when he started, the whole with lots of alterations to suit the latest fashion in adjectives.”
When I read that bit “how bad he was when he started” was both aghast and amused. I mean who wants to express one’s horrible clum-bustedness to the world at large? Everyone knows one has to learn greatness – I don’t care how much talent one has at birth, the language still needs to be learnt – but to display one’s early ineptitude?
Gack.
I suppose it comes down to allowing great poets to be human first and great poets second, but the desire to keep them as icons is rather strong. I suppose that desire is about as strong as one’s own when it comes to not seeming like a blithering idiot if one is fond of one’s intelligence. For example, imagine reading Ayn Rand at 12 and being taken by the ideas. Forgivable, I suppose, if just barely. But in a 40-year old? Gawd.
Still. I think I’ll buy Burnett’s book. It may give me hope that I might one day produce at least one really good poem.
There are a number of Larkin poems online. Try here, here and here for a sample.