Saturday, November 22, 2008

Patrick:

Your hip-hop recommendations are right on the mark.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Deeply troubling

Reyanne thinks someone should explain this whole "Twilight" thing to her. Ready, GO! 11:38pm
- 3 Comments

Vanessa Johnson at 11:43pm November 18
agreed.

Devon Ian Peterson at 2:15am November 19
It's an immaturely-composed girl book that creates deep sympathy with the characters despite the poor writing and contrived narrative. It's also pretty regressive in terms of women's empowerment, which is the worst bit, because its major fanbase is young girls who are being socialized into idealizing a female character who actually begs to give up her life to be with a man (literally; she has to become a vampire) and is otherwise flat, shallow, and uninteresting.

Michelle Duncan at 4:08pm November 20
okay no....Reyanne listen to me!!! Twlight is amazing! I've only read the first book so far but i am about half way through the second book...its a love story and i think you should give reading it a try. i was skeptical about it at first but once i started reading it i couldn't put it down!! so get the book...Ready, GO!

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

You do just fine

Ugh, god, I'm stuck on a song again. It's really too good. There are so many great moments in it – particularly at the end of the verses. "I'm the homerun king 'fore his muscles grew," "so what's the use in even tryin'?" and "I say you were born up in the sky." Okay so only one of those is at the end of a verse but they're just delightful.

I had lunch today with a bunch of Arabs. A Tunisian, an Egyptian, two Syrians, and a Sudanese. Dunno man, I don't wanna get all T.E. Lawrence up in here but it was chill. I think it's time I got myself over there. I'ma just up and go one day. Save my money, work out an arrangement with some friends' family, and be like, "Alright guys, I'm off to Syria, catch you in a couple weeks." Oh man. That's incredibly tempting. Don't even give mom a chance to worry. Hah, even better, I could just go and then when they call I'd be like, "Can I call you back? I'm in Damascus right now."

It's kinda like, y'know? Like, my parents have never really worried about me and I've never done anything really stupid. I figure I get one free. One free chance to just go and be gone and then come back like, "Ta-da!"

Ugh, I've found flights from San Francisco to Damascus for $700-$800 round-trip. And that's without looking or talking to anyone who would know better. I'm threating it. Next winter maybe. People gonna turn around and suddenly I'm eating lamb and learning Syrian dialect from the cab driver. Or something.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Slip

Weather's been weird. Hot wind like a Santa Ana blowing in from where the houses are burning down south, turns the Bay inside-out, no one knows how to dress. Went bhangra dancing tonight with DPE after spending yesterday moping around my apartment and not eating.

I eventually did eat though.

Money came in today – paycheck six days late, but it's probably for the best – those were six days it wasn't being spent. To celebrate I bought Old Crow's most recent studio album and I'm glad I have headphones cause otherwise Charlie would probably get pretty annoyed with me.

Guess I'll head to bed after this song – arms around a pillow instead of a girl, listening to the city murmur outside rather than her breath in the room. Damn.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Poetitudes cont.

So what makes a poem "good?" Well, first it's important to understand what a poem is. Poetry does not communicate. Poetry does not transmit ideas or feelings about the world. Poetry is the very stuff of reality itself. Suggesting that poetry communicates feelings or ideas or experiences is like suggesting that I communicate Devon.

How does understanding this affect a poet and the process of writing? First, it (hopefully) releases the poem from the obligation of "telling" and allows it to "be." Therefore, the poet is freed from the preconceptions of what the poem is about or what it is for, and they can exercise their artistic skill in many more various directions.

Secondly, it is instructive about how to craft a poem. Poetry doesn't transmit ideas or feelings. If there are to be feelings or ideas aroused in the reader, the poem cannot serve as a device to pass them from the poet to the reader. The poem must create these feelings and ideas inside the reader, organically. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest, often the most effective, and also (I contend) the most fun, is through imagery.

A poem should explode in your mind when you read it. It should burst with colors and sounds and temperature and heartache. This turns the reader from someone reading about an experience to someone living it. Remember – there is no meaningful distinction between reality and poetry. How can it do this? It's important to avoid what I call "grey words" or "blank words." These are words and phrases that fail to light up the mind. They're only words, things like "confused" or "feeling whole" or "good music." These are telling words – they come from the poet, telling the reader about something, but giving them nothing to hold on to.

Images serve as hooks for the mind, making it pause and linger over a passage to savor it and see it. I know when I read a piece with a lot of blank words my eyes sort of slide down the poem and when I pause I realize I can't remember anything about it. It ends up being a real effort to read – and you don't want people to have to really try just to read your stuff. Maybe to analyze it, pick it apart, but they should be able to read it and feel it in their mind with relative ease.

