|
I'm going back and rereading the poetry books that initially excited me about the written and spoken word. First up, Mark Doty's Atlantis. This is the second of probably three interactions about how my response to this book changed over twenty years. The first one is here. Rebuilding Atlantis At Twenty-Nine
1. The Shape Of Things The subject of the night's workshop is line breaks and how they shape the way the reader interprets the poem. I hate American waterfall tercets. In fact, all unnecessarily shaped stanzas detract from my interest in what a poet is trying to say. I understand they think it looks pretty. It gives me a headache. I still love Mark Doty's work even if I don't like how it's laid on the page. 2. Emerald Legacy If you look closely at this handful of sand Turquoise and emerald Sapphire and crushed pearl All this silt All this emerald Sand is only brown from a distance Shattered rocks Crushed coral Once royal and thriving Now loose foothold for children to build into wet castles Everything beautiful looks plain from a distance There is nothing alluring when the polish has been ground into well grounds Emerald at fingertips So what Tiny grains of quartz small enough to sprinkle over corn flakes Beauty tastes terrible Gets stuck in teeth Opal amongst beige Everything looks so beige until you really stare Flakes of emerald sparkle through the blah There is always something living thriving despite the paper bag covering our textbook lives Always something emerald if you know how to look Not where to How to 3. Grief Is Exhausting And Everywhere I didn't see ryan's sickness until it killed him I didn't look for comfort in shoots of dune grass I didn't imagine our future coming to a point Curling to fist I didn't imagine we needed a lighthouse to protect us Shimmer of crest Agate shadows It wasn't until i had to turn around that i ever noticed the shape of my own shadow lacking his beside me
0 Comments
I'm going back and rereading the poetry books that initially excited me about the written and spoken word. First up, Mark Doty's Atlantis. This is the first of probably three interactions about how my response to this book changed over twenty years. Sidenote, the title is a line from my poem, How To Survive A Sixty Hour Work Week On Just Above Minimum Wage. While it is, of course, a reference to the lost city, it is also a reference to Mark Doty's book and the time of my life when I first read it. Atlantis At Nineteen
1. Colorblindness Sun starved leaves A handful of wet beach ready for sculpture The color of a paper bag under transparent tape protecting textbooks from my clumsy adolescence Horseshoe crab shell All of these things we'd touched together And all i could think of when you took off your hat in your parents' basement was You have brown hair It was only in the darkness that I could realize the misdiagnosis of your hair color Two years of loving someone without noticing this basic physical trait I was still flash cards at lust Heart Sex Breath Touch At a bar with my coworkers from the Reconnaissance Faire I didn't note the leather taut atlassing the twin planets of the wax maiden as the exhaust of her day and her bourbon warmed my ear I thought why is this woman blowing in my ear? Everything so straight forward I didn't even know her name just the job she weekended for two months of the year The best part of her year when her ex took her two twelve year old sons and she dipped hands and roses into hot wax and blew hot air into the ears of nineteen year old gay boys too paralyzed to turn their heads I was of course staring at you a single row of straight white stones the lower shelf never cresting your bottom lip On the drive home you kissed your own hot air towards me without so much as leaning closer This was how I learned to love with distance 2. Strangers & Family Members Are Fiction I did not choose Mark Doty's "Long Point Light" for its language for how I would later imagine it an apt description of our relationship You liked lighthouses I was too stiff for "Homo Shall Not Inherit" The assignment read a poem to a diverse group of people ask them to tell you what the poem means Diverse on Cape Cod in 1998 meant my ashen mother my pasty boss the blanched friends of the pale children I nannied the cobweb customers at my corporate record store job my eggshell psychology classmates Diverse meant not the same age job level of education All these diverse listeners patiently described what this poem which was so obviously about how every day was a new opportunity to be honest with you and myself was so obviously about how I could see metaphor only in things you cared about All of these diverse listeners presented me with their own incorrect translations of this obvious poem Mistaking Doty's hazing and flickering as an invitation to build their own lighthouse to monument I bought whiteboard I mod podged photos of your favorite lighthouses printed out all these wrong interpretations of what was obviously our poem and threw away everyone else's truth I drew crude approximations of boats emerald fiberglass like your favorite color of seaglass polyurethaned wood like your hair silver like your car barn red like your duvet Each boat labeled with the description of an imaginary person The waves beneath them fake quotes I attributed to them each one a different way I looked at the poem except of course yours Who else had ever had an opinion that mattered? 