HOW I WRITE A POEM
I always start a poem by trying not to think—which is one reason why I prefer to write first thing in the morning, before I have eaten, when I am still partly in the associative mode of dreams, and the cares of the day have not yet taken hold of my mind. Often I am deeply groggy when (coffee in hand) I sit down at my desk, and it sometimes astonishes me that I can write at all, given how utterly incapable I would be of talking to another person.
My goal is to sink into that part of my mind where inspiration seems to arise of its own, without the influence of my will. I don’t want to bully inspiration with expectations or ideas; I want only to be a conduit for whatever it has to offer. But, of course, I can never really blot out thought, so I try to begin writing as soon as my computer cursor starts to flash, before any of my expectations or anxieties can develop full force.
As I type, I do two things simultaneously—although in some ways they are the same thing: I try to write whatever comes into my head without thinking about it, and I try to put only those things that surprise me onto the page. The reason I see these two activities as the same thing is that what surprises me is what I have not anticipated or intended—that is, what I have not thought about in advance. And, as this thing is not already established in my mind, it is less likely to be a cliché, and more likely to be a revelation, both to me and to my reader.
Poetry (like all writing) is about revelation, about showing readers the world in a way they have never seen it, or about giving them a perceptual, emotional, intellectual or linguistic experience they have never had before, and then doing that over and over again, with every new word, new line, new sentence, and in the work as a whole.
Something else I am alert to as I write is the sound of the words: to the rhythms of rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance and stress, and to the textures of syllables. The way the words sound is part of the revelation they deliver—at least if it is not predictable, if it comes as a surprise (though, perhaps, only a very small surprise). But my attention to sound is entirely unconscious. I never think about sonic patterns and textures as I write. I only discover that I have created them after I look at what I have written, and often I am amazed by how complex they turn out to be.
I just keep on writing like this—as unconsciously as I can—until I either get tired or I feel that I have reached a conclusion or climax, or have created some sort of unity. Then I look back over what I have written, and realize, of course, that almost all of it is garbage. I make the finished poem by finding those bits amid the garbage that seem redeemable, that seem fresh and true, and that seem to have some sort of natural connection to other passages. I put the best bits together in whatever order makes sense, and then spend a long period—days, at the very least, but usually weeks and sometimes months—trying to amplify and clarify meanings, emotions and sonic effects until, all at once, the assembled bits turn out to be an actual, finished poem.
It might seem that the poems coming out of this process would tend more toward the surreal or Language Poetry end of the spectrum, and it is true that I like poems that remain mysterious and that are filled with unexpected, and sometimes not entirely comprehensible juxtapositions—just as I love music that sometimes approaches and even crosses over into noise. But that said, my poems often end up making fairly straightforward statements, and can be entirely realistic evocations of moments in my life or of nature. I try not to be doctrinaire about poetry. I don’t see the point of turning my back on any form of beauty or any way of making meaning. I think it is wonderful that we can do so many different things with words.
I read my poems aloud over and over and over as I polish them. I try to feel them on my tongue and in my ears. I try always for the most pleasing sounds and rhythms, ones that—ideally—amplify the feeling and/or significance of what I have written. Sound patterns matter immensely, but still, I avoid all regular rhymes and meters. I feel that subjecting my imagination to any pre-existing pattern diminishes the precision, subtlety, truth and imaginative elasticity of what I write. This is purely a personal preference, however, one that—when I am reading Keats and Yeats, or Frost and Auden—I am sometimes tempted to abandon.
I work very hard never to fake meaning, that is, never to pretend that something is meaningful when it isn’t, and never to say anything to my readers that I don’t think is true, or that doesn’t seem to express, in fact, something I feel passionately. Oddly, this is not difficult to accomplish, because I find that my unconscious (which is only interested in the things that matter most, in those things I don’t understand but need to) has very little time for bullshit. Often, all I am really doing as I write and edit is discovering what my unconscious is trying to tell me.
It is probably true that ninety-nine percent of the time I spend on a poem I am only tinkering: trading this word for that, monkeying with line brakes, and trying always to make the poem more concise, more true, more clear and more surprising. Surprise is of the essence, of course, but not merely for its own sake. My goal is always to surprise readers with some kind of truth—though it could be a very small truth, say, about the smell of dead leaves after a rain.
