I think this may be the only poem R.J. Ellmann has ever written, but when you've done this well first shot out of the box, why mess with it? Delight.
Click the title of the poem to listen.
To a Frustrated Poet
This is to say
I know
You wish you were in the woods,
Living the poet life,
Not here at a formica topped table
In a meeting about perceived inequalities in the benefits and
allowances offered to employees of this college,
And I too wish you were in the woods,
Because it's no fun having a frustrated poet
In the Dept. of Human Resources, believe me.
In the poems of yours that I've read, you seem ever intelligent
and decent and patient in a way
Not evident to us in this office,
And so, knowing how poets can make a feast out of trouble,
Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair,
I give you this check representing two weeks' wages
And ask you to clean out your desk today
And go home
And write a poem
With a real frog in it
And plums from the refrigerator,
So sweet and so cold.
R.J. Ellmann
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
Induction
Phil has been following and contributing to my National Poetry Month project since the first year I did it. He lives in Hull, Yorkshire, which is a city with a great history of gritty, mouthy, sharply brilliant poets. When he discovers something new that he likes, I file it away to share during April. They've been some of my favorite posts over the last few years, and I particularly love this one. Russ Litten is a local Hull poet, and he teaches a creative writing class in a prison (read a little more about that on his website). Phil is guest reading today.
Click the title of the poem to listen.
Induction
Every Monday morning I stand up
before twenty or so disinterested faces
slouched around library tables
and tell them
about the possibilities of poetry
and the prospect of escape.
It's a poor joke, and some mornings
it goes down less well
than others.
Like this morning,
one sullen soul flinging rancour
from the back of the room:
What's that for then?
...
Yeah, but what do you get at the end of it?
...
Do you get paid?
...
So what use is that to me?
...
And I said
(quoting Scargill quoting his Dad)
:
"...the quality of your life depends upon
your ability to manipulate words..."
Does it fuck, he
said,
thus proving
both of
our
points.
by Russ Litten
Click the title of the poem to listen.
Induction
Every Monday morning I stand up
before twenty or so disinterested faces
slouched around library tables
and tell them
about the possibilities of poetry
and the prospect of escape.
It's a poor joke, and some mornings
it goes down less well
than others.
Like this morning,
one sullen soul flinging rancour
from the back of the room:
What's that for then?
...
Yeah, but what do you get at the end of it?
...
Do you get paid?
...
So what use is that to me?
...
And I said
(quoting Scargill quoting his Dad)
:
"...the quality of your life depends upon
your ability to manipulate words..."
Does it fuck, he
said,
thus proving
both of
our
points.
by Russ Litten
Friday, December 27, 2013
75.
I am interested in precipitating events.
When I was a very small person, I used to look out the car window at everything we passed and make myself crazy with the knowledge that I could never truly know everything there was to know unless I'd stood in every single spot on earth, inside the eyes of every single person on earth, and looked in every possible direction, including inward. I'd try to lessen the burden of that impossibility by imagining standing on every square inch of the land where I grew up, and absorbing the visual information that belonged to it. Even that much lesser task was, of course, impossible. So for a while I tried drawing that information in great detail - the swath of forest visible from our living room picture windows, in all seasons: lush and urgent with leaves and evergreen needles, naked and whispering with fallen leaves in autumn, silent and bowed with a heavy, crystalline snowfall. I'd try to record the shower of white at the exact moment when the weight of snow became precisely the right degree of warm to melt and slump off onto the ground, sending a storm of sparkling dust into the winter sunshine and leaving the branches darkened with moisture but lightened in weight. None of these attempts were successful. They would have failed even if I had possessed the skill to render them perfectly on paper. There is no way to archive every moment of breath or change or action or stillness in every thing that lives. But the attention to detail gave me the ability to accurately record the obsession decades later, and it gave me an interest in the beginnings of things. Where we mark the start of the story, what minutiae is important in the engine of narrative. There are ways to draw attention to what matters, to assign value.
What interests me now is first things. When I stop to notice a landscape that's inhabited by people, I never fail to wonder who was first. What made them stay? How hard did they have to fight to carve a life out of the space where I'm standing? Is this town here because someone once lost the will to go any further? Or because they saw this view from further away and thought - there. That's where I'm going. That's what I want. I'm interested in the tiny thing that triggers the combustion of recognition between two strangers. I'm curious about where to position the first point of story. Which tiny element of something different belongs to which thread of narrative. I love these things, and I fall prey to following them through whole improbable scenarios in my head.
