7-9-2010

I wrote a poem this morning called "Boys' Life". I'll put it up later. It's on my home computer. It's sort of a hodgepodge of feelings and nostalgic ramblings about the good ol' days. I finally decided to try and apply some thematic similarity to my work in hopes of coming up with a book-length manuscript. That theme has evolved into something I'd like to call "party poems". Note the difference between this and "poems about parties".

I was thinking about it, and trying to write poems that address some social injustice or philosophical debate. Everything I wrote in this way, where I was writing for a certain cause, seemed false. Philip Levine writes poems about the working class, Robert Hass does these great meditations about life and experience, Gary Snyder is naturalistic. Their poems mirror their life. I feel like at the undergrad and grad level writing programs there's an abundance of fakery. You wrote a good poem about World War II, which is great, but I mean you weren't in World War II! Or you write this poem about fish swimming at the bottom of the sea, but again, you've never been diving! You've never even been to the ocean! You're too pale!

So for better or worse I thought about what I have been doing and that's 1) working, 2) reading, and 3) going out. Obviously the first two make for captivating writing (not). So really, I have no other option but to write about the struggles of being a young adult in the 21st Century. Of course, in every creative writing class the teacher usually puts a ban on "writing about that party you went to where you got wasted and you met a girl and the cops showed up and you hung out with a homeless man and you had an epiphany", so in that sense, I'm breaking a cardinal rule. On the other hand, I also feel like this generation is one that hasn't been represented in poetry, other than in perhaps spoken word, or SLAM, or L A N G U A G E poetry, or some other nonsense.

My mission is to address the teenage/young adult experience with the same sort of gravitas applied to it as Levine lays upon a factory worker. Look at the subject analytically. Make the poem expand beyond just a personal experience.

Regarding my actual life, the strange dreams are continuing. Last night I dreamt that some friends and I were driving home late from a party one night. We were in a strange town, so we took two cars. I was in the second car, following the first car. I was tired in my dream and falling asleep in my dream, which I didn't think was possible. In my dream's dream I specifically remember being on the porch of someone's house with Lorin and Danielle, (which actually happened).

I was awoken from the dream dream by a loud explosion. Our two cars were on a narrow road cordoned off on both sides by what appeared to be Sandinista revolutionaries. They fired a rocket at the first car, which exploded into flames. Then they came up to our car and demanded all our money. I went in my wallet and fished out Jennifer Thaggard's debit card. (In real life, a friend of mine, Jennifer Thaggard, gave me an old debit card of hers. It's expiration date was still valid, but the account had been closed. It had an American flag design.)The revolutionaries were beating one of my comrades with clubs; I distinctly remember spurts of blood flying off the body. I gave the leader revolutionary Jennifer's card and said "This is all I have."

The leader looked at the card and said, "Okay, let him go." Then I woke up. No, actually, it was another dream where I dreamed I had woken from the previous dream, a third dream-level, where I was in my bed looking in my wallet to make sure I still had the debit card. I fumbled in my wallet, and finally found it, but instead of the American flag design it glowed an eerie blue color, like a lit swimming pool.