Sitting and lazing
Old cat lying in the sun
Why don't I get out?
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Daylight Savings Time
Spring forward, and fall back they say, and for some reason this year they have decided to set our clocks forward an hour several weeks ahead of time. I dislike losing the sleep, but more I dislike losing the daylight. With all the night I get to thinking about death and the universe.
In other news, I saw 300 today. It was very faithful to the comic book although I think the ending was extended. Right before seeing the movie I purchased The Cat Who Went Bananas for much cheaper than it was originally priced. I'm going to read it while reading also 3 or 4 other books.
In other news, I saw 300 today. It was very faithful to the comic book although I think the ending was extended. Right before seeing the movie I purchased The Cat Who Went Bananas for much cheaper than it was originally priced. I'm going to read it while reading also 3 or 4 other books.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Li-Young Lee
Long before I arrived at the UC, I was introduced to a very moving poet by the name Li-Young Lee. Something about his approach to his art, something about how he carried himself and how his written work jumped off the page both in my reading of it and in his reciting. He came to De Anza College back in 2005 for an afternoon and for that afternoon I could not think of any place I would rather be than in that conference room listening to him speak.
I won't go into his biography, you can look it up for yourself but I will give you one of my favorite poems from his work Book of My Nights, a collection of poems I bought from him when he came. He signed my book, too. What a nice, unassuming guy. I got his older work, Rose, for Christmas this year because I liked this one so much. Maybe I'll just give you two examples of his work...
Little Round
My fool asks: Do the years spell a path to later
be remembered? Who's there to read them back?
My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.
My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother's sleeping face.
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.
My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.
And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.
And my mother? She divides
the rice, today's portion from tomorrow's,
tomorrow's from ever after.
And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can't see.
And my God.
What have I done with my God?
-Li-Young Lee, 2001
I like so much the formatting of his work! It is so easily digested and yet so full of profound statements. Lee often writes about his family, about his father and mother, often in reminiscence, and of his wife and his departed brother. So much comes back to the central themes and motifs of the poems, that they could all be one poem but with different names of individual sections.
The second poem, from the other book Rose makes me feel good about my current situation and the hopes for the future.
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
-Li Young Lee, 1986
I won't go into his biography, you can look it up for yourself but I will give you one of my favorite poems from his work Book of My Nights, a collection of poems I bought from him when he came. He signed my book, too. What a nice, unassuming guy. I got his older work, Rose, for Christmas this year because I liked this one so much. Maybe I'll just give you two examples of his work...
Little Round
My fool asks: Do the years spell a path to later
be remembered? Who's there to read them back?
My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.
My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother's sleeping face.
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.
My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.
And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.
And my mother? She divides
the rice, today's portion from tomorrow's,
tomorrow's from ever after.
And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can't see.
And my God.
What have I done with my God?
-Li-Young Lee, 2001
I like so much the formatting of his work! It is so easily digested and yet so full of profound statements. Lee often writes about his family, about his father and mother, often in reminiscence, and of his wife and his departed brother. So much comes back to the central themes and motifs of the poems, that they could all be one poem but with different names of individual sections.
The second poem, from the other book Rose makes me feel good about my current situation and the hopes for the future.
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
-Li Young Lee, 1986
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Editing and the Creative Process
I often wonder about what sort of editing I would do if I ever edited. Right now I do not have any particular works that bring a tear to my eye, nothing that makes me wonder if I could write a whole pamphlet of poetry like it or put together an entire novel based on a few lines of text, but I have been putting more effort into writing lately so I may just start worrying more about editing and the creative process.
Most of the time it comes down to my being lazy or spontaneous and putting exactly what I think I want to write/read on the page without much forethought or afterthought. I am a lazy person and it shows in my writing ethic. I have to work to fix that. But fixing any problem takes time and resources.
