8-26-11

I've been given an assignment. The goal is to write a poem. The theme is "disasters". I suppose this could entail many things. Actual historical disasters like the Titanic and personal tragedies are up for grabs, but so are less dramatic things, like fashion disasters. Or the Monster Omelet sandwich. I can write about bad decisions I've made, injuries that have befallen me or my loved ones, car crashes, break-ups, missed opportunities, terrorist attacks, deaths. The world is my oyster.

As I write to this subject, the first lines that appear are:

I was shooting with my father, we were wearing
Heavy winter coats and I could see his breath
Climbing up the gray fire of the sky
It was just target shooting, there’s not much else
Inside this memory but gray fire, permafrost
And a target I never hit.

These words appear in my mind effortlessly, and stop abruptly. Poems are such teases. Now comes the hard part of continuing the initial image and developing the narrative of the poem. Before, I would have strained to try and figure out what "happens" next. This time, however, the approach I'm going to take is a more linguistic one: What are the connotations of these words that I've chosen? What am I trying to say here that's outside of the poem's setting? Obviously it has daddy issues,possible impotence implications, but other than that, why did these words appear first under a topic heading of "disasters"?

From here the poem needs to take some surrealist leaps in imagery, breaking free of the setting ("gray fire"). Nobody cares what happens after this. The father and son see a deer, the father shoots the deer, whatever. Instead of following the characters, let's follow the author for a little bit. I'm kidding about the impotence by the way.

8-24-10

Today I was pleased to find it ten degrees cooler than it normally is when I wake up. The good times roll! For whatever reason, this summer has been particularly difficult; I've always been more of a cold weather person, but my aversion to heat has never made me ill before this summer. Unfortunately, the nice weather seems to be a one day thing. I'll be relieved once the heat breaks and autumn proper begins.

I wrote a little bit of some poems today. Submission season is approaching and I'd like to send some stuff out this year. The University of Tampa, in particular, is holding a contest. A couple days of revisions and coffee shops are in order, I think. The "poems" today - and I use the term loosely - were mostly nostalgic warblings about people I haven't seen in years, and how these people are now forever locked in my memory as they were then. There is Meacham parties, discussion about Caravaggio, smoke breaks on the patio. There's bicycles and collared shirts whipping in the wind. Those were the best days of my life.

8-11-10

I have two new roommates now, bless their hearts. Ethan and Lorin are shacking up in my "office" now, living in sin together and having tickle fights. It's been nice coming home to people again. After such a long period of living by myself, I sort of acclimated to the solitude, and in the process forgetting to feel alone. However, it will take some time for me to get used to them enough to where I can write comfortably. Their quiet voices and occasional music are nagging distractions.

I took the last week off with intentions to travel and write. Fate intervened in the form of my beat-up and broken down Toyota. I planned on trading it in, buckling down, and biting the bullet on a new car, but I couldn't find my car title. So in the end, I ended up staying in Chattanooga doing nothing for a week, which was in and of itself relaxing and more of a vacation than I could've hoped for. It was fortuitous, as it enabled me to help Lorin and Ethan move, and allowed me to catch up on some much needed reading.

As for the writing process, I did a third wave of revisions on the early chapters and worked a bit on some chapters involving the "second" protagonist. Not as much as I hoped. Whenever I set aside extra time for writing it rarely leads to increased productivity. Lately I have been feeling the pressure to get to finishing a draft of the entire thing - I would like to have people read this before they die or grow senile, after all.

I think I'm coming down with something. It's either from Lorin's moldy couch or some bug one of them has. I'm going to try and kill it with Sudafed and exercise.