So far in doing this writing project, my favorite things have been two pieces that were sort of creation myths. Some of my favorite reading recently was a book of short stories called Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory. They're very simple, pared down parables that tell of absolutely epic, sweeping events in the lives of ordinary people, or very ordinary events in the lives of wondrous strange people. Every time I sit down to write something here, I am conscious of wanting to write those stories, and having to think about not writing someone else's work, but still wanting to use it as a jumping-off point for my own work. The creation myths have been very much my own, and have not read like those stories, but I'm conscious of a flavor of thought in my mouth that owes something to this book. I'd like to keep doing them; I suspect that reading this book was a precipitating event for me.
When I was a very small person, I used to look out the car window at everything we passed and make myself crazy with the knowledge that I could never truly know everything there was to know unless I'd stood in every single spot on earth, inside the eyes of every single person on earth, and looked in every possible direction, including inward. I'd try to lessen the burden of that impossibility by imagining standing on every square inch of the land where I grew up, and absorbing the visual information that belonged to it. Even that much lesser task was, of course, impossible. So for a while I tried drawing that information in great detail - the swath of forest visible from our living room picture windows, in all seasons: lush and urgent with leaves and evergreen needles, naked and whispering with fallen leaves in autumn, silent and bowed with a heavy, crystalline snowfall. I'd try to record the shower of white at the exact moment when the weight of snow became precisely the right degree of warm to melt and slump off onto the ground, sending a storm of sparkling dust into the winter sunshine and leaving the branches darkened with moisture but lightened in weight. None of these attempts were successful. They would have failed even if I had possessed the skill to render them perfectly on paper. There is no way to archive every moment of breath or change or action or stillness in every thing that lives. But the attention to detail gave me the ability to accurately record the obsession decades later, and it gave me an interest in the beginnings of things. Where we mark the start of the story, what minutiae is important in the engine of narrative. There are ways to draw attention to what matters, to assign value.
What interests me now is first things. When I stop to notice a landscape that's inhabited by people, I never fail to wonder who was first. What made them stay? How hard did they have to fight to carve a life out of the space where I'm standing? Is this town here because someone once lost the will to go any further? Or because they saw this view from further away and thought - there. That's where I'm going. That's what I want. I'm interested in the tiny thing that triggers the combustion of recognition between two strangers. I'm curious about where to position the first point of story. Which tiny element of something different belongs to which thread of narrative. I love these things, and I fall prey to following them through whole improbable scenarios in my head.
So far in doing this writing project, my favorite things have been two pieces that were sort of creation myths. Some of my favorite reading recently was a book of short stories called Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory. They're very simple, pared down parables that tell of absolutely epic, sweeping events in the lives of ordinary people, or very ordinary events in the lives of wondrous strange people. Every time I sit down to write something here, I am conscious of wanting to write those stories, and having to think about not writing someone else's work, but still wanting to use it as a jumping-off point for my own work. The creation myths have been very much my own, and have not read like those stories, but I'm conscious of a flavor of thought in my mouth that owes something to this book. I'd like to keep doing them; I suspect that reading this book was a precipitating event for me.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
51.
I'm struggling with this project the last several days. When I started it, I meant it to kickstart my thinking and self-examination and I hoped that it would start to generate some creative writing impulses for me. And it did, in the very beginning. It had been so long since I'd blogged that I think I had a backlog of inclination to write, as it were. But the last several days, it's felt like a struggle and a chore to sit down and write something. It's been more about choosing a single thought I've had during the day and honing it into the nicest shape possible than it has about pushing into new territory. That's ok, I guess; there's nothing wrong with craft and it does me good to think about the best possible way to say something.
What I really want, though, is to do some new writing that's bigger and riskier and sloppier. So far, I can't find my way into that. I don't think it's a matter of daring, although I might be blocking myself without knowing it. It's that nothing has occurred to me except my usual small thoughts. I want to find a way out of that and into something messy and unknown. As I type this, I'm picturing Joseph Gordon-Levitt coming to on the floor of a dark basement in Brick, and saying to his shadowy assailant, "Hell with you. Which wall's the door in?" I can't find the door. If any of you people who do the writering have suggestions for finding the door, I'm listening.
What I really want, though, is to do some new writing that's bigger and riskier and sloppier. So far, I can't find my way into that. I don't think it's a matter of daring, although I might be blocking myself without knowing it. It's that nothing has occurred to me except my usual small thoughts. I want to find a way out of that and into something messy and unknown. As I type this, I'm picturing Joseph Gordon-Levitt coming to on the floor of a dark basement in Brick, and saying to his shadowy assailant, "Hell with you. Which wall's the door in?" I can't find the door. If any of you people who do the writering have suggestions for finding the door, I'm listening.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
winner: sentence of the decade
By PearsonMaron, via Twitter, one of the greatest sentences I've ever read: "Troublesome Violet cried at the Dr. because she didn't get a shot." Magic stuff.
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