Pick a daisy
Pick a blossom
Pick a sprig
Pick out the foxglove
Pick someone your dog would love
Break it down
Burn a bridge
Break a vow
Berate and smother
Realize you’re not right for each other
Halve your history
Hold your mother
Hug your dog
Hide yourself under covers
Pretend to move on to other lovers
Poetry is the usurpation of experience into rhythms
We found the juiciest Blackberry
Prominent in our gathering path
Huge and sun-soft to pick
Our voices became excited
Only one may have a single berry
Sumptuous as can be
Against a berry backdrop
Blue sky with clouds as pillows
should have made us give it a rest
but only one can eat the blackberry
his mother heard our distress
She charged through the brambles
the most tempting rose has thorns
and disappeared under our voices
Into the disguised ditch
Help couldn’t be heard above the blackberries
We lost his mother among the brambles
Consumed by our desire
Of the most perfect Blackberry
Hanging like a golden apple in the sun
She had fallen trying to prevent a second Troy
Drawn by approaching clouds
The blackberry pulled apart
in ruins
Her demise finally heard as the dust settled.
Awake
Eyes closed.
Floating princess in bed
Waiting to hear the sound of the Step.
Was that The creak?
Thud Bang of floorboards!
There isn’t much time to catch
Before she makes it
Safe to the kitchen.
Eyes fly open princess clambers
down into a knight
A Quest to catch up
Little steps race
down the hall,
trip on the stair, keep running up
Soft carpet to the wood floors that gave her away.
Caught up hugged
by the leg
how did you know I was up?
Holding tight
I can hear you!
Walking to the kitchen I can always hear you.
The double bed can barely fit
us two. I’m young and fascinated
so I take less room and the point is to read with me
before I go to bed.
Dad leans the book
so I can see it,
I can read too but he reads for me,
the better to look at the pictures. Russian fairytales,
and the pictures are fanciful, rich, delicate and beautiful.
Of legendary horses and princes
and houses with legs,
Dad shows me and every night,
we see more.
Light blue velvet presses
and warms us as we sink slowly down
to the depths of the shallow end.
Sunlight plays
across the bottom, dancing with our undulations
to keep to the cool rough tea room.
Cross legged
and facing each other properly
and moving with the pulls of the pool,
we eat
to our hearts content,
quickly serving and stuffing
to have the full service
before our breath runs out and the surface beckons.
Eyes closed.
Floating princess in bed
waiting to hear the sound of the step.
Was that the creak?
Bang of floorboards!
There isn’t much time to catch her
before she makes it to the kitchen.
Eyes fly open princess clambers
down to knight
to catch the awesome prize.
Little steps race
down the hall,
trip on the stair, keep running up
the carpet to the wood floors that gave her away.
Caught up hugged
by the leg
how did you know I was up? Mom smiles
moment of child love excitement
I can hear you!
Walking to the kitchen I can always hear you.
I’d read poetry before coming to Middlebury, I’d occasionally enjoyed it, if given in a small enough dose. My mom has given me a book of Emily Dickinson poetry, that I didn’t read until after we learned about her poetry in class, and I love it’s tight circularity, that you can learn so much from single lines and agonize over their significance. I could explore any one of her poems, like “tell the truth but tell it slant” is a personal favorite. I find that for me it is often something within a large poem that rings true, and one of my favorites is from within Anne Finch’s “The Answer (to Pope’s Impromptu)”, that I read for one of my first English classes here.
We rule the world our life’s whole race,
Men but assume that right;
First slaves to every tempting face,
Then martyrs to our spite”
This was so impressed on me because I could never imitate the precise prose of Alexander Pope, and there is so much bile directed at women in almost everything we read, but this, this directly answered what underlies the obsessive disdain the men in the books I read feel. I read it, and I had to read it again. The superiority of the male is but assumed and projected, and each love they express is not the only one. Especially the last two lines I see play out every day, though not relegated only to men. I love it because I can see the poetry live and communicate a feeling I have experienced and seen.
The double bed can barely fit us two. I’m young and fascinated so I take less room and the point is to read with me before I go to bed. Dad leans the book so I can see it, I can read too but he reads for me, the better to look at the pictures. Russian fairytales, and the pictures are fanciful, rich, delicate and beautiful. Of legendary horses and princes and houses with legs, Dad shows me and every night, we see more.
Light blue velvet presses and warms us as we sink slowly down to the depths of the shallow end. Sunlight plays across the bottom, dancing with our undulations to keep to the cool rough tea room. Cross legged and facing each other properly and moving with the pulls of the pool, we eat to our hearts content, quickly serving and stuffing to have the full service before our breath runs out and the surface beckons.
