Very Like A Whale

Annie Dillard in The Writing Life - and I swear this is the last reference to it on this blog - highlights this passage from the writing of Jacob Boehme, the German mystic (for this particular reference, scroll down to Chapter 13, Verse 65). She says: He was writing, incoherently as usual, about the source of evil. The passage will serve as well for the source of books.

The whole Deity hath in its innermost or beginning birth, in the pith or kernel, a very tart, terrible sharpness, in which the astringent quality is a very horrible, tart, hard, dark and cold attraction or drawing together, like winter, when there is a fierce, bitter, cold frost, when water is frozen into ice, and besides it is very intolerable.

Not sure if I like the passage for what it actually says (and it says just what, again?) or for its crazily over-modified reliance on abstractions, but Annie Dillard thinks the source of books happens when we  “dissect out the very intolerable, tart, hard terribly sharp Pith or Kernel, and begin writing the book compressed therein.”

I think she’s right.

Amy King. Congratulations!

We’ll be back for you next year, Rob.

Here.

With NaPo!

Where’s the party?

Everyone: Please apprehend me and sternly demand my papers and rigorously question my sanity in the completely unlikely event that I should, next year, announce I intend to participate in NaPo again.

Please. 

When a Ship passes in the Night it Steals your Name by Barbara Jean. OK, not too sure what’s going on in this one yet, but what sonics, what images! Creepy in a great way, or what.

<><><>

Standing Page

Today we are buying time by Matt Merritt. This is a thread rife with gems that bear much re-reading. Great job, Matt!

<><><>

Standing Page

Zen by Donner. I can so relate to this one…

<><><>

Standing Page

Annie Dillard again, still from The Writing Life:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

How hard and slippery it is to find one’s own place.

Some in the blogosphere say: Don’t put your poems on your blog!

Some evil person may steal them. Or some publishing person may say they are thus published and not thereafter publish them. There is no good argument for putting or leaving your poems on your blog.

But I think there is. I think poems are like skin cells - you have to continually flake them off and discard them to allow the new ones underneath them light and space to grow.

And yes, you have to believe 1) that there will always be new ones behind them 2) the new ones will be better than the ones that have come before and 3) the new ones are the better for the discarding of the old ones.

Might not all our talent evaporate on us one day, all our power dissolve?

Possibly. Not improbably. But does hoarding it, portioning out and stinting it while it lasts do anything to lengthen its lifespan? Al contrario, muchachos. Surely not.

Surely.

This, via Google. Heh.

Something Watches by Rik Roots - whimsical in concept, very nicely executed. There’s many a piece worth highlighting in Rik’s thread - have a look!

<><><>

Standing Page

September and Insomnia. Small songs by Howard. Actually there are many more worth highlighting in his lyrical sensuous small song thread, so check ‘em out.

<><><>

Standing Page

I am such a lemming. Whale Child and I were reading Orlando Keeps A Dog last night for the trazillion gamillionth time when I suddenly suffered a massive attack of guilt over how little poetry we read together (I think Tinkle’s Robin Redbreath poem did it).

Luckily, this article fed itself opportunely into my inbox and I swiftly made the following order in the early watches of this morning:

Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings
Douglas Florian

Animal Poems
Valerie Worth

This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness
Joyce Sidman

Bronzeville Boys and Girls
Gwendolyn Brooks

The test of the lemming pudding will be in the eating. We do not fear the unknown.

Bring ’em on!

Death News by George London. If I were still doing NaPo Thread of the Day, I would highlight his whole thread, which started out late in the game. Thick and mysterious, this thread, in a good way.

<><><>

Standing Page

xkcd: hypotheticals

Pomegranate Flux by James Midgley. Richly, densely imaginative, like most of James’ stuff. Check it out.

And check out the other stuff James has been busy with: a new blog, a new poetry magazine and a new poetry workshop!

Total quality management, or what.  Go, James! 

<><><>

Standing Page

Knew that English does not distinguish between a formal and informal you, but not that it is the only one of several hundred Indo-European languages that does not. It used to, but no longer.

And I’m going yaaay, English, because I still need to work out whether that’s sad, or not.    

For Rob Mackenzie. For 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. He’s in second place!

Soundzine. Send your stuff in.

Congrats Charles and Salli!

 Pyramid of Happiness.

Heh. Couldn’t resist. As I’m sure David couldn’t either.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life:

“…Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.”

This resonates with me, I have to say. I’ve grown up and continue to live surrounded by packrats. I’m completely anti-packrat. My impulse is always to jettison, to keep the overall load as light as possible, to remain mobile, unencumbered. Working on poetry over the couple of years, I find that philosophy has transferred wholesale, for whatever reason.  As I revise, I jettison early drafts without a second thought. The only valuable one is the current one, and the only one more valuable than that is the one still to come.

But then of course (because how simple-minded to imagine that this sort of question could be anything less than another ghastly continuum in human affairs…) I have begun to question so uncomplicated an approach, reading now about how other people keep copies of each version they write, draft following draft, all piled up sequentially and easily retrievable.

And are they not right?  For one may easily revise in the wrong direction, find that the right, the needed, thing was actually dropped at a crossroads five miles back and that one must re-trace one’s steps to retrieve it.

But does that kind of trail-marking, that kind of crumb-leaving, have anything more than tactical (poem No. 125 at stake) value? Does it have strategic (one’s poetry writing skills in general at stake) value?

Related note: I always feel the best thing I do is always still to be done and that what is done always falls under “means” rather than “end.” I wonder where I think I am going with all this.