3. There Is Never Enough Ocean I was twenty and selfish without understanding what my self was like everytwenty like everyyounglover I read Atlantis but came away with only "Long Point Light" said everything else was ocean and shimmer I had enough ocean around me enough shimmer when I tried to look to the future Taking a break from Homage Poems for a bit. My initial read-through of Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things didn't inspire anything in me. So I must have been in a terrible mood. Much like Martin Espada's Imagine The Angels Of Bread, the book starts with a poem I imagine hearing on stage at a slam-related open mic. It's written very accessibly and it deals with the sort of stories and issues people at a slam-related open mic will be quick to cheer for. But as the book goes on it becomes increasingly interesting and more complex. And I'm always a sucker for a well-written poem about insomnia. The Tongue Blanket Of Dreaming
Adam Stone I'd like to take a nap. But not a nap that's eternal, a nap where you wake up having dreamt of falling, but you've only fallen into an ease so unkown to you it looks like a new country. -- Ada Limon, "The Noisiness Of Sleep" When i grew too exhausted to tip-toe between the dragons I curled myself into a lozenge Intent on melting away on the foulest dragon's tongue I slept like an accusation against someone you love Dreamed all the precious treasure was time i could scale against my chest Of course i dreamed that i had become my scythe-toothed shelter Don't we all dream of being our own killer or savior This poem is an accidental cheat. I was supposed to be rereading Marge Piercy's The Moon Is Always Female but I couldn't find my copy, so I picked up What Are Big Girls Made Of which I've owned but hadn't yet read. After the first seven poems about the death of her brother, she opened the second section with the title poem. While I have since gone back and read the rest of the collection, as soon as I was done reading "What Are Big Girls Made Of", I got the idea for this poem and immediately sat down and wrote it, as is. What Are Faggots Made Of
Adam Stone Abandon and abandonment An ear for vacuuming pop culture and slang from other generations identities not fully compatable with our tongues Uncommon sense Shoulders Our parents' confusion Never knowing what to say Saying it anyway An array of hats Plaid and everything that clashes with plaid Lobster claws for cavity searches Such senses of humor The ability to see common ground in areas clearly marked no trespassing The desire to loose our tongue in areas clearly marked no trespassing Trespass A belief in borders Neighborhoods without fences but cities with painted lines Not stars We are not imagination We language imagination We speak for a we that does not have a singular voice We are made of nothing I am not queer because i was a gift for barren parents Sora would not be straight if his mother had lived Wyatt would not have dressed more accountant if he had less sisters Corey's pronouns would still be corey's pronouns if there was no church in their shadow It is so tempting to believe our bones are fortified tragedy We grew strong Invasive species thriving on the coast of straight Pilgriming inland to the heartland Fish with legs Mammals with feathers Divine mistakes of evolution Faggots are made of blame and fear A lack of science The myth of history Aging Loving the people the world is afraid to love Glowsticks and wrestling tights Painted nails and shaved heads Manifestos Lists of incongruous stereotypes Such musical anger A pot of boiling realizations Disappointment in the people we try to love and try to be The death of casual heartache The chalk outline of puritanism Blood so pure it could kill you if you're not careful A vocabulary of distance Optimistic hyperopia More heart than genitals Faggots are not faggots We are more than reclaiming the hard gs of outdated taxonomy We are not made of looking for conflict Spotlight fuckers Lip synching the gender Karaoking the rebellion We are not we are nots We are waiting for a textbook understanding that was checked out last century and is so past due that religion has decided to pretend they never borrowed it We are not alone in waiting We never want to be alone We grow up believing the ghost story of our wrong the fables of our impending solitude We adolesce into camouflage or sequins We do not sleep for fear of dreaming incorrectly Humans are made of humanity It must be driven from us by our ancestors' ignorance A learned fallacy A typo in the owner's manual of our hearts What I like most about Sara Eliza Johnson's work in Bone Map is its sense of constant travel. I never feel like she is stopping to explain her images or ideas, she's just showing you this beautiful short film she made. And you can watch it as many times as you'd like (the book is in your hands, after all) but she's only going to tell you about it once, and she's not going to answer any of your questions. What I Remember As Panicked
