pen ink river

I started this poem two years ago on a sunny day in late May 2003. It grew out of freewriting exercises that urged you to take strange, not necessarily logical language and see if you could weave it into a poem. Because of that, I don't this think poem is necessarily that successful. It is, however, an important piece to me because, as it turns out, I was writing it the day the last day G. was alive, only I wouldn't know that for another six months. It was the first poetry I'd written in a long time and I remember how much I enjoyed the playing with sounds and words and the memories I'd tried to capture. It still needs work and I think, soon, I'll be ready to get back to it. Meanwhile, even if it's not finished or muddled and muddied and incomprehensible, I post it now so at least these words find a place in the world.

Syntax

I judged books by their covers,
the shape of feet and hands.
One particular night is
a farmhouse heated with wood,
my two-year-old asleep in an adjoining room.
Candle burns to a stub,
makes a pass at the sun,
at our sad nest
of hearts. I climb on top,
the man on the bottom
gives in.

Back on Girl Scout craft day,
cotton loops become
hot pads on a metal frame.
In the grownup life, the wail of
the vacuum drowns out
trace of the human race.

Bent knuckle syntax,
give me the nouns and verbs,
the glottal stops and dipthongs that
once and for all, explain.
How the dream wakes up and stumbles
into a dark, eternal down.
How grief makes exclusive use of
the question mark.
How people—certainly me, definitely you
hanging from that tree the day after I wrote this—
remain forever in hot pursuit of
the easiest way out.

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I'm supposed to be writing one of these this morning. Having a hard time focusing on objects, my mind wants to ramble and rant. Below, some notes on what an Objectivist poem is from the Writers on the Net class I'm taking with Barbara Henning.

These kinds of poems:

-- Concentrate on the luminous details in the present conscious world.

-- Includes historic and contemporary particulars.

-- Follows William Carlos William's "No idea but in things."

-- An organic poem with no parts to analyze, rather an accumulation.

-- Yet it makes a social statement.

-- The opposite of symbolist and surrealist poetry in that it's about immediate conscious reality, no streaming consciousness.

-- The object is primary. No metaphors. Instead the material quality of the word.

-- The poet in the background as a collector or arranger.

-- Use documents and newspapers and talk of people. This school of poets wrote usually urban poems, but this isn't necessary.

-- Use local speech and rhythm. Immigrant particularities. Documents.

-- Condense and collage.

-- "The poem as a field of action" (W.C. Williams again). Shape grows organically during the process of making. All at once. All together.

-- Intellectual & moral.

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