Throw Them Out

So yesterday I was throwing out drafts of poems, and not sonnets or any other fixed form, either. Straight up poems. The kind I usually write.

It was fun. I've read poetry and written at it for so long now that I can almost never fool myself. Those opening lines really were irremediably stupid and loose, the similes strained, the endings predictable. The prognosis? Hopeless.

I'm very tender with these failures, but I don't do what some of my poet-friends do, which is save the best parts. They claim that sometimes, anyway, these scraps come together and make a kind of quilt. Maybe, but it's likely my scraps would come together and look like Viggo Mortensen's pants in "The Road."

What a blessing, really, to be able to spend four or five hours afloat in the medium of my choice. Did I fail? In a way; the poems will never amount to much. Was I successful? Sure, because just by showing up there was always the chance language would step forward and take me with it as it lifted off and landed far from this city or any other city. Somewhere, if I was lucky, absolutely angelesque.

70 and sunny after 2 days of rain. Buddy, as usual, prowling around and playing Lord of the Carpet.

RK

On Sonnets, Hollywood, and Buddy the Cat

I just threw last month's sonnets away, too, but put them on top of the garbage because last week I spotted one of my trash guys in Starbuck's reading Proust. Therefore, I thought he might have some helpful hints, something a notch or two above, "No more horizontal stripes for you, chubby boy." Or, "Llama/mama isn't the most felicitous rhyme I've ever seen."

I went to the P.E.N. dinner last night to introduce Kathy Appelt who won the kids' writing prize for THE UNDERNEATH. First of all, Pasadena is about 18 miles from Beverly Hills, but it takes 90 minutes to drive there during rush hour. We valet park her truck, Bianca is starved, so we go down to the coffee shop and pay $14 for an egg salad sandwich. Then sit upstairs by a fire and listen to people make deal after deal on their Blackberries. Hollywood is just a parody of itself. If you haven't seen Tim Robbins in THE PLAYER, rent it now!

Watching the Weather Channel reminded me of how cold it is in MN, so here's a haiku from Billy Collins:

Full moon on new snow,

and in the corner

an open can of white paint.

Buddy the cat says hello to everyone.

RK

Hands on Writing

Ron's challenge (see post below) is a wonderful one. Character development is what I do most of the time anyway, so I took a deep breath and decided I should try the sonnet thing, but in honor of National Novel Writing Month I am modifying the challenge to only 30 days & 30 sonnets. I played catch-up the first two days and now have four very bad--extremely bad--but structurally correct sonnets in a notebook. Wish me luck.

I am writing in long hand, something I rarely do anymore. My handwriting is terrible now and so the computer is a blessing. But it's wonderful to again have the tactile experience of watching a word form from the pen in my hand. It's also nice to pound the pen and beat out the rhythm, though doing that reminds me of why I didn't go far as a young piano student and why the dance classes in junior high phy ed were such torment; I couldn't even deal with the two-step.