Poetry Resurrection

I miss poetry.

Last week, I stopped in the downtown Tattered Cover Bookstore to look at some poetry. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Inspired by AMC’s Mad Men to take a closer look. But standing there, reading the words, the poems jagged edges pleasing to my eye, I realized how much I miss poetry.

For the last two years, there’s been no time for poetry. Barely any time for fiction. And even before that, I’d neglected it. There was a time when I read a lot of poetry, devoured it, wrote it, read it at poetry readings, published it. I turned them into songs. I even used to send out a poem each week to a long list of email contacts. I haven’t written a new poem in probably ten years. Even in the MFA program, I stuck with the fiction writers. You kinda got the feeling you’d better not go trying to play in the poets’ sandbox.

So now, writing again after two years off in the EMBA program, I feel it might be time to reconnect with poetry. I really want to shake up my use of language, to be inspired to take chances, to not go for the obvious word choice, to seek out unique metaphor, to see things again from a poets perspective. So I pulled down from my shelves Carolyn Forché

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.
“Taking Off My Clothes”

Sylvia Plath

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Not the poets I know well. I went to the library, checked out Theodore Roethke

Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out all I could of all desire;
I weep for what I’m like when I’m alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.
“The Sententious Man”

Denise Levertov

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom
of the well where the moon lives
“Everything that Acts Is Actual”

Li-Young Lee

And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
“This Room and Everything in It”

We all should more poetry in our lives. At least I know I should.

Going Public

I am not a good friend. I am not good at staying in touch. In some ways the people of my past stay fixed in that past. They exist for me as only memories of that era. I rarely bring those people forward with me. This is one of the reasons the whole idea of Facebook, of going public, makes me a little nervous.

In some ways I think I'm afraid of worlds colliding. The man I am today doesn't necessarily jive with who I have been in the past. Maybe I'm embarrassed now of who I once was, or maybe I'm embarrassed of who I am now from the perspective of who I once was.

I am 'the man' now. I work a 9-to-5, I'm married, and I have kids. Heck, I even live in the suburbs. I'm not the rebel I once was, sure, but I'm not nearly as miserable as I used to be. In fact, I am quite happy.

There are risks in reconnecting, but it is not like I've been in hiding. I've been writing a blog for something like four years. A Google search will find me pretty quickly. Actually reaching out to people, as Facebook creatively requires, risks bringing up all of those things from the past, all of those traumas and dramas. There is a lot in my past that I'd rather not revisit, no matter how I feel about the people involved.

Who I am today, though, is a result of all that happened before. I may now be an MBA candidate, but I also have an MFA in Creative Writing. I may have a good job in corporate finance, but I also finished writing a novel (still unpublished and not even yet submitted) last summer. I may spend what little free time I have playing with my children, but I also spent years drinking too much and playing in bands. I may be happily married now, but I spent years either pining or having my heart broken by women.

I am venturing forward into a strange virtual world of social networking and at the same time I am venturing into my own past, opening up boxes that had been closed and tucked away. Maybe now, today, I can be a good friend--at least, virtually.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Damon-Garr/1590769401

MFA-MBA: An Ethical Dilemma

When a literary-type enrolls in an executive MBA program, an evaluative eye naturally remains open. I may be doing my best to learn, but a part of my brain remains open, judging, assessing, characterizing what is happening around me. And though the seriousness of it, the workload and the nature of what we're doing, consumes my energy, I still want to write about it.

Here, I am faced with a dilemma that is at least ethical, but goes beyond that. Writing publicly about my experience in the EMBA program is tricky. I think the blog is the perfect forum because it allows me to debate things openly. Not only do I want to write about my experience, but I also want to get into what is being covered in the courses. As well as what is going on in the real world.

My instinct for self-preservation tells me this is risky. Writing critically about the program, the faculty, or other students might get in trouble. It's not as if my name isn't all over this blog. If I fail to mention the name of the college, or the name of any other student or professor that at least might help me avoid any pesky Google searches.

So, I'll tread lightly, I suppose.

A shift in objective

It is funny how sometimes I feel I have nothing to say and then other times I feel like I could sit down and bang out 5000-word essays non-stop. I've been coming up dry when it comes to blogging. I still like the idea, but there have been so many occasions when I don't feel like anything I say is worth putting out there into the ether to be read by my extremely limited internet audience. And the less I post, the more that audience shrinks.

Yet, I want to be writing. I am willing to take on the most uninteresting of journalistic assignments in order to be writing and to have my name out there in the world--and in print. The trouble is that I remain conscious of a future audience. I worry that the words I write will somehow negatively influence some one's decision about me. It could be a future or current employer. I'd love to write about the Russian-Georgian conflict of last week, but it is likely to be a sensitive issue for people in my organization and I'd be better served by staying silent on the issue. And there's always the idea that sometime in the future my children might get a hold of my writing. If course I'd really be in trouble if they ever began reading through my journals.

For some time I've had the notion of changing the purpose of the blog. There are plenty of people writing about books and writing, and while I'm not likely to stop doing that, there's no reason to compete with people who could do a better job. It is better to capitalize on my unique position, using my life, my personality and personal predicaments instead. And at the same time it would better show case my writing abilities, which really should be the purpose behind the blog.

The work-life-writing balance, an issue that has plagued me for some time, and inspired many too many journal entries, is about to get worse as it, again, becomes the work-life-writing-school balance. I imagine that there are few MFAs out there pursuing MBAs. By shifting the blog's objective somewhat I might actually end up writing more and writing better and more interesting posts.

Book Review: The Lives of Rocks

The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass

For such a well-reviewed book, this short story collection was extremely disappointing. The stories, though they contain lyricism and apt descriptions, were naive, as if written by a first-year MFA. Nearly each of the ten stories contained some element that was far-fetched, hard to believe, or simply unnecessary or out of place. It's as if they were written by someone just new to the craft and exploring what he can make happen in a story. Either that, or they read as autobiographical, but no less far-fetched. The kind of stories that would be defended by "Well, that's how it happened."

Rick Bass has a name that carries with it some credibility and so coming to this collection with a high expectation and anticipation, I was extremely let down. Let me not discount Bass's ability to put together strong sentences, vivid descriptions, all filled with content that demonstrates his wide ranging knowledge. I only wish he'd been coached some on shaping the stories into what they could have been.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Wouldn't it be nice if I were on vacation this week? Or if I was so consumed with working on my project, or even by the Libby trial or the latest dirt on Obama or even all the deconstruction of this week's episode of Lost, that I had a decent, fun reason for why I haven't had a thing to share this week? But no. It's that darned other life, working too much and coming home too tired to think about much.

There's another debate about MFA programs going around that I'd love to weigh in on, because I myself go from ambivalent to adamant.

I'd also like to rant a little about that Libby trial, but you probably know what I'd say.

The good news is that I am currently reading Toni Morrison's Beloved and I am quite surprised by it.

So, just a little catch-up blogging at the end of the week.

Since when is writing about writing boring?

Gwenda at Shaken & Stirred has recently started on her MFA and she has an excellent post on revision. And she has me until she says her advisor wrote her 17 pages in response to submitted revisions. Bullshit. Are you listening Steven Schwartz? 17 pages!

It almost makes me miss the program, or at least miss having some input on my work.