"Put in more images." Almost every time someone asks me to read their stuff this is my advice. "Dump your ideas and put in images." Don't describe your feeling – search around in your mind or heart or wherever poetry comes from and find something that is your feeling. Something that will make you have that feeling every time you read it. Most of the time a poem can't be great on just images alone. But if it's chock full of them – good ones, of course – it can't possibly be terrible.

There are times to scale back and do other things, but whenever someone starts to feel dissatisfied with their work, or that they feel like it's not ringing true, or what have you, the first thing they should do is think, "Where do I have ideas without images? Why? Can I change that?" When they edit they need to be ready for their poem to change – the point is not for your ideas to be communicated, the point is for the poem to approach perfection.

There's plenty more I could talk about re: writing poetry and crafting poems, but that starts to get more particular and less accessible (sometimes). I'll probably end up writing more about it, but this is the big stuff.
On the Overcast Nights

On the overcast nights—
orange fog above the Bay,
sodium glow from streets
bent under the clouds
like a broken compass rose;
on the overcast nights—
when street people toss
and turn on their concrete or grass,
murmuring half-dreams
in the ruddy twilight;
on the overcast nights I
stare out on the cities
staining the sky with their
electrical fire, and I wonder
at the darkness that I
managed to clutch
with you, when we sat beneath our own
chemical glimmer,
and the yellowish mist
was burning.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Old Crow Interlude

Old Crow at the Fillmore. Willy Watson's hair is all long. Ketch Secor is a madman. It was an amazing show. Impossible to overstate how rad it was. They're so intense and energetic and fun on stage. Stuff came out in their songs that hadn't come out before. Very cool.

Very, very cool.

edit:

This was a dumb post because it was late at night and I was equally excited and exhausted. I explained it much better to Patrick just now.
[15:36] tyedyedtruth: So dude.
[15:36] tyedyedtruth: I saw Old Crow at the Fillmore, right?
[15:36] tyedyedtruth: Holy shit dude.
[15:37] SquidgeeMoot: Good time?
[15:37] tyedyedtruth: It was an unspeakably good show.
[15:38] tyedyedtruth: Ketch Secor, the fiddler, had a layer of dust built up under the bridge of his fiddle.
[15:38] tyedyedtruth: Which is what had become of his rosin.
[15:38] tyedyedtruth: o_O
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: ....
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: Wh-shit.
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: Shit.
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: Wow.
[15:39] tyedyedtruth: It was totally insane.
[15:39] tyedyedtruth: They were all totally drenched in sweat.
[15:39] tyedyedtruth: I mean, especially Ketch and Willie.
[15:40] tyedyedtruth: Cause they do most of the singing and also a better part of the gallivanting on stage.
[15:40] tyedyedtruth: But there was this insane feedback loop of energy from the crowd and the band.
[15:41] tyedyedtruth: I mean, okay.
[15:41] tyedyedtruth: I've read in several places that their early and continued success has been in large part fueled by the extensive tour schedule and excellent live shows.
[15:41] tyedyedtruth: But I had no idea.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Poetitudes

I recently had a brief but invigorating chat with my friend Sarah about poetry, which she's only just begun writing. Like most new poets, she writes when she overflows, spilling her Self all over the page. She asked me to read her stuff, and in the course of an elliptical conversation punctuated by a anecdote or two I described to her what I thought about poetry and how to "improve" it. Being both as qualified and unqualified as any other journeyman wordsmith, I've decided to share.

As I said, new poets are often exhilarated at the writing of poetry, of both releasing emotions and thoughts that are pent-up inside, and also at the prospect that what's been written might be read, communicated, and understood. This exhilaration in the act of expression is that "feeling" that people get. New poets – in a generalization that I should know better than to be making – are often less concerned with the poem itself than what it accomplishes, within themselves and in communication with others.

This is okay! Catharsis is a critical aspect of creation. However, most want to "improve" their work, and this is where my anecdote comes in.

One night, junior year of high school, I found myself up late at night, on the computer, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, and very much in the throes of that "feeling." I wrote with the swing of the music and the gyrations of my heart, and then went to bed. I had written about two stanzas, and finished the poem with two more the next day or so. I ended up putting it in the next fM. Magazine because I needed a piece, but I wasn't totally satisfied with it.

A few months later I needed something to submit to the Young Writers' Conference, and thought that that poem had some promise if I cleaned it up. So I sat down with it, thought about it, and fixed it up nicely – by removing the first two stanzas (saving one line and two or three images) and writing something entirely different. It would be difficult to overstate how much it improved.

I edited the poem by eliminating the bit that was written during the "inspiration," when I had that "feeling." This isn't to say that the inspiration was unimportant – it served to sort of find the poem and crack it open for me. I certainly released a lot of good feelings doing it, but the poem itself, if it wanted to be good, had to grow beyond that.

More later.