Chimera Song Mosaic
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
or to put it another way:
LED display
Of VCR, cable box
Cautious symmetry
Jane Reichhold says in “Haiku Rules that Have Come and Gone: Take Your Pick” (and AHA! POETRY is a pretty cool site): “If you've a desire to write haiku, you are manifesting a desire for a few more rules in your life. And rules aren't bad as long as they are your rules for your work.”
Okay, this is probably true and accounts for my recent attempt to organize both my thoughts and my poems—my thoughts that motivate my poems, etc.—and this is probably the reason I started blogging (and from what I’ve seen in some explanations, the reason why many people started blogging). Here’s the plan:
I get out the drawer of colored note cards that I have been saving for years (no doubt, for this purpose) and place them all about the house in places where I am spurned to write poetry. For posterity’s sake, the coding goes like this: blue—bedside table; yellow—living room; green—bathroom; pink—car. I guess I’ll make up more categories if I need to. I’m not sure why or if they are important, but I wanted to have some organizing principle. I guess if I travel I’ll write on white note cards.
The purpose of using note cards is to file them in those little boxes like the ones people keep recipes on note cards in. I know these boxes have dividers, so to avoid the anxiety created by having to come up with relevant divisions, I have decided to use the rather arbitrary categories described above. I know I will have at least 2 relevant subgroups: 1) poems or partial poems and 2) ideas and words for future poems. Also, I plan to go through the horrendous mess on my desk (currently used as a dump site for stuff I want to keep) and copy the words and ideas scribbled on little pieces of paper onto the legitimate note cards (maybe I’ll use the white ones for this) so that I might actually find my ideas later; I need a place to leave my ideas so that I can find them later.
The other thing that made me want to write on the note cards (other than a desire to salvage myself from almost irreversible dishevelment and poor organizational skills) is that, after completing 1 & ½ postcard poem cycles with Catherine Meng, I have become very comfortable with writing on small, stiff cards. Why not? I’ve never been terribly particular about what I chose to write on before; maybe now I should be.
I could see myself taking this too far, but I think it’s worth a shot. At least my poetry scribblings will be instantly recognizable now and can’t be mistaken for a grocery list or a note to self or a bill due date (although these sound like appealing misrecognitions).
Weighing In
More Jim Behrle poems worthy of heavy petting: #s 121 & 213 from June 2 and his HAIKU from today are lovely, especially the first.
Mama Meng is right about threes (May 3); here’s another:
3 ducks in literature and/or literary allusions: 1) the ducks on the pond in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye 2) Mrs. Mallard in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (it’s her name, and she also sees birds out the window) and 3) the way ducks are used as an image of surrender in the first season of HBO’s The Sopranos (Tony raises the ducks in his swimming pool and then can’t stand to see them go).
What’s the connection here? I guess these three characters are suffering, and they are unsure as to whether or not they should let go. Why is this best represented by ducks?
Anyway, Catherine, good luck on the “cat dynamics.”
Also, thanks to Stephanie for providing the recent thought-provoking coverage of Fears of your Life by Michael Bernard Loggins. Man, I wish I had Stephanie’s old job, much more the super cool one she probably has right now (I also dug her snippet (April 29) on the new book about the goddess Inanna, and I’m gonna get that one for my sister for her birthday if I can). Ummm (the pleasure sound), also, I love to read about Harbin (May 5 is gorgeous!).
Bogus Stuff
I have a fear to add to the list: ever since I saw on Six Feet Under that you could be hit by “blue ice” (the frozen jetsam from an airplane toilet), I have been worried about that when I go outside with the dogs. McAllen’s airport is right in the middle of town, so virtually everyone has planes flying over their heads several times a day. I can hear one now!
I guess this is what happens to a person when she is not working: lots of crazy hyper-organizational tendencies and irrational fears of invasion. Speaking of invasion, I just read in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that the word vagina comes from the Latin word for "sheath." So this means that the most commonly acceptable (but misleading—we’re usually talking about the vulva and not the actual vagina) term for a woman’s genitals is not actually referring to the thing itself but rather to its potential to enclose or sheathe something else. I wonder what that something else is, hmm? So now I can add random stabs at patriarchal nomenclature to my list of summer peccadilloes. But don’t you see? I had to write down that thought so that I could be free of it—and could turn the page of my dictionary.
