In the Absence of Poetry: a Game of Tag

GreenyFlower, whose blog is much better-written and -read than mine (deservedly so), has tagged her friends with a "getting to know you" questions game that I figured I may as well participate in until the block is lifted. The game is "4 things," in which the respondents give a list of four responses to various questions. Though my favorite version of this particular enterprise is still "I Have Never," what the hell. ;) Read 'em all on the jump.


Four jobs I have had or currently have:

1. Music Store Clerk--part time summers when I was in college, I'd run the register at the revered Boyd's Music Store in Little Rock. I used the downtime during the week to learn the rudiments of drumming and how to play "Crazy Train" on the mandolin.

2. Graduate Teaching Assistant--taught Freshman Comp and liked it pretty well. My students thought I was harsh but fair. I used to read a poem of the day at the beginning of class, and at the end of the semester often had students tell me it was a motivating factor for them to show up. Which was nice.

3. Systems Administrator for a Computer Network of Dentists--a self-declared "visionary" orthodontist hired me to do hardware and software support for his brainchild of a networked chain of interdisciplinary dental excellence. I spent most of my time driving to a periodontist or general dentist's office to "fix" a computer monitor that wasn't powered on. Learned through experience that dentists as a group are just as megalomaniacal and insecure about being respected ("I'm a DOCTOR, dammit!") as they are in caricatures of them.

4. Fiction Editor for a Horror Magazine--City Slab in Seattle. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I can do this from Little Rock. It's great to discover fun, scary fiction, but it's also great to discover stuff so amazingly bad I have to consciously keep my mouth closed while I read. I have a collection of such stuff. Ask me about it.


Four countries I have been to:

England, France, Italy, and Germany. All during my junior year abroad, which I spent at Cambridge. Love the Eurail.


Four places I would rather be right now:

England, France, Italy... No, just kidding.

1. Fayetteville, Arkansas--where I went to college, met my wife, had my first child, and looked forward to building a life. I love Little Rock, but if I'd had my druthers (thanks, Stephen), I would have stood up there.

2. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston--went there with my best buddy a couple of times while visiting him. Wonderful, for all the usual reasons.

3. With the Aforementioned Best Friend. I miss you, Mark.

4. Rome. 'Cause, you know.


Four foods I like to eat:

Chicken vindaloo. Tempura and Brown Noodles. Pesto. And every now and then, a big greasy cheeseburger.


Four heroes, past or present:

1. Jack Butler--a poet and novelist from Mississippi who spent a lot of time in Arkansas and who I met just at the time I decided I wanted to be a writer. Wonderful, wonderful poet, criminally under-read. His novel Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock was nominated for all the big prizes. It's been my honor to correspond with him in recent years, and he's one of four or five people who've read my novel.

2. Mary Vancura--my high school English teacher who pushed me to do a lot more than I would have done on my own, and remains a huge influence and friend. Wouldn't have gone to Europe without her help. Made me feel I was special when I really needed to feel that way and didn't. Now she's retired and travelling the world, enjoying life (I hope) in a way I hope to do, if not now, then one day.

3. Donald Harington--another criminally under-read writer from the South, his books are absolutely wonderful and magical and dense and funny and amazing. Do yourself a favor and go get some from the library, especially his Stay More books. Start with the earliest you can find and work your way up. You'll thank me.

4. Anybody with the courage to leap off a cliff into the unknown for the chance to do what they've always wanted, rather than staying on the edge out of fear and the desire for certainty.

*Sigh*


Four books I have read or am currently reading:

My most recent reads:

1. Memoirs of a Wolfman by Paul Naschy. 70s Spanish horror actor/screenwriter/director who made some of the most outrageous and fun b-movies I've ever seen. I love Paul Naschy. I love his movies, his enthusiasm, and his huge pectoral muscles. If you don't, we can't be friends.

2. McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (ed. Michael Chabon) Hit and miss, like any anthology. Made me realize that I used to think I loved Joyce Carol Oates's stories, and now I think that maybe I really don't.

