Sleepless in Santa Cruz (Plus Bonus Rant!)
February 27
4 p.m.
I was up until around 3:30 a.m. last night. I really did intend to go to bed after my shower, but it was a lost cause-- I was wide-awake, and feeling much more sane than I had all evening. So I answered some e-mail and surfed randomly online, catching up on journals and the Rumormill. I was up late enough to get e-mail from a friend in North Carolina-- which he sent when he woke up. I finally went to bed, and I guess I got to sleep around 4... as I expected, my hamster-wheel brain had to whirl for a while first.
8 a.m. (which is the absolute latest I can sleep in, and that's only if I showered the night before) came really early, but I felt pretty well rested. Apparently it's okay for me to get my requisite six hours of sleep a night in pieces. It would probably wear on me after a while, though.
Work has been a sucking black hole of nothingness today. Making photocopies was the high point. The big project I'm working on is coming up with info sheets for one of our products, stuff to be used for direct mail and to be distributed at conferences. I've got a biggish pile of background material to read through, and I've been dipping into that intermittently. The time-scale on this project is really loose. If I pushed, I could have drafts done by the end of the week, but there's no hurry, so why should I push? They're having trouble finding anything for me to do this week anyway (there's lots less general-office stuff now that I'm in a smaller office), and I don't especially want to have my hours cut back, so I'll plod along. This project is mildly interesting, at least.
Not interesting enough to keep me from writing such a boring Tropism entry in the middle of the day, though.
I miss poetry, y'all. I miss having arguments with people about how to scan a tricky line of blank verse. I miss being able to use words like synecdoche and metonymy in a useful fashion. I miss thinking about line breaks and enjambment and lift and caesuras. I read Goldbarth's poem "Homage" and laughed out loud because it's such a clever, loving twist on Marianne Moore's poem "The Fish" (and on Marianne Moore's work in general, actually)-- and then I realized that I could think of exactly one person that I know would appreciate it as much as I did, and that's my old poetry prof Jay Wentworth, from A.S.U.-- to anybody else it would just be this random poem with exceedingly strange line breaks. That bummed me out. There's nobody I can talk to about this stuff, nobody I know around here who's fascinated by the technical and emotional aspects of poetry.
I need to find a good poetry workshop... that, or I need to go to grad school for poetry. More and more I come back to that idea. I love poetry, and that's the only way to make a living doing it, you know? I like teaching poetry a lot, and I'd be very good at it. I'm still developing as a poet, and I'll never be one of the Yale Youngers, but I think I could do some good work, and teach others to do the same.
Then I think about how incredibly, painfully marginalized poetry is in this country (and many other countries, too, but I'll limit myself to bitching about ours). School kids hate poetry because they're forced to read impenetrable crap. It takes a lot of time and effort to appreciate some of those dead white guys, and some of them aren't worth the effort. Why don't we expose high school kids to slam poetry, or to the work of Ellen Bass or Nikki Giovanni?
Oh, yeah. I remember. Because that kind of poetry is about sex and disillusionment and political chicanery and war and fury, and we can't let kids read or hear that kind of stuff. Jeez, then they might actually like poetry, and be interested. Better to let them read about red wheelbarrows and yachts and mending walls and poems not half so lovely as trees. Not that I'm dissing that stuff (not all of it, anyway), but why not draw the kids in with stuff that's more modern and interesting and relevant to their lives? Instead we pretend that Allen Ginsberg is the cutting edge. Which he was, in 1956. And which he most assuredly isn't, anymore.
The recent push towards "multiculturalism" has exposed kids to some more contemporary poetry at least-- Joy Harjo, Cathy Song, Louise Erdrich. That's a long way better than nothing, but I hate the token quality of including such poets in big anthologies of Dead White Guys.
By the time most kids get to college, they've learned to outright loathe poetry. The ones who try to write poetry have learned all kinds of terrible lessons-- they think it's good to be obscure, for one thing. It is not good to be obscure! What good is your poem if people don't understand it?
Granted, teaching college wouldn't allow me to do much about that early-poetry-training... but it would let me do something, maybe. Teach students that poetry can be vibrant and fun and painful and disturbing. That it can save lives and destroy them. That it can transform lives. Because poetry can. It just rarely gets the chance to do so.
Another entry to follow at my usual time. Hope this tides you over 'til then.
Total Word Count: 44,368
Today's Word Count: 0 (so far)
The Daring Darlings: