Friday, December 28, 2007

Terribly allone. Heartrendingly 
hooked. Out there, my only harm.
Of course I near the barb.
Roams below shilippering my fars
with thawing ease: of course.
I'm The World which
The Mountain descends from
and I laugh because it tickles.

(from Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danelewski)

Tonight's exercise

Leap across the room reciting one of the posts, preferably one by someone who intimidates you.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

When you feel like writing a blues song

Hood River baby, zigzag home in your small black car.
Walk lightly baby, you stepped out of your blues song.
Up on Mount Tabor, you know one lamp is switched on.
And that's not rain on your shoulders, it's just the darkness
wishing for hands.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Arctic Homecoming (Winter and uncertainty go together)

Now there is snow. It is winter, I admit this much.
It is hard to think of anything but the cold,
I walk around shaking my head at the cold.
The icicle hangs like a dagger,
distilling light into the bedroom window,
into the bed, into the eye of the just-awoken.
The first moment in the icy white light
I am bleary-headed, blurry-eyed
trying to catalog these old surroundings
in the heat of the blankets. In heat which I call
the fireplace, these wool socks, fresh coffee,
and which I must divide from the frost,
the breath-seeing air, the black ice we are warned against.
I try to expand; this hot and cold won’t do.
The sun’s light turns a kinder spring-yellow as it spreads across snow
in late afternoon–– A diffusion of useless dichotomy,
(a device for limiting the limitless).
I shake my head at the great unknown.
It is hard to think of anything but the stiff steel cold,
my head ballooned by false heat and frozen wind,
a strange place of intensity without clarity,
marked by these vibrations of uncertainty.
Scratchy bare-limbed trees seem right.
Winter is hardest, shuffling around in these slippers without any answers.

Florida (state with the prettiest name)

Overzealous german instructor on cassette oversees this scene: mother baking florentine schnitzen cookies, Milky the dog snoozing next to my feet (sleeping like its her job), and me- well me here, repeating after the german instructor (ich fuehle mich gut? oder..) catching caramel whiffs as they travel from the germanified kitchen, feeling the beating Milky warmth, her back rising with her breath, the clocks in the house in hemiola-time... everything is crazy-circular, casuality and causation have lost their place (help me rolling tape german language instructor). I know this place is real but sometimes I get the faint impression that I had died and this is my mind recalling memories and feelings and piecing together in this strange theatre of my mind, "home." Sometimes newness is so much more familiar than old. maybe if I start writing more coherently the world will accordingly cohere itself. Do you find this to be true? a conscious choice, to be less subconscious and more conscientious.

Getting yr feet wet, plunging in: an essay

So, what I’ve been wanting to talk about is how I’ve become improbably captivated by essay writing during the process of applying to grad school (which is over and done! yay!)

To begin at the beginning, I should admit that a tome called “The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present,” has followed Jon around since college, and even made its way out to Oregon; despite the offputtingness of its large size and dull, textbook-like cover, it still seemed to have made itself a place in my boyfriend’s heart. Still, I never felt tempted to crack this 770-page book until incident this fall that I’m going to call “the bath of desperation.”

You can probably infer from the name that I was desperate to figure out how to write a personal essay (which, like the devil, goes by many names, including “statement of purpose” “statement of plans” and “candidate statement”). A calming bath, it occurred to me, would be just the thing to soothe my little brain. I’m not sure where this idea came from; I hadn’t done it before and I had none of the requisite “products.” In lieu of bubbles, I went to the bookshelf to find something to look at besides the ceiling. That’s how I ended up wrinkling the pages of Jon’s anthology with my pruny, wet fingers.

I was inspired just reading the introduction:

“The hallmark of a personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue–a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.”

In the Introduction to this book, Phillip Lopate uses some of the techiniques of the personal essay to explain just what it is that makes a personal essay compelling and functional. The intimacy, the frank, conversational tone, the admitted personal style, the very human, rambling shape of the personal essay all set up a relationship between reader and writer regarding the writer’s honesty. The style of the personal essay admits the style of its narrator, who, in turn, is promising the reader that he will use the essay to go about “delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible.”

“The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive the essayist’s self-absorbtion in return for the warmth of his or her candor.” In my own crude formulation, the personal essay equals the high-art version of a blog.

Which is why I thought it fitting to share this thought in this forum. Also, I thought it might be a good idea to plunge right in, and the noun “essay” has its roots in a verb meaning “to issue forth.” An essay once described the act of riding your horse forth from your stronghold, in search or pursuit of–

Friday, December 14, 2007

A Beginning

Here's a start.

To begin, a blog seems to be the easiest way to give people a chance to post their own work. The first writers-in-residence will be able to post their poems, prompts etc... and everyone else should be able to respond in the "comments" section. For now things are pretty simple, but we hope that the site will evolve as we learn.