3. The Ghastly One: the Sex-Gore Netherworld of Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough. Another filmmaker biography, this one much darker than Naschy's. Milligan was a playwright and artist around 42nd Street in NY and had a hand in starting the off-off-Broadway movement. Later he became a filmmaker, creating some truly strange and venom-filled flicks out of spit and tape. A really disturbed, horrible, and strangely fascinating figure, not the kind of guy you'd want to meet anywhere. McDonough's biography is so gripping that even if you've never seen a Milligan film, you'd be hard pressed to put it down.

4. Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess. I figured this would be dated as a Cold War spy novel, but I was gripped and entertained and made to think throughout. Sex, food, intrigue, philosophy, and a lot more sex. Great stuff. That Burgess, he was pretty good.

There you go, Greeny. Now you know. :)

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Block

Like a 10-ton cube of cement. I've been trying, but I got nothin'.

Never fails: make a big deal about starting something new, and then it fizzles into nothing. I should have kept my mouth shut.

Or stuck to sonnets.

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Lost

Maybe out there somewhere
there lies a path
overgrown now, weed-choked, stopped
by debris--a fallen log
astir with insect life,
its loosely clinging bark
atwitch
  like skin--
where once a person might
have turned aside and found
down rootbound valleys
hidden there among
the shadow leaves (whose negatives
are sunbeams)
             something
else.

The woods hide gold that is and isn't
sunshine,
show rending claws that are and
are not bears.
Some things are food and poison, some rain
and dew and blood.

Maybe there was a way
through then, although it didn't
seem so. A poke,
a prod might have revealed--what?
Dog-run, deer-trail, some parted sea
of weeds revealing tracks
beyond my understanding,
patterns I had not the skill
to name?

And maybe after miles, after bright orbs
of white and yellow dazzled me like
swamp gas, will-o-wisps,
for who knows what the cycles,
then
    or now, or when, or
soon,
I might have turned and recognized
a flower, called its name,
rhododendron, devil's trumpet, trillium,
felt suddenly unlost and therefore safe;

or else, aswim in plants evermore
strangers to me, no path, abandoned
by taxonomy, I sprint
a barefoot madman through clasping leaves--
green twigs caught in my hair, bugs crawling through
the dirty thatch of my gray hermit's beard,
be so unmade and deliriously free, I would
to joy and to oblivion
succumb.

It could be so.

For now, as lost here in these words
as any child forsaken in the wood,
gone feral, wolf-raised out of sheer neglect,
I find just tangled thoughts, a knotted string
around my hand, so difficult to trust.
What have I snared? What is it tugs and leads
me on around the next
leaf-shaded bend? Whose hand?
Or is it my own dumb animal soul
now bound here by some hidden hunter,
Time?

So many knots, and spoken promises
once breathed, that can no longer
be revised.

Walk far enough, and nothing will make sense.

A poke.
A prod.

Maybe it lies there still.

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on July 6, 2007

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Epigram

"This can't go on!" the rebel said.
But oh, it could. And so it did.

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on June 27, 2007

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The Awful Uncertainty of the Artist

Maybe this is it:

the depression/mental illness
that will finally make my work (and life)
meaningful
   saleable
        interesting.

But,
(oh God)

             ...what if it's not?

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on June 27, 2007

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Learning to Say Yes

Just tell them I accept. I'm getting tired
of blowing up balloons that sink like stones.
I'm ready now to loose those trailing strings
and watch their multicolored orbs disperse
to fall, sperm-like, out of a barren sky
toward who knows what airless lack of fruition.

I'm ready to accept, accept it all. I'll take
their golden chains, I'll gladly put them on. I'll wear
quite willingly the yoke, I'll pull the plow until
it sinks, until it wedges in the cracks where lack
of rain has broken, even here, the earth's own skin.
My hooves will throw up clouds of yellow smoke, the dust
made ghostly, powdered, like a broken shell.

I'll put on vestments like a village priest
who can't remember now when he believed,
when God flowed through his brain like liquid light
and haloed all creation through his eyes.
I'll stand up at the altar, say the words;
I'll swing the censer and cough on the scent,
Say prayers, baptize and bless, and listen while
the rain rattles the roof, the windows crack;
inside then, safe, I'll snuggle in my bed
all tired and drunk on sacramental wine.
I'll do it, I accept. Go tell them now.

