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Now, I don't mean to go off on a rant... |
Wednesday, November 10, 1999 Rambling While Zonked Professor J says he's gotten some flak from my Poetry Workshop professor for helping me reteat into writing structured poetry on frivolous themes, when she'd prefer I wrote more personal stuff in less formal ways. So he's told me to write a poem about eggplant, sneakers, sign-up sheet, and jism, in the style of Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons. Oh, and to make it personal somehow. (Why "jism?" In a nutshell, he spelled it with a "g" in his first novel, and almost my first comment on the thing after I read it was that he'd misspelled the word. His version turns out to be one of many variant spellings, but never mind that.) Anyway, I borrowed Tender Buttons, flipped through it, and decided there was no way I was going to pull that off. Nor did I want to. My overriding thought was, simply, "He likes this stuff?" But, of course, he does. As do a bunch of other professors here. I'm surrounded by Gertrude Stein fans.
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But no I think no Stein is not my thing is rambling is fragmented is a cube
on a rectangle is square. Stein, fine, brine, supine. But sneakers are
not worn if they're worn they are not. A pose is a pose is a pose, I
suppose. Can an egg be a plant if it signs a sheet with jism? It is blue. Balls.
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Yeesh. Tell you what; you forget I wrote that, and I'll try to do the same, okay? Although I suppose I could e-mail him a copy of that. It'll probably be enough to deter him from asking me to get anywhere near that sort of writing ever again.
I have other stuff to write about, but I am zonked. Zonked I am. Zonked am I. Have been all day, in fact. And I still have to write up an analysis of a bunch of poems and, ideally, write another one of my own. So I'd better stop here.
(About an hour later...) Well, I started writing my analysis, and I've been setting my record for sarcasm and venom, partly as a backlash against last week, and partly because the first poem up for analysis is really, truly awful. Gives Vogon poetry a run for its money, even, and that's supposed to be the third-worst poetry written anywhere in the galaxy, as I recall. So I think I'm just going to try to get some sleep and look at it again in the morning.
(About an hour and a half after that...) I'm starting to wonder if I'm ever going to upload this entry and go to sleep. Anyway, since the last report, I've done a bit of chatting on a MUD, and, along the way, cranked out an appalling amount of truly bad poetry, some of it cathartic in various ways. And sent it all along to Professor J, whose mailbox is going to be overflowing with vapid verse if I keep this up. Perhaps these "Three Haiku for English 304" will suffice to give you an idea of my overall frame of mind:
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A pile of hot dung Poetry in this classroom What is the difference?
Lame-ass poetry
The Autumn wind blows
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I mention in passing that I think this is the first time in my life I've ever used the term "lame-ass." Please make a note of it for posterity. But it's not all fun and games. Along with that work came a piece on my now-deceased grandfather, which is fairly appalling, and which I'm not about to share here. Nor "Anyway, I Still Don't Have a Poem," a free-flowing rant that's titled all too aptly. I should go to sleep, but it's been so long since I've been in this state; tired, yes, but riding that ragged edge between being exhausted and being alive, with the adrenaline or something pumping through my veins and the words just flowing from my fingers to the keyboard and, oh, I could write all night, it's just that nobody would want to read it because the sentences are turning out kinda like Dennis Miller's except without the syntax and the library of reference books backing up each statement. Okay, I'm gonna stop now, at least for purposes of this journal; I usually hate this sort of thing as a reader, unless it's done really well, and I don't think any of this qualifies. G'night, all.
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