The clarity I am talking about is more clarity of image. I avoid vagueness as much as I can. Had I written above “a small truth, say, about the perception of nature,” that would have been vague. When I say “the smell of dead leaves after a rain,” I am giving my reader a perception of nature, one that I hope is clear, evocative and—in the context of the poem, at least—significant.
We don’t live in the general. We live only in the specific: in a specific instant, a specific place, with a specific history, and amid very specific sights, sounds, feelings, etc. Writing that imitates such specificity feels more like life and so is more vivid, and brings readers closer to the world.
Although I talk about clarity and truth, I never intend the meanings of my poems to be obvious or simple. On the contrary, I think that poems must always be mysterious to a considerable degree, that what meaning they have (and the term “meaning” itself if fundamentally mysterious), should only filter out through repeated readings and through reconsideration of the poem over time, and, even then, should never be wholly accessible.
When a poem is mysterious, readers have to open themselves up to it, which is to say they have to open themselves up to surprises, to receiving things they don’t already have. In a way, they have to get into the associative state I am in when I write, which means they are opening themselves up to their own minds, to language, and to the world. Also, when readers are required to actively engage with a poem (rather than passively receive it), the experience is more intense, and they are more likely to retain what the poem has to offer… or, at least, I hope they do.
So that’s it: I write and write, then I tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker—hoping that I am making the poem a better poem, and making myself—over time, at least—a better poet.
One final thought: When I was an undergraduate, I took a class with Kenneth Koch, who once suggested that the best way to test the quality of a new poem was to imagine reading it to your girlfriend. At the time, consummately insecure about both the quality of my writing and the impression I was making on women, I found this suggestion utterly terrifying. But it stuck with me, and, over the years, it has come to seem increasingly wise, if not entirely practical. One thing I like about Koch’s recommendation is that it encourages us to think of poetry as an exchange between one human being and another, or as a dialogue between two hearts and two minds. But, more importantly, it encourages us to think of a poem as a gift to our readers. I don’t believe we should ever write because we want something from our readers—their admiration, their pity, or even their money. We should write only to give our readers something they want or need—a fresh way of seeing the world, an unexpected twist of emotion, a new idea, or just a good time. And I believe that this gift is all the more valuable because it is one we give to strangers, as well as to those whom we love.
Stephen O'Connor
DAILY SENTENCE ANTHOLOGY(2/21/12) "The sky was whale blue and shark blue and the pink of cooked crabs." --From "The Scientist" (2/20/12) "Charles could see absolutely nothing, but seemed to perceive a sort of falling away, as if space itself was rapidly expanding in front of him—which sensation, he suddenly realized, must have been the origin of the expression, 'yawning depths.'” --From “The Department of Refutation” (2/19/12) “We stumbled through the impossible sounds in our little books, and we were given rooms, we were welcomed into echoing spaces and served plates of exotic meat.” --From “Promises” (2/18/12) "I am trying to accommodate the insignificance of desire, pay my debts, lie here." --From "Brass Ring" (2/17/12) "And so we walked along a trail between what we couldn’t say and what we couldn’t think.” --From “Ghosts” (2/16/12) "There was no moon that night, but the cold had so thoroughly wrung moisture from the air that each star shone like a green beacon at the end of a tunnel, and cast enough light that every snowflake had its glittery tilt, and every shadow had a razor edge." --From "Elodie" (2/15/12) "It was getting dark. Way out on the water, practically at the horizon, the flower-like pink machines that Charles had heard some people refer to as God were turning ocher in the dusk light." --From "Department of Refutation" (2/14/12) “That way she had of elbowing him in the ribs, rolling her eyes, slapping herself on the top of her head and saying, “Only joking!”—why did his cobblestone feet always do a shuffling dance when she did that?” --From “Ziggurat” (2/13/12) "You plug in a “special someone,” whom perhaps you replace with another “special someone,” whom perhaps you also replace, until finally you end up with a “wife,” who is really only another way of saying “life,” whom you plug into a landscape with palm trees, white sand and transparent water that deepens to turquoise as it approaches the sharp horizon, whom you plug into a candlelight dinner, whom you plug into an earnest conversation under a kitchen ring-light." --From “Elodie” (2/12/12) "The answer is: those puffs of freezer steam unrolling toward the floor, that crack in my neck as I pick up the cat, that copper-bright dawn light glorifying pigeons on a water tower, that flat wham of car crash, that first icicle drop pocking the window snow, then another, then one more." --From “The Story and its Writer” (2/11/12) "The room was so hot his nostrils dried with every breath, and so silent that the high-pitched whine in his ears—what he thought of as the dial-tone of his consciousness—was deafening." --From "Stealing Peaches from Sam Snow" (2/10/12) "After Ma met Deak, she dyed her hair and started wearing teenager clothes. Instead of looking all sleek and Barbie-like, which is probably how she saw herself, Ma looked like a rag-doll version of Barbie, one that had gotten left out in the rain, and so was all lumpy and funny colored." --From “Decoherence” (2/9/12) "Can our rivers, our wind-riffled lakes, our acorn scented forests, truly be paint-thin and impenetrable?" --From "Diptych" (2/8/12) "The answer is: life constantly exploding our thought boxes, this rocketing elaboration of things that makes idiots of us all—cavemen poking laptops, moths in porch light flummoxed by false parallax." --From "The Story and its Writer" (2/7/12) “On good days we’d wind up approximations of ourselves, on bad days Quasimodos, platypuses, banana slugs.” --From “Quasimode” (2/6/12) "The whole world could see that inside Celia’s mind there was a shrine, and on the throne in that shrine sat a medium-sized man with sandy brown hair, fog-gray eyes and an unimpressive chin: This was Tim." --From "Disappearance and" (2/5/12) "But do any of us actually want to live in a world where all ambiguities are so perfectly calibrated that we can intuit our undoing in our first act, in which each moment belongs only to one story and is linked so inexorably to the next that we can watch the mystery of our being apotheosize into pure meaning, after which nothing happens or matters?" --From “The Story and its Writer” (2/4/12) "It is time to undo our dignity and suck from the same fluted flower: that lily—inside-the-mouth-red, that candlelight, that tuft of tangled filament." --From “Country” (2/3/12) "And the bear was looking at her with an expression of profound irritation, as if she had just done something contemptible, something for which she would never be forgiven." --From “Love” (2/2/12) "The cries are a language -- Nell is certain of that -- but a language so foreign, human ears don’t know how to sort its meaningful parts from its noise." --From "Ghost” (2/1/12) "Here again at my steel sink, looking across the valley at the leafless forest on the hillside, rust red, cigarette orange and wedding band gold again in morning light, a cup in hand, my ordinary daytime self slow to arrive, dreaming still, gummed by reluctance to shoulder again the apparatus of duties, great and small, in this life diminished by yet another day: Coffee helps, and the impossible blue of the frigid sky, and the golding of the hillside as the sun lifts, all these pleasures, great and small, this beauty, my stubborn yearning." (1/31/12) "Never once on any of her expeditions did she encounter another person—neither child nor adult—and so it had been natural for her to feel that every tree, rock, or stream she passed, every vista she looked out over not only existed—in some secret but essential way—for her enjoyment, but, actually, shared in her enjoyment." --From "Love" (1/30/12) "The newspapers said the seas would be glassy, and tonight would be our first without the moon." --From “All in Good Time” (1/29/12) "I feel as if I have been lifted out of time and installed at that very point on which the world pivots, and that my capacity to influence fate—for good or ill—has been so transcendently magnified as to have become a thing of beauty. I can hardly breathe." --From "Another Nice Mess" (1/28/12) "We’ve got a scheduling problem here in the eternal city—insufficient distinction between now and never, which zeros our future and rezones our past as fantasy." --From “Now What” (1/27/12) "'You see,’ Stan Laurel smiles with satisfaction. ‘Some of us are what we are, and some of us aren’t.’” --From “Another Nice Mess” (1/26/12) "The problem is: Here comes the truth again, making a mess out of everything." --From "Truth, Grim" (1/25/12) "This night when our every misunderstanding is semi-intentional, and our every misstep outlined on the dance chart, and the moonlight here is so brown, on these tilted sidewalks beneath these sodium lamps, and that blond girl is standing next to me on the subway, her breasts in a cradle of lace—isn’t this all just distraction, this ritual of bodies and eyes, this way my breath seems to die in my throat, this faint agony of never quite making it?" --From "Buenos Aires" (1/24/12) "As I cross this room, am I, in fact, strapped into an apparatus of fate that will keep a teenaged girl up long into the quiet of an August night?" --From “The Story and its Writer” (1/23/12) "What does it mean if, nightly, we follow the same glimpsed bright gleams between the same black trunks down to that edge where air and water open out?" --From "Diptych" (1/22/12) "They were astronauts together, in a glass globe floating toward the Moon, and the Moon was exactly the same as their globe but opaque and alight, and when they collided with the Moon, either the Moon or their globe would crack—but maybe not; maybe she and Tim would drift right past the Moon, and then just drift and drift and drift." --From "Disappearance and" (1/21/12) "Our hands clasp and our shoulders square, and as we dance, looking straight into each other’s gaze, not a single eye on the subway lifts -- and yet there are nights when my hat is brimful of silver in the rancid light." --From "Buenos Aires" (1/20/12) "The orange sunrise off the window across the street casts a wobbly rhomboid on the floorboards, and the city emits its motor noise, shouts, sirens and unidentifiable hisses for miles in every direction—isn’t it narcissism to imagine this world incorporate enterprise?" --From “Invisible Hand” (1/19/12) "I have made a study of the brave. They eat oblivion for breakfast, lies for lunch and at night they have healthy portions of self-deception and rage, whereas I was kidnapped in my youth by a cult of doubters, which perhaps I founded myself, and I keep my rage well-oiled and disassembled in a velvet box beneath my bed; I have never been well defended." --From "Truth, Grim" (1/18/12) "If only absence would go the way of all finalities, and we could still be where we really are, toasting, knee to knee, across varieties of whiteness and light." --From "Diptych" (1/17/12) "So here I am driving sixty-five on the interstate, smiley as the next guy, every hair at rest, sunlight gleaming off my cheeks and teeth, and then the sky rumples and turns gray, and that question comes tumbling in." --From “Truth, Grim” (1/16/12) "The crowd disperses and the sky between the rooftops goes sodium-purple, cadmium-blue, then gray, then powder pink, and we make our way across the deserted avenues and through the condom-strewn wilderness to a mud and blood colored current, the Rio del Plata." --From “Buenos Aires” (1/15/12) "All self-replicating beings of cellulose or flesh must one day surrender that essence distinguishing them from stone, air and empty space." --From “Disappearance and” (1/14/12) "That little snippet of bird-peep that entered the new girl’s voice whenever she got excited, or when she thought something she had done was stupid—he wanted to put that in a box, tie it up with a leather thong and keep it always around his neck." --From "Ziggurat" (1/13/12) "And through it all, Sally Hemings, her white shift little more than a mist about her resplendent body, drifts up ladders, down corridors, across humming fields as if she herself were only a shred of steam, while Thomas Jefferson must wrench his feet off the ground with every step, and feel his throat go raw from lack of breath, and his heart kick in his chest." --From "I Am Not Lying" (1/12/12) "The professor of atheism is being confronted with a moral challenge: Through the soot-shaded window across the airshaft he sees a woman holding a frying pan over her head and a man holding a butcher knife." --From “Here Comes Another Lesson” (1/11/12) "As she flees Monica and a life so love-sore and turned against itself that she fears it will only bring her pain, shame and bleak solitude, what she wants most is to feel the beauty all around her; what she wants is for that beauty to fill her completely." --From "Ghost" (1/10/12) "What if we are each again on our slanting rock, looking across that same expanse of black—ever shifting, slippery with light—at that same cratered sphere, impossibly clear and white?" --From “Diptych” (1/9/12) "In the end, however, it is not the blackening of her lips, or the startling inertness of her hair that causes him to fling himself out the window, but the almost incomprehensibly awful thought that he might, in fact, have become the Angel of Death." --From "Here Comes Another Lesson" (1/8/12) "Everyone loves it when the box opens and the glittery assistant is gone." --From “Supreme Being” (1/7/12) "What does it mean then, if, in our separate cities, we walk the same forest, night now, dark with a dark that is like a blotting out, yet still loud with leaf rustle, owl cry, the whispery clicks of lake water lapping rocks?" --From "Diptych" (1/6/12) "You lose everything? Big deal! It was all messed up anyway, and you can always try again—which is the wafer of eternity that keeps us wanting, and that star there, that pink winker in the quitting-time sky." --From “Here We Go Again” (1/5/12) "They are teenagers again, sitting together on a slanting rock beside the sliding river, and they have every right to the world they have made in their yearning and delight." --From "Same River" (1/4/12) "You plug in a “special someone,” whom perhaps you replace with another “special someone,” whom perhaps you also replace, until finally you end up with a “wife,” who is really only another way of saying “life,” whom you plug into a landscape with palm trees, white sand and transparent water that deepens to turquoise as it approaches the sharp horizon, whom you plug into a candlelight dinner, whom you plug into an earnest conversation under a kitchen ring-light." --From “Elodie” (1/3/12) If truth is only a variety of falsehood, that left Tim to choose between faith and fear. --From “Disappearance and” (1/1/12) "I just keep swimming; my arms chop and my flippers oscillate, and a swaying path paved by flecks of yellow fire flickers between where I am and where I want to be." --From “I Would Never Do These Things” (12/31/11) "Are you the woman whose glance I caught last night in that wanton moment after the cheers when all the glasses were refilled?" --From “True to Life” (12/30/11) "Zip bliss out of this thingness I & I rewrite." --From “Memory Loop” (12/29/11) "Sometimes a yellowish light laminated the wall at a bend in the tunnel, and the Minotaur was sure the new girl was hiding just around the corner, but, as his footfalls shook dust streams from the ceiling, the lamination would dwindle to gossamer crosshatching, to a golden web, to a few glowing strands, to winking glints, and then, finally, to only the possibility of light." --From "Ziggurat" (12/28/11) "Our investigations show that you were well aware of the glycerin softness of the water that evening, of the rose lambency on the undersides of the clouds, that huge blue they drifted through, the way the sky crumbled into gold above the black trees, and that smell (that micro-atmosphere rising six and a half inches above the sky-warping water) so deliriously reminiscent of peat moss, fish tanks, tears, earthworms and of—I will be frank—engorged sexual parts." --From “That Night” (12/27/11) "She loved to waken in a sun-filled room, so slid from under the covers and went to the window, allowing Jack a moment in which to admire her long and fluent oscillations, her sandy pink, her hazelnut brown, and her gold: here tufty and tarnish-dark, there lanky and flaxen-bright." --From “’Til There Was You” (12/26/11) "As a child Tim had learned to tell the difference between disappearance and loss: Disappearance is best defined as the occasion for reappearance; loss is the diminishment of life." --From "Disappearance and" (12/25/11) "This is again that time when everything ordinary reveals its secret joy, when they owe nothing to anyone but each other." --From "Same River" (12/24/11) "Julianne tended to think of her “true self” as somehow separate from the rest of her, as a tender and idealistic creature hiding out, not merely from life’s barbarities, but from her own thoughts and emotions." --From "Aunt Jules" (12/23/11) "It seems that we have entered that phase where things are insufficiently real: flap of black feathers, fog shadow, no crow, etc.—I want to touch you in this falling away." --From "Diptych" (12/22/11) "You can only wake so many mornings to the shock of being tin before you are rescued by amnesia." --From “Tin” (12/21/11) "It was as if happiness were something they had discovered together, something no one else in all the history of humankind had ever experienced, their secret, their gift to one another." --From "I Am Not Lying" (12/20/11) "And do you see how everything is shifting, how everything, all at once, is becoming something else?" --From “Second Time” (12/19/11) "So why, amid these vapor nodes, must we recede, not even waving?" --From "Diptych" (12/18/11) "He fled and he fled and he fled, and eventually found himself down in the Rumination District, at one of those joints whose denizens seem to have accreted onto their barstools out of a miasma born of disappointment, illness and urinal deodorizing