Eyes closed. Floating princess in bed waiting to hear the sound of the step. Was that the creak? Bang of floorboards! There isn’t much time to catch her before she makes it to the kitchen. Eyes fly open princess clambers down to knight to catch the awesome prize. Little steps race down the hall, trip on the stair, keep running up the carpet to the wood floors that gave her away. Caught up hugged by the leg how did you know I was up? Mom smiles moment of child love excitement I can hear you! Walking to the kitchen I can always hear you.
The fiction section of this course seems fast and compressed somehow, and the squeezing of time I think can be felt in my work. The “Conscious Stream” exercise in the tutor led workshop was fiction, but that I made it into someone “running, breathing, running continuous gasping but humming” to demonstrate my immediate thought process speaks volumes as to how I feel everything and I are going. It started at the beginning of the fiction unit and just didn’t stop rolling, iniatied by my non-fiction poetry piece, “A grand adventure to nowhere,” written on my way to Mexico while literally being stuck at the airport with no sleep for two days. Thankfully, the remaining time was great, but picked up upon our return.
Fiction is bloody hard to come up with, the entire thing you have to pull out of cloth, without the frame of previous experience to give some idea of where the story is going. I attempted five different beginnings for my less than 750 fiction before I was satisfied to go beyond the first few lines with a hazy concept. From there I was able to create an actual character in my head that I could explain to Alex during our conference, but it was an arduous, extremely tortuous process. Then I got stuck at the I love you. I didn’t know what she wanted, whether she should collapse or continue with the relationship. And I did make the end undecided, but more of her thought process, more of the character’s state of mind was included. Even creating the common fantastical piece was a slow ticking to a workable creation of a world of small.
Balance is easies to maintain in the shorter fiction pieces where I can have a lot communicated in a small space without having to explicate everything that is going on, what they look like, or how they got there. I definitely tried to make things more ordered and coherent, with varying degrees of success. I had a lot of fun with stranger fictions and for some reason, my hugging Santa mini story. There is so much going on and I can think of so many things when we just have to come up with something on the spot and not worry about its capacity for longevity. Things are sluckier that way.
The five page long piece was an idea that was conceived with such high hopes amidst my debilitating cold and fell short of where I was hoping it would go. Grounded in my preteen fantasies and wanting to create something truly fictional, I went for the knight. I also wanted to experiment with changing the focus in narration, like what we read for class. The focus was too broad for five pages, and I was concentrating on a set of characters for a novel, too many for a shorter piece. I wanted the focus to be on George as the lead, and have each character give their opinion on what it meant to have a girl aspiring knight on their squad, while keeping her attitude silent, with the reader relying on the accounts of those around her. The omniscient narrator was to enable a panning of perspective when they all regrouped. Using names indicated closeness and personality, while referring to characters as he and she was my attempt to rebuke or distance them. Dialogue was a writing technique to communicate feeling and a story that I really wanted to explore, especially after Hills Like White Elephants, as I had never thought to use language in that way. The setting was wrong to provoke a true confrontation however, but I didn’t want to plagiarize the plot of my books when they instigate the antagonism and romantic possibility. I am kind of unsure but kind of like the idea of soldiers playing at being knights as a way to escape the situation they find themselves in. Some confusion on the groups part was not knowing anything about knights, and therefore did not understand the concepts of knighthood or the process to it. The experimentation during the tutor led class allowed me to at least reconceptualize the introduction to the story to make it more explanatory, and hopefully, more clear without giving everything away. Next time I will try and risk fewer things at once, experimentation still has to work. Poetry is going to be a whole new ball game.
Translation poem- Li Bai
April 28, 2008下終南山遺斛斯山人宿置酒
暮從碧山下，山月隨人歸。
卻顧所來徑，蒼蒼橫翠微。
相攜及田家，童稚開荊扉。
綠竹入幽徑，青蘿拂行衣。
歡言得所憩，美酒聊共揮。
長歌吟松風，曲盡河星稀。
我醉君復樂，陶然共忘機。
http://www.legacy1.net/poems/libai_nanshan.html
Even as I sit
I observe the cars, shining silver.
Passing through, past my flowers.
Delicate nature, through a window.
Soft spring leaves, slowly turning.
Remaining still, reading people.
Everyone is contained, in themself.
Trees in gardens, watching time.
I found this poem by Li Bai, one of the most famous Chinese poets. They didn’t have cars when he was writing, but I felt my poem worked. I looked at the characters for inspiration, though I read them backwards.
Tags:interpretation, li bai, translation
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