Apr 23
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing building a poem, cento, danielle pafunda, national poetry month, poetry as architecture, poets and writers, writing poetry
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been following The Academy of American Poets 30 Poets 30 Days Twitter project. They’ve had some great poets guest tweeting for them. One of them, Danielle Pafunda, is hosting a cento (poems composed from the lines of other poets) contest. Throughout her day as guest Twitter-er, she tweeted 75 lines from different poems, then asked followers to compose a cento from those lines in about a day and a half.
I was loving the lines she’d chosen, so I decided to try my own. I’ve never really done this before, but it was an interesting experiment in composition, in order, in arrangement. The spirit of the cento is something new from something old, and so I was free from the stress of the words themselves–I didn’t find myself trapped in the cycle of type, delete, type, delete. Instead I was free to focus my energy on how the poem came together as a whole.
I’m sharing an excerpt from my poem below (you can see it in full here), and I encourage you to check out all the entries over at the official competition blog. There are some pretty amazing poems, and it’s interesting to see all the different ways people worked with the same initial stock of lines and even words. Thanks to Danielle Pafunda for an awesome contest idea, and for picking such great poems to work with.
For six months I arranged museum dioramas;
now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday.
Sewing up the kinks in this film, I’m
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair,
sleepily indifferent, because the continent
was clothed in trees, just jars of buttons spilled.
Once you’re done checking out all those awesome poems, get to work on your entry for the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge. The deadline’s coming up on April 27, but you still have plenty of time. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors! And don’t forget about the cool prizes!
Jan 22
MeredithUncategorized ink, long-winded ramblings, paper, poets and writers, richard baker, somebody take that keyboard away from that woman, that new book smell
This morning, I groggily picked up the January/February issue of Poets & Writers (yes, bathroom reading. it’s good for the soul.), and flipped open to a random page. And on that random page was a little paragraph about the work of an artist named Richard Baker. The paragraph began:
“As more readers choose a nifty gadget like the Amazon Kindle over a hefty new hardcover, or a flashy iPone application such as Stanza over the soft dog-ears of a well-worn paperback, those who still appreciate objects made solely of paper, ink, and glue will likely respond to the work of forty-nine-year-old painter Richard Baker.”
Baker did a series of beautiful paintings of book covers. Two selected images in Poets & Writers were of Nabokov’s Lolita and Sontag’s Against Interpretation.
But what really got me was not the images, not the intro, but this quote from Baker himself:
“Books have always been important to me. As physical objects they are powerful fetishes, icons, containers of every conceivable thought and/or emotion. They come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses–they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our own skin.”
He’s said it so well that I don’t know that I can add to it. But I can say this: it is true. So true. And reading that felt, in a way, validating for my sometimes obsessive love of books and ink and paper. It made me realize why I chose a graduate program with a book arts component rather than just a writing program.
Because I love books. From start to finish. From the writing of the words to the building of the spine and covers.
Ever since I first realized I was a writer (waking up in the middle of the night with words for a poem pounding around in my brain), I’ve struggled with why I don’t obsessively sit down and write. With how I can fall into a black hole while crocheting something or making a print, but I’m too intimidated to even sit down and pick up a pen or pull out my lap top and put words on the page. The way I can’t achieve that sort of focus when it comes to my writing.
And lately, that’s scared me a little. Made me wonder why on earth I was getting a degree in writing. Wonder what kind of charade I thought I was putting on.
But something about Baker’s words reinforced something I think I already knew, something that the kind folks at UB have been trying to hammer home for nearly two years now: There is no right way to create something. There is just the act of creation, in whatever form that takes. And there is a joy in that. Though I may not sit down daily (or even weekly) to write, when I do it makes me so happy. And that’s what’s important. Not quantity. Not publishing a book. Because once it’s written, it’s written. And that moment is over.
In the writing world people often talk about how important it is to distance oneself from one’s early draft because one is all too prone to love something horrible at that beginning stage. And it’s largely true. But I think that love should be relished. Because it is fleeting. Because there is all the time in the world for polishing and editing and criticizing.
And the books and writing are precious. Perhaps not everyone will agree that it’s good enough. Perhaps some will be put off by the cover, or the title. But these books do become our lives.
I remember the first book I ever loved. I read it over and over again. The title and author have slipped from my memory, but I can remember the cover, the story of a young girl and her gypsy friend, the evil eye. Most importantly, I can remember how it felt to love story, to cherish a book, to read the words I knew so well over and over and over again.
I can remember the books I’ve tried to read but never finished. Books I felt I had to read to be literate, to earn my English major street cred: A Confederacy of Dunces and On the Road. The one I actually did make it through: Junkie. I was so pleased with myself when I turned that last page.
My most recent book obsession: The Twilight series. It took my back to my teenage love of all things vampire. And it convinced me to finally take on Dracula. Which I’m still working on.
The last book I read that made me cry. I put off reading it for years, convinced it was just a stupid trade paperback not worth the time of day. But when Ave’s mom handed me her copy of Marley and Me, I thought, “What the heck. I need something to read.” And read I did. And laugh out loud. And weep. Though that crazy Labrador Retriever may not be the next Gatsby, the story feels genuine, something I’m coming to appreciate more and more. I believe every word that John Grogan writes.
The book that made me want to be a writer: A Moveable Feast.
And I’ve read and loved these books, regardless of genre or technical merit. And I do mean the books. I’ve loved the stories, but the books themselves hold a unique attachment for me. Anyone who knows me has seen my overflowing bookshelves (and probably knows there are more books in Missouri that just haven’t been shipped out here yet). I form an attachment to the books I read. They have been my companions, and I am reluctant to let them go. If one is lost I rarely replace it because it just wouldn’t be the same book.
Over the years that love has deepened, particularly as I add the books my friends have written to the bookshelf. And as I’ve learned to make the books themselves. I understand the thought and time and dedication that go into each one. That $8 paperback on the shelf may not seem like much with it’s flimsy cover and tissue like pages, but it is. And the price of a $25 hardcover may feel like way too much to pay, but really, when you think about it, it’s not.
So, at the end of this very long-winded post (which I should probably edit down but just can’t bring myself to cut), I won’t be buying a Kindle. As I’ve said before I’m a creature of paper and ink, and so I’ll continue to revel in the smell and touch and sight and sound of books, of glue and bookboard and paper and ink. Because it’s a little touch of reality.
And because all those books make for an extra layer of insulation in the house, or so says a certain writer that I know.
Read the little article in it’s entirety and see some of Baker’s work here.
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