tablets, where every light bulb is dust-encrusted and the illumination it sheds at least a hundred years old." --From “’Til There Was You” (12/17/11) "Deak was the kind of guy who had no trouble with the idea that time is just another type of space, that Lee Harvey Oswald could work for the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, and the KGB all at once, or that the bushy-eyebrowed family who owned the vacuum cleaner repair business at the end of the block were actually detectives hired by his ex-father-in-law to spy on him." --From "Decoherence" (12/16/11) "Among TV thoughts, we find blue light, lob mortar shells at our intractable otherness, Siamese always." --From "Same Heart" (12/15/11) "Discovery is the process by which the unnoticed passes through impossibility into obviousness." --From "'Till There Was You" (12/14/11) "Then silent, side by side, they drift under bridges, trees, the yellowing sky, back to their other lives." --From "Same River" (12/13/11) "Sally Hemings says, 'I want us always to be as we are here, where we are only our eyes, our hands, those parts of us made for each other by nature, where our only words are the ones we whisper in the little caves we make between pillow, cheek and lips.'” --From “I Am Not Lying.” (12/12/11) “Here in the snow, in the woods, there is black, there is white, and all the shades in between, but none of the colors have names.” --From “Invisible” (12/11/11) "The landscape might be littered with washing machines, coffee cups, shredded pinups, and drenched, broken-back couches, but the air will be filled with infinitely various bird song, and red-stemmed weeds will still be standing by the flattened corn." --From “What Next” (12/10/11) “Sometimes the choice we desperately want to make is the wrong choice, and when that happens, no matter which choice we actually do make—the right or the wrong—the choice we didn’t make will shimmer brilliantly with something like the life it never became.” --From “Ghost” (12/9/11) "We’d laugh, shrug, blot away a tear, then start all over; we never quit. I’ll say that for us: We just couldn’t stop." --From “Quasimode” (12/8/11) "Just as the beauty of the dance along the wing is not the dance, but the belief that the dancer is beloved by God, so we work the trick by being moderately polite." --From “Supreme Being” (12/7/11) "It’s not that sadness does not build its timber teepee, it’s that it burns—and in that burning itself we rocket this red earth." --From “Sun Down Dance” (12/6/11) "And we so happily on holiday from our grave obligations, so recklessly transmuting our autumn into bench-talk, green-eyed, sun-rivering each other endlessly." --From “Season After Season” (12/5/11) “Guess it’s not hypothetical anymore, these slate clouds on glass air, this sleight of hope, those big shadows landscape-sailing our breakable acres.” --From “Season After Season” (12/4/11) “His memory was able to adhere to her smoothness, to her rough parts, to her every swelling and concavity, but only in a way that was like an ache—or like a hunger trying to feed upon itself.” --From “Ziggurat” (12/3/11) "We look so strange in our new reality, side by side, wearing spacesuits." --From "Off on a Comet" (12/2/11) "Do you see the water flowing over your chest and face, rippling the trees, making a sound like applause, while all the black and yellow birds rise at once from the Queen Anne’s lace?" --From “Gliding Over Lips and Teeth” (12/1/11) "I do not consider inconstancy a weakness, more of a shy dance on a beach night, like that time you said “I love to hear you laugh” on the telephone." --From “Fire Ins.” (11/30/11) "Is this happiness or oyster-life?" --From “Biology” (11/29/11) "High against the deepening gray, a great blue heron gathers air beneath its bent, broad wings; stick legs and twig feet drifting uselessly behind." --From “Not Yet” (11/28/11) "We are singled out among the beasts by steel misunderstanding, by hokum apprehension, machete-backed." --From "Same Heart" (11/27/11) “It is only when we want incompatible things simultaneously, or when our desires smack against our fears that we become obsessed with distinguishing the true from the false, reality from fantasy, evil from good.” --From “’Til There Was You” (11/26/11) "It’s like a breeze from which the pine scent has been extracted by winter cold, or like that air you breathe in certain hospital corridors, or when you press your cheek to a bath towel left outside all night—or it’s that emptiness you sense before you know something is missing. --From “Ceremony” (11/24/11) "And now Thomas Jefferson can actually see what she is writing—but it is not writing at all; it is a savage assault of senseless scratches, blots, crossings-out, jabs, loops, squiggles, splashes, gashes, senile