Midden

Listening to a poetry podcast, wherein Fanny Howe talks about her latest novel (and Conor O'Callaghan graces the world with his wonderful Irish brogue), sparked a thought in my head. Nothing groundbreaking, but perhaps interesting nonetheless: when asked when she wrote the opening, autobiographical essay, Howe stated that she wrote it many years before – an understandable response considering the content (her life) as a topic of consisted analysis. The rest of the book was a compilation of fragmented ideas that she had cut and paste into different stories. I paused the podcast (which I have yet to finish) and reflected on my writing: I often feel as if my thoughts are never coherent, never fully realized. I write down half-formulated ideas, something scratching on my brain and nagging me to let it out. So I find a place on my computer or a spare notebook and give it a home, but generally that's the last I see of it. Lately this has been bothering me, how much potential may be wasted because I don't have a larger plan for it, because I'm ignoring it (though "ignore" connotes an active refusal to acknowledge, doesn't it? "disregard," then?). After all, if these ideas bother me enough to write them down, they must mean something, right? This process of writing reminds me of the life of a pack rat, a rodent whose nomenclature tends to mimic my habits in many ways: they store and store and store because there's room for everything and everything can have a place, and leaving something out makes room for regret. It's all a matter of finding the right area of the nest to place it. Some ideas need space and time to permeate, to expand and embody a larger, possibly unexpected theme, whereas other ideas function more semiotically. They may need tweaking and cleaning, sure, but their presence, however large or small, can nestle their way into an even greater nest of writing.

The Importance of a Sonnet

For the first time in months I managed to jot down a poem. It's rough and somewhat rambling (as rambling as a sonnet can be, I suppose) and it probably won't make it past the page I wrote it on, but it's a step in the right direction. Why is it in form? Well, the shallow, thoughtless responder inside of me would say that it is because form has rules, and manipulating words to reach a predetermined syllable count is easy (in theory). The more analytical side of me would say this:

Having graduated college in December, I am in a state of flux. A sporadic surgical procedure, while non-life-threatening, unfortunately pushed the timing of my life off by a few months, which sounds minor, but it was just enough time to disqualify me from applying for spring internships. The whole point of a fall semester graduation was, of course, to beat the majority of applicants who would still enroll in the spring semester. And as a graduate from a relatively no-name state school, I needed any advantage I could get. As it is right now, I am waiting out the days until student loan payments start chasing me through the night, merciless with their sharpened, greedy teeth. It's intimidating and it's chaos-inducing. Perhaps "chaos" is too bold of a term right now, but the naivete enrapturing my life (wait, is that a contradiction?) will soon lead me into a chaotic state.

Form is grounded in rules. It is established for various reasons, one of which is to keep poetry clean, recognizable. A sonnet is a sonnet is a sonnet, sure, but to me it also represents something that I can control, something that I can still hold on to. And in unstable times like this it is important to embrace whatever is within my grasp, however miserably written it may be.

Grass

Spring is gaining momentum and that means some kind of weight lifts from our shoulders, like an invisible machine attaches itself to the dead feeling long winters drape over us and pulls it away. And socks are becoming less and less important, which is a good thing because the holes are eating up my feet anyway. I think my musical preferences are becoming less and less about the dumps of a blanketed world and more about the recovery of the grass as it learns to open up its tiny collapsed lungs and breathe again. That is: less Bon Iver and more Kite Flying Society and Page France, because they are bright, but not too bright. They have songs about dazzling things, about grass, about the liberating fresh air; but they also have songs about things being too dazzling, and the pollution that overtakes the grass. It is a time of recovery, true, but it is hesitant. It's confusing. And that's what I mean to say: for the first time in my life, I am seeing spring sprout around me in a slightly different environment. An environment that threatens cold, but a snowless cold. But the wonderful thing about spring is the visual evidence that it exists: watching snow piles fall away, finding alternate pathways around muddy areas, remembering the patterns in the cracks of the sidewalks previously piled too full with invasive snow. And I can't help focusing on that absence.