I wrote a poem last week after my turn at the student reading, and it may be a good exercise to try to edit it, as I think the end was much weaker than the beginning when I had a great burst of creative energy. Let me see if I can do that today and get it up here for tomorrow.
In the meantime, here is a haiku I wrote in German some weeks ago. I have added the translation (also in haiku) below. Note the German words may look like they could rhyme, but they certainly do not.
Ich hätte gern ein
Glas Cola, aber ich kann
heute nicht trinken
(I would like to have
a glass of Coke, but I can't
drink any today)
Most of the time it comes down to my being lazy or spontaneous and putting exactly what I think I want to write/read on the page without much forethought or afterthought. I am a lazy person and it shows in my writing ethic. I have to work to fix that. But fixing any problem takes time and resources.
I wrote a poem last week after my turn at the student reading, and it may be a good exercise to try to edit it, as I think the end was much weaker than the beginning when I had a great burst of creative energy. Let me see if I can do that today and get it up here for tomorrow.
In the meantime, here is a haiku I wrote in German some weeks ago. I have added the translation (also in haiku) below. Note the German words may look like they could rhyme, but they certainly do not.
Ich hätte gern ein
Glas Cola, aber ich kann
heute nicht trinken
(I would like to have
a glass of Coke, but I can't
drink any today)
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Creative Writing on Wednesdays
The creative writing class I have this quarter, LTCR 10: Intro to Creative Writing, has been a very interesting experience. Up to this point I have not had as much exposure to the different kinds of people as in this, a room of 25 people, all of them with huge egos and small egos and great hopes and desires to be read and loved. I share some of their sentiment. Although this experience has more or less turned me off from the creative writing major, I have been forced to write a lot for the class, and some of it has turned out better, some of it worse.
One such situation that came up was just last week. Last month our teacher asked all of us if anyone would like to speak at the upcoming student reading. I said that "if I have something to read, I will read" and the Monday before I got an email saying we all had one minute to recite any verse or prose we wanted. I scrawled together a poem the morning of, practiced it in the 4 hours or so that I had between classes, and went to class feeling alright. When it came time for me to read (which was early), I got up and thought I knew exactly how things were going to go. It wasn't nearly as smooth as I had hoped, though. In any case, I would like to share the poem with you all. I wasn't sure whether the ending would be too cliché, but I went with it. You decide.
Musing
From the moment we are born to the moment we die
We are unclean. We live in filth.
Like a pig in the sty we roll in the dirt
Kicking dust into the sky we squander the earth's resources
Our time is running out.
We can only push our shit underneath the carpet for so long
Before we can no longer sit on the floor
And the rising tides of the current times
Are claiming more and more
Fading coastline, removing margin of error
Squeals quashed, swallow the bitter pill
Dig your grave not wit hthe shovel but the dollar
Consumption despite the dearth and squalor
So when the ocean comes to cleanse the land,
I hope you enjoy the view
As God destroys the human world
Destroys us, me and you
One such situation that came up was just last week. Last month our teacher asked all of us if anyone would like to speak at the upcoming student reading. I said that "if I have something to read, I will read" and the Monday before I got an email saying we all had one minute to recite any verse or prose we wanted. I scrawled together a poem the morning of, practiced it in the 4 hours or so that I had between classes, and went to class feeling alright. When it came time for me to read (which was early), I got up and thought I knew exactly how things were going to go. It wasn't nearly as smooth as I had hoped, though. In any case, I would like to share the poem with you all. I wasn't sure whether the ending would be too cliché, but I went with it. You decide.
Musing
From the moment we are born to the moment we die
We are unclean. We live in filth.
Like a pig in the sty we roll in the dirt
Kicking dust into the sky we squander the earth's resources
Our time is running out.
We can only push our shit underneath the carpet for so long
Before we can no longer sit on the floor
And the rising tides of the current times
Are claiming more and more
Fading coastline, removing margin of error
Squeals quashed, swallow the bitter pill
Dig your grave not wit hthe shovel but the dollar
Consumption despite the dearth and squalor
So when the ocean comes to cleanse the land,
I hope you enjoy the view
As God destroys the human world
Destroys us, me and you
Manticores and Things
Well, where to begin? I suppose I could start with the most recent poem I wrote. But before I do that, let me give you a little backstory.
In January of this year my housemates and I decided to watch 007: GoldenEye. We watched it, and as you may know Janus gets into a boat labelled Manticore. I decided to ask my housemates sarcastically, "Hey Jen, what's a manticore?" They didn't want to play along, so I gave the description of a griffin, and they fired back with, "That's not a manticore! That's a griffin!" Of course I had trapped them. After that I looked up manticore facts on Wikipedia, much to the chagrin of my friends. They had heard enough about manticores.
Fast forward to February and an online friend introduced me to the Which Way Adventure, one of those "choose your own adventure" games in Flash format. Oftentimes the player is given choices of what to do that lead to being surprised and eaten by the manticore. I showed it to a housemate who instantly loved it, and thus the love of the manticore was borne.
Now at the end of February we had a different teacher for one session of the creative writing class I have been taking. He introduced us to the idea of the imagist poem, one where there are no judging or emotive words, simply stated facts about the situation. We read William Carlos Williams' piece about a housecat that climbs over a bookcase. Last time we were in class Joe, a man in my class, questioned how a poem like that could become famous and important in the history of poetry. Our teacher offered up the idea that because the movement of the poem matched the structure, and that poetry at the time of Williams was very romantic, this was groundbreaking.
I decided to try to emulate Williams with this poem I have entitled Manticore. Enjoy.
Manticore
Pointed wings lift
The lion's
Torso
Over
The people
Who run away
Its tail tipped
With poisonous
Barbs
Grinning
Human head
Roars at the
Sky and eyes
The fleeing
Prey
Dinner
For the
Manticore is served
In January of this year my housemates and I decided to watch 007: GoldenEye. We watched it, and as you may know Janus gets into a boat labelled Manticore. I decided to ask my housemates sarcastically, "Hey Jen, what's a manticore?" They didn't want to play along, so I gave the description of a griffin, and they fired back with, "That's not a manticore! That's a griffin!" Of course I had trapped them. After that I looked up manticore facts on Wikipedia, much to the chagrin of my friends. They had heard enough about manticores.
Fast forward to February and an online friend introduced me to the Which Way Adventure, one of those "choose your own adventure" games in Flash format. Oftentimes the player is given choices of what to do that lead to being surprised and eaten by the manticore. I showed it to a housemate who instantly loved it, and thus the love of the manticore was borne.
Now at the end of February we had a different teacher for one session of the creative writing class I have been taking. He introduced us to the idea of the imagist poem, one where there are no judging or emotive words, simply stated facts about the situation. We read William Carlos Williams' piece about a housecat that climbs over a bookcase. Last time we were in class Joe, a man in my class, questioned how a poem like that could become famous and important in the history of poetry. Our teacher offered up the idea that because the movement of the poem matched the structure, and that poetry at the time of Williams was very romantic, this was groundbreaking.
I decided to try to emulate Williams with this poem I have entitled Manticore. Enjoy.
Manticore
Pointed wings lift
The lion's
Torso
Over
The people
Who run away
Its tail tipped
With poisonous
Barbs
Grinning
Human head
Roars at the
Sky and eyes
The fleeing
Prey
Dinner
For the
Manticore is served
Welcome
This will be the repository for the results of my writing, starting with the work that I have done since first coming to the University of California, Santa Cruz. I write because I have to. There is no medium I would be more enharmonic with. I can only hope to effectively translate my feelings into words on the page.
My purpose in creating this site is first to have one unified area where I can keep my works accessible and second to share those works with the world. Enjoy.
My purpose in creating this site is first to have one unified area where I can keep my works accessible and second to share those works with the world. Enjoy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)