Adam Stone Sitting in the fort your parents built for your younger dying brother You pluck a caterpillar from the tree Squish it between your fingers and rub the smear of its was down my face A moth probably unrelated flies to a tree we can't reach It flies what i remember as panicked But is just the way moths fly Your dog will eat it or its progeny He being a conoisseuir of injured bugs and children He will feast on your brother's arm That he does not kill him is a fit of magic Your father the unwilling volunteer from the audience will make your dog disappear from our neighborhood to the house of an aunt you will never meet This poem actually started as a Sara Eliza Johnson interaction. I was struggling over three interactions for a few days, all of them nature-based, and then there was C A Conrad's splendid little weird book, The Book Of Frank. So many of my interactions this month have been homage-based, and I was finding it difficult to write in the style of C A Conrad without feeling like I was just poorly imitating C A Conrad. So I decided to write a letter to his character of Frank, instead. Letter To Frank From My Uncle's Garden, 1982
Adam Stone I don't know where my parents are But my uncle has this video camera And my cousins haven't surrendered their moods to cocaine and mushrooms yet So they are dancing by the pool I am a scarecrow on the outskirts of their flower garden Staked by dozens of bumblebees as big as my five year old fist All they want is me Dancing with them So that my uncle can capture the abandon of our youth Our dumb rhythms to a song i can't even hear See kids they imagine me saying to my own children in thirty years Once your father was as laughter and jumping jacks as you And you can see it all thanks to this betamax recording A medium which will never die When my parents return from their wherever My uncle pronounces me uncooperative A selfish little nancy My parents do not laugh I am pretty sure my uncle still had the tapes of that party when he died My parents and never saw them We have never needed film to remember ourselves I spent a couple of weeks working on a piece about almost getting into a fight at a Violent Femmes concert. And I think, eventually, that will become more than just a story I tell people about how when physical altercations are aimed in my direction, or the direction of those I care about, I use testosterone-fueled language and the stereotypes people attach to my appearance to defuse them before there is anything more than emotional hurt. But, as much as reading Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib makes you want to write about music (seriously, I just read his article on Bright Eyes and have had the first desire to listen to Fevers & Mirrors in about a decade), reading his collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much got me thinking more about his style and formatting than his subject matter. In particular, I love his poems that begin with "The Author Explains..." There's something about the honesty of the italicized text as he speaks to a specific person about something he feels deeply that makes me keep coming back and rereading them. It doesn't feel like reading poetry, it feels like overhearing someone self-omniscient perfectly explain his beliefs to someone eager to learn them. That's not quite what I ended up with in this poem but it's what I was initially aiming for. Sometimes, for me, the prompts I most enjoy are the ones that get away from me and produce something I wasn't expecting when I set out to write it. The Author Explains To His Ex-Fiancee Why He Finally Cut Her Out Of His Life, And How It Has Nothing To Do With How His Boyfriend At The Time Hated Her