I'll take it now, I will. I'll take the years,
impotent, yes, but sheltered, weak but safe.
I'll black the stars with ink until no light
can filter through, till all those colored dots
have disappeared. I cannot be accused.

I won't be shamed. I'll sow those borrowed fields
whose crops will feed me better than my own
however bitter they may be to reap.
I'll eat and give my thanks, although the grains
of sand wear down my teeth and make them blunt.

I'll swallow bitter bread and sour wine,
approximating ecstasy for show. I'll raise my voice
until, quavered by age and use, it will not
answer more. And even then I'll make the signs,
and croak the words of near-forgotten prayers
to children, widows, new-deflowered brides,
so strongly no one would ever suspect.
All of it, I accept. It would not do
to give those yet faithful a cause for doubt.

So tell them to prepare it. Let them spin
like hypnotists their gold watch on its chain
before my nose. I'll follow, I'll walk straight
for years--this I can do.
And will.

         I'll track it like the Magi's star
until that day when, palsied at the edge
of all, I miss my step--

and falling,
flailing,
snatch it from their hands.

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on June 14, 2007

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Because It's Probably True

If suddenly the room burst into flames
orange ivy climed the curtains
black clouds rolled up and out
and hair floating on waves of heat
crinkled, shrunk away

while everyone obliviously slunk
between table and chair
bedroom and bath
 beer tub snack bowl
("Nice party, what's this dip?")
while at their backs
a cataclysm
only I could (in this problem)
see--

It takes an effort of
imagination
to feel my arms go up
to see my jaw drop
to
(hypothetically)
  taste soot
        ozone
        methane
        new sweat
on my dry tongue
taking the breath with
which I'll shout:

"Hey! Fire!"

I've always been the quiet one.

Of course once if I edging toward the door
a dampened napkin pressed
 under my nose
saw that
no one
had noticed
(incredibly)
the
  blackening ceiling
  the cd player plastic bubbling
      like Yosemite mud
(I know, but just bear with me)
nothing except
     perhaps
some dizziness
and the fact that the softwhite sandwiches
suddenly
are toasted

then of course would I pop the lock
murmuring, as I stepped outside
to cool air
wet grass
green trees
that someone maybe ought to call somebody
and I've had a great time, thanks,
but by the way, some of you might think about

leaving

because it's getting late
and a work night
and the kitchen is on fire and
after all, no one wants to be an ash, hahaha--

But seriously.



I would do it.
If I had to.

But even in this dream it ends
like this:

everyone turning to stare
and smirk or frown or pucker their lips
and (even
       as their flesh
                      cooks off their bones

)

thinking

"Well. Someone
needs

attention."

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on May 11, 2007

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So here's the story...

From April 24, 2006 to April 23, 2007, I wrote 365 sonnets and posted them on my blog The Sonnet Project. It was a massive undertaking with mixed results, but at the end of it all I decided I wanted to keep writing poetry, something I hadn't done with any seriousness since high school. Having mastered, nay, even REDEFINED the sonnet form for a new generation*, I decided to try my hand at other poetic genres--blank verse, limericks, villanelles, and even the dreaded (by me) free verse. I wrote some and posted to the Sonnet Project, and my few readers seemed to like it all right.

But posting non-sonnet posts on the Sonnet Project bugged me for OCD-related reasons, so I decided I need a new blog for such stuff, not only to help in organization but to maintain the integrity of the Sonnet Project as a 365-day record of my journey through that form. (Pretentious enough yet?) And blogs being cheap, hence Defined By Negatives, aka The Further Adventures of Sonnet Boy.

In the next few posts I'll be moving the non-sonnet poetry over from the Project. As time goes on I'll probably also blog in a more traditional way if I find something to say or have some news to share, but mostly this will be a writing blog, a revising blog, a poetry and flash-fiction blog. Until I decide to do another volume of Sonnets, this will be the place.

So there you go. Welcome. Caveat Lector.




*Bwahahaha.

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