25/30: Conversations With My Classmate-Professor Over Lunch in Cardiff

Of all the places, high street, of all the places on high street, a faux-mexican

chain with bad spellings and valleys accents. Here again for all the unpacking
at the logical end of the course we took together.
find ourselves comparing notes eight years from the day he said

so you’re also an American, and showed me the best seat

in the mini-cafe.

The years they have been kind?

Strange? About the same?

His kids are people now, big

laughs and so many transgressive

authors, Naked Lunch Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch and how the students

need

to be shaken

and twisted

and broken

you just keep writing and throwing it

out and keep writing and throwing it

out to the high street, he gestures,

something for the people, these

people they just go about their little

lives.

At some point in our thirties we just start looking the same

for a long time. We met when he was a year younger

than I am now, he’s lost a little weight, but aging only

shows in family pictures.

So many beat authors  and  pages full

of violence, his students complain, especially

the women, but people need to know

life’s not all gardens and shopping

and roses. he references Thoreau

and Ginsberg and Lydia so and so

and says something about guts

on the page. GUTS.

To break up the bland, pleasant

horror of domesticity.

What are we doing

here on the high street,

if we’re not picking  up tail

or telling rough truths?

He’s married. I’m not. He was married when we met.
I wasn’t. The Cardiff we meet in and the Cardiff

he lives in are different places even so.

The new book is meant to be

destroyed, because art is temporal.

I get a copy for free. He has to give

some of his students credit, they call him

on his shit. He’s got shit, like I’ve got shit

like they’ve got shit, but these

are his classes and

I learn more, here on high street

about Cardiff Uni Politics

than will

hopefully ever be useful.

Always used to joke to me to not get married, fuck around as

long as possible. Struck me as sad, and honest. A third weak

beer in and I remember three years ago, he sent a few links

for professor jobs in Cardiff, then one in Bellingham that

he’d thought about.

But you can’t uproot family. You, you could go anywhere.

He pulls a page out of his book and wraps his tip in it

things are going pretty well, he re-iterates, life is what it

is, just kicking against the long going

and I take another look down high street

contemplating curriculums for those who only

wish

their desperation could be

quiet.

19/30: In Which I Summon the Ghosts of Still Living Scribes

Ten oil paint woodland water scenes
in this room where two men in
turbans compare data over a
laptop and the guy who works at
the gyro place where they recognize
my nephew sits in a chair with
an embroidered cushion while
songs with echo-ey lady vocals
drift over the sound of espresso
machines, and I believe that if
there is a problem in this room
I am part of it.

This is the second poem I've written
in A Muddy Cup in my life time and the
more-than-second poem I've written
during this arbitrary daily-poem-calendar
-time about the coffee shop that I'm writing
in and if every poem is a little bit
about poetry, then all of mine are a lot
about poetry, but this is the second one
that I consciously chose to write this month
and I will finish my taxes a little  later
than I planned.

Now this is like a Shane Guthrie poem
or Ryan Johnson poem, they are also both
writing poems every day or almost
every day, because it is important and we
know we are important because we
choose to do this, and they also both
have written about the act of writing and
I'm not sure if they'll be flattered or offended

that I sat in a room with it's own library
that is in the business of giving people a
place to sit and not be terrified of the world
but ostensibly it's just coffee and now
this piece is much much longer than either
Ryan or Shane usually write, even longer
than a poem by Jake Tucker, who was the
most enthused about the 30/30s, but has
written the least, so I assume he has broken
fingers by a Moose in Canada, but yes,
mush longer of a poem than any
of theirs, unless
it's an epic diatribe,
surrealist or
political, respectively,
God
I could use
one of those

right now.

2/30! The Knives Are So Sharp Because the Stakes Are So Low!

The Knives Are So Sharp Because the Stakes Are So Low

Terra cotta attack dogs/bomb(s in) every library.
the only thing we (have to) say regards legitimacy,
but you're carving down/(c/should
be) punching up.

brutalist watchtower/gatekeeper.
naturalist's flowering rebuttals.

I had a friend once, the novelist said, and we were surprised
enough at that to miss the rest of the anecdote.
I had an enemy once, the poet replied, and we gathered
by the campfire, sharpening up our tongs.

this is integral, the cannon's fire,
the statues raised/toppled/razed.

modernism and feral cats/atomic slushpiles.

This is no laughing matter. This is no simple grudge.
This is (g)war. You hear me?
Literally dozens of mid-level careers have potential
to be nominally effected by what we find in this rubble.

Georgian arches burnt crisp. A flag we wave,
passing (up/in/over) the halls of
crunched paper.

August Kills With Wandering Thoughts

The sun through Rachel's doorway, the heat.
The stairs that live here, the plants either side the stairs.
The days of half-open curtains, thankful for sun, praying for shade.
This almost became a piece about photosynthesis,
almost became a poem about homes away from home,
a poem about the inertia of comfort, like 9 years old,
notching yourself into the corner between arm-rung
and seat on a merri-go-round, feeling the spin
paste you to your spot as you watch the swings become a blur,
but the keyboard on top of the amp, sitting by the door,
the growing pile of my own books, the knowledge of coming rain,
the good nights with bad tv shows, beamed directly here,
this almost became a poem about a relationship, gorgeous
with stir fry breakfasts, adventures to suburbs and accommodations,
but poems about relationships without the benefit of hindsight
or confirmation of jewelry. . . well, there is iced coffee coming
and this weather makes hard thinking into exhaustion.

Starting With Intent to Finish

Start it with a poem about drinking. About a long, dark porter
and sly slow slurp. The real, hard, anger of salt.
Then go to your most detatched, your commentator newscast.
Don't get your hands dirty, wear clean gloves. Comment on the sun,
raying out over the hood of a dented buick. As you stand there with
a microphone in a suit your 17 year old self still protests, make
that buick glinting your goal.
aspire.
Talk it good so people forget all about the
drinking poem. Write the light so hard that you are
a tee-totaler, always were. Write yourself celibate
on forests that you camped under the day before
yesteryear, punctuate with a poem about acid rain.
Go righteous. Go fist pumping.
Then, write the sex poem-filthy and needed--
before writing the monsters out of the closet
and back under the bed where they belong.

_______________________________________________________

blogspot will probably wreak havoc with the format of this, but so goes. I wrote this on tuesday at the SPLAB meeting I facilitated on Writing Goals. This is as it was in the minute, and as a freewrite, I'm pretty happy with both how it feels and what I was "trying to say" about both the process and product of writing new poetry in the new year.

The Hard Life of the Calloused Fingers

the seventies-style lampshade, dented in three
ascending spots is the thin shield between his life
as a teacher and life as a writer. starting a poem he
swivels to the deepest dent, almost, almost a rip
and takes a swig from the engraved flask he received
post-graduating, a ritual more than anything, this
is the same rum from two weeks ago. but he considers
"poets are thirsty creatures" for the next title
of a book, essay, something. trolls the new medias
for new medium, reads a story about depreciating
values of degrees and vice versa.

circle-paces his porch, perking ears for neighborhood gunshots.
haven't been in years. one of students asked him
what life was like in the olden days, squeezing childish
truth-telling into teenage dickishness, but professionalism
forbids one from getting feelings hurt.

back inside. the rum remains stubbornly in the flask,
he doesn't reach for it. tosses a stress ball
at the ceiling; it only ever when things are breaking,
what happened to the last lamp, but he saved the shade.
forty minutes later, a finished product on his screen,
exhausted but not sleepy, sober but fuzzy-visioned,
the slow trot of some forgotten reference winces
through his backbrain--

as long as standards keep dropping. . .it says,
but doesn't finish the sentence.

It's like the Awesome Nameless Summer Poetry Project, but will probably get a title soon. Part 1.

Today I got an e-mail from GPS with a contract and everything. Something about invoicing them. I've never "invoiced" anyone before; largely because I'm usually on the other end of that equation and because most of my dealings are with friends. This, however, is with a large, poetry-based corporation.

More on that later. With regards to the Other End of my cash-acquisition, I'm currently working on a new Chapbook to complete in time for a top-secret lock-in fundraiser at Lewis' band's practice space beginning of April.
Yeah, I know.
Something about a "top-secret fundraiser" sounds eight ways to dodgy, but still. . . I like reading in cramped, poorly lit spaces. If my words don't hit people, specks of saliva will.

So I'm currently going through a list of potential poems for this book. I want it to largely consist of pieces I've written (or heavily edited and completed) here in Swansea, I want it to have a strong Sense of Place, but I don't want it to read like a poetry-based laundry list of images and places; I find that heavily themed works get real stale real fast.
So. I've got a list of titles here, some with links to them, others you can easily find on this blog, others are yet unseen in online form and we'll let that stay the case.



First off, the Poems I Wrote Pre-Wales, that for whatever reason I Feel Strongly Enough About to consider including
Story Problem
Zombies and Paint Thinner
Dinner For One
Watching Films About Death
Little Red Corvette
Cavities
Caleb Barber Loses His Teeth to Meth
Everyone Has Something
Murder Ballads

Poems I've Written in Swansea, More or Less About Swansea or Places in It or about General 'Welshness'-->(*Marks one that needs a good bit of work)
Beneath the Cathedral
Paintings of Famous Satanists
Rugby '08
Rugby '09*
Rucksacks*
The Cafe Across From the Train Station
Glasgow Weather and Inappropriate Footwear
Carmarthen Train #1
Its What We Writers Do (For Jen)
Christmas Light Gallows*
Tall Drink of Water
Black Pudding*
Isolation Therapy
At the Chip Shop
Beck House D 3.1*
Ambition is Critical*
Swansea-Cardiff Blues (Bellngham Edition)*
Earl Grey
All My Friend Back Home (Start a band about this one)*
Tired Eyes


And These Are About Girls or Concepts or came from Ryan's prompts and aren't necessarily tied to Wales
Ellie
Donkey Kong Country
New Poem For Old Plasters
We Laughed at the Same Thing (M4W)
Clippers! Clippers! Clippers!
A Little Fear of Drowning
Flicking Ash
24th Ave, NE*
Cities that Exist in Movies*
Children Go Missing Every Day
Context and Subtext
Ways In Which Gloriana Flotsam McGrew Will Probably Die, Since It's Always So Fucking Glamourous With Her (addressed to the subject)
Pigeon Bait
Children Go Missing Every Day
Forward Thinking
Boyz*
Three Counts of Public Urination
Enough With the Cape Already*
Genus, Species and Flavour
I am the tired orphan*

yeah. So about 15-20 poems out of those. Plus a few that are very much in my head but not on paper yet. Some are shoe-ins, but it really depends what sort of thing I want to make and what purpose I want it to serve for me and how long. Which I'll talk about later. I've tagged a lot of places you can find some of the mentioned poems.

Its What We Writers Do

For Jen, on her return to the United States

I suspect I will spend
life watching my favourite people
get on planes
then writing about it.

We all have our themes.
It’s what we writers do.

When you go, you take a piece of Swansea with you.
Ridiculous?
Sure. You aren’t from here either.
But I see people as signifiers, metaphors;
chapters in a book I’ll write later.

Who else will remember the drunk old man
in the corner of Uplands Tav shouting about how
we were too young to know anything
and the volumes of eachothers poetry we
sliced up and re-sected ‘til they were done?

This won’t become a list of inside jokes
because that would be too easy, my
crooked grin at the look on your face as you
tell me I’m busted.

When you go I will write something;
its what we writers do.
And, after all,
there are airplanes involved
and I’ve gotta stick to my
themes.

When you go,
I’ll buy you a drink you don’t want,
Make a few jokes too many,
They’ll be pretty tasteless
And you’ll tell me
I’m busted.

This would be a great Slam Piece---

if it didn't require a solid knowledge of both 1) the bible and 2) the smashing pumpkins. still, it was fun to write.
you can thank Ryan Johnson for the inspiration; the prompt he gave me was "if My Body Goes, to Hell With My Soul." And this is what I came up with.

enough with the cape already

billy corgan likes to think he knows,
but he doesn’t get jokes.
guitar-stance heroics pave over going bald early;
the severe pain of the electric razor,
figuring out how to throw your guts as far
as you can once you’re no longer pretty.
perhaps this is why he invokes Job;
another who had his flocks taken from
him by an act of God
or public favor.

poet types under thirty adjectivize.
words like “beautiful” or “dirty”
or “heartbroken” or “tragic”--

It’s a pre-emptive mustering of guts, saving it up
for when words alone will have to get us laid.

Then there's Job (in the desert or wherever)
his friends visiting him, even though he had
festering sores and all that. these were the types
who bought "Machina" at full price.

but
at some point, you just have to point
the finger and say "look; the shaved head was fine,
the eyeliner we could deal with, but enough with the
fucking cape already."
probably sounded something like Bildad the Shuhite's lectures
on sin and retribution, how Job had definitely Done
Something to Deserve It.

The lessons I take from both (besides
Don't Get the Devil's Attention)
run something like: "go ahead and whine.
but do it in style."

"beautiful, dirty, heartbroken, tragic."

Or could look at Job and reminisce on the model of endurance and
grace in the face of ridiculous suffering; I think I could have

taken the loss of my kids and my flocks but once the
blisters broke out I would have had a hard time with it;
my most depressing days are the ones on which I feel ugly.
in his shoes,

I probably would have listened to my wife
when she said “curse God and die,” because if my body’s
already gone I’ve lost my better half and my guess is
that she was under thirty
and a poet.