quaverings, lightning bolts, comets, eruptions, bullet holes and crevasses, running in all directions, superimposed, without any regard for horizontality, order, or even the paper’s edge." --From “I Am Not Lying” (11/23/11) "That night had seemed so happiness packed, it hardly made sense to disbelieve it." --From “Brass Ring” (11/22/11) "And what of this brotherless Harpo in his sad wig, convinced the world smiles as he quicksteps along Broadway, that strangers don’t shake their heads in his wake, and trade knowing glances?" --From “Harpo Life” (11/21/11) "For many years doubt was my carrot juice." --From “Ideal Life” (11/20/11) "There were hollow bangs, of course, glass in the eyeballs, fractured sternums, mangled feet, but also a shimmy in the fingertips and a rocketing in the skull that was like shooting right out of the shit and into that zone of endless motion, mountainous white and bottomless blue that some believe is life itself, and others revelation." --From “Before Dawn” (11/19/11) "In fact, we have no choice but to live this unending surprise of who we are, and to suffer the joys of our relentless need to be." --From “Bon Fire” (11/18/11) "Just as the beauty of the dance along the wing is not the dance, but the belief that the dancer is beloved by God, so we work the trick by being moderately polite." --From “Supreme Being” (11/17/11) "They are the usual denizens of such places: the loud and lobster-faced; the grinless twentysomethings, halfway between keg party blackouts and a twelve-step program; the grizzle-headed losers, happy that near-senility has liberated them from all expectations; the terminally isolate, whose gazes anchor in the middle distance and never budge." --From “I Would Never Do these Things” (11/16/11) "Vole-like me, I just tunnel under the eye beams, and hope none of this gets real." --From “Things Just Come” (11/15/11) "We believed that incompletion equaled freedom, that everything was safely nestled in nothing much—whereas, in fact, even our idlest imaginings were fixing our fates, and our every glance, caught breath, or half-funny joke was anchored to the comet that yanked us light years beyond our known world." --From “Off on a Comet” (11/14/11) "It is because regret is the language of hope that we redescend every morning this yellow earth, this anthill." --From “Same Heart” (11/13/11) "Sometimes a yellowish light laminated the wall at a bend in the tunnel, and the Minotaur was sure the new girl was hiding just around the corner. But, as his footfalls shook dust streams from the ceiling, the lamination would dwindle to gossamer crosshatching, to a golden web, to a few glowing strands, to winking glints, and then, finally, to only the possibility of light." --From "Ziggurat" (11/12/11) "And, anyway, it is necessary that nothing seem quite right, that you should never know if the red-fingered girl loves you, that you should always be uncertain about the priest’s glance across the steaming polenta." --From “Second Time” (11/11/11) "We hurry to the charred field, and let loose our silver balloons, only to come home and find that mice have colonized the library, that squirrels rule the world between the rafters, and spiders fog the corners with complicated thought." --From “What Next” (11/10/11) "One afternoon we set our memories on pillows—lopsided tree-house beside snow-romping dog beside streetlight buzzing and a smattering of Chinese." --From "Quasimode" (11/9/11) "Stan Laurel’s squeaky weeping, however, always comes through with perfect clarity, and for some reason I find it immensely comforting—perhaps because it allows me to believe that we never actually cease to be children, even on the brink of death; or maybe it is because the weeping is generally accompanied by Laurel’s admission of responsibility for some catastrophe, which makes it possible for me to believe that guilt and innocence can be synonyms." --From “Another Nice Mess.” (11/8/11) "We’re magicians with smothered doves in our hats, monkey Rembrandts with fists crammed in paint cans, beneficiaries of failure’s only grace: the ubiquitous proximity of zero." --From “Here We Go Again” (11/7/11) "Now we children on the red dirt fish-face our vacancy; our rumpled shorts, our gleaming teeth, our feet edged into air." --From "Sun Down Dance" (11/6/11) "By abstraction I mean meaning, I mean human longing, I mean loneliness accreting as quiet on quiet, as white on bluish white" --From “Above the Lake” (11/5/11) "Perhaps we have stayed true to our dim promises all along, because the words were never more than ghosts we had to bring to life by living." –From “Promises” |
An Occasional BlogApril 22, 2011 |
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