Adam Stone I've never had to choose between love and family And you were almost both And it's hard for me to abandon either But it's easy for me to dismiss neither and almost And you were neither love nor family but almost both And your taste was always so neither And your hatred was so almost Christian but neither Christ-like nor religious Like you could almost swallow jesus when we talked but then he'd get all hairball and there's your savior in a puddle of sick on the couch between us You looking at me like my tongue was a sponge or you could pray my heart into a paper towel And I would stare at you because you are not a cat you're a grown-ass human with a daughter the age we were when we met and you have never had to clean up your own mess and maybe you forgot that i am not on-call for you anymore I love a man who has Old Testament problems Like someone burned his city due to a misunderstanding and his mother is a pillar of dust Like his father wants him to save two of every memory they shared so they have something to talk about in the future but lord it looks like it will never stop raining I know you don't understand what i see in him Your neighborhood has been sunny your whole life Except that time you don't speak about from back before you and jesus were on a first named basis Maybe i love the strange weather in genderless eyes and you are so content to sit in your california and cast shade at our cold fronts I haven't abandoned you because i've forgotten what i saw in you I simply can't stop seeing who you used to be and how afraid she would be of who you have become The title of this poem is a slight alteration of a line by Audre Lorde: "I see much better and my eyes hurt." I like the straight-forward honesty of her book Black Unicorn. There were a series of ideas I had about what to write for my interaction but when I got to the fourth section of the book, this idea I have been trying to articulate for the last few years took form. I don't think this is the final draft of this poem but it wouldn't be this far without reading her work. I See Much Better Now That My Eyes Hurt
Adam Stone You can not call me crazy now that we have queer vocabulary lessons and a dialect on our own television networks Now that pride has been appropriated into us How we parade the most entertaining stereotype Swishen fetchit the spectacle We are not diagnosable we just are But some of us can step outside our lack of the current buzzword privilege to see that some of us are crazy not in the funny hat sense (that's usually religious) but in an inability to separate our I from our us The separation of sexuality and sanity is not church and state anymore than the separation of masculinity and rape is sports and gambling Trying to talk about a person outside of their generalization is not so much unheard as unlistened to We defend the borders of our identity so vigilantly we should be fascist billionaires by now Enough us Enough we I I am silent now when unsure I am listen when not my experience I am never sure when I am too prideful not proud but supporting my fellow lions I am staring at the center of my own Venn Diagram of sexuality and (everyone has mental illness instead of responsibility) responsibility I don't like how I overlap with people I don't like Eliza Griswold was recommended to me by Mckendy Fils-Aime when I asked poets to suggest other poets whose work I wasn't familiar with. Griswold is primarily a journalist, and her poetry tends to be half-page poems that somehow manage to encompass both huge, international events, and small, personal parallels in about eight lines. They're rarely WOAH poems. Instead they're a series of quiet tremors. Pokemon Key Chain
Adam Stone In the winter before the game's bold comeback you bought a Snorlax figure for the keys to my apartment hoping it woud become our apartment if you charmed it with the Pokemon most like me. Reading Saeed Jones's Prelude To Bruise from the beginning was a mistake of chronology. The first few poems didn't grab me. As I read further, I realized that the manuscript started too universally for me. I prefer a personal beginning that expands rather than a universal beginning that constricts. So I decided to take the experience of how I feel about a manuscript and write it into a poem without being, hopefully, too meta. Universally
Adam Stone The way to his bed is down an elevator not quite antique maybe broken enough to be vintage It is caution enough to take the stairs He is waiting with the lights out You do not fear witness All he has given you is fake but his address His name His picture His experience You are the only thing real about him He does not kiss well But he can apply a condom using only his mouth As you push the neutral gear of his body up a hill The kindest stranger alternative to aaa He tells you about how unlike the town where he was raised this city is You were raised in the same town You were two years apart in the same high school If you'd started at the beginning you'd have known you both started at the same beginning are currently at the same physical now and dark basement but he moles his sexuality you don't know how to metaphor yours but you are not ashamed of it You will leave and never return his e-mails Say the sex was forgettable (it was) But really you are ashamed of his shame And do not care enough to explain it to him If we've all been there what of us says why? How do we not know how to start anything? How to end anything? How to be satisfied with the middle? |
InteractionalityAn ongoing conversation between writers and the text that they're reading. Archives
December 2023
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed