Field Studies

No one should play games with words. In poems, I'm all for fun, for humor, but please don't play with me, while me, with me, with me, while while while, in the poem. This stuff? Not acceptable. Downright angers me (as did versedaily anger me today).

I suppose this righteousness (I'll say it, my anger pushes me toward acting like I know better), is just an expression of my aesthetic. Certainly we discover the writing we like, the writing we'll put into the world -in part- by finding the writing that makes us want to close the window with an extra-hard click on the mouse or a meaningful slam of the cover.

So when the first line of the syllabus for my summer workshop reads "the autobiographical lyric has become thin and predictable," I think, oh. Shit. I mean, how many of us don't write something that begins in an autobiographical experience? Yes, we lie for the sake of a well-drawn metaphor, for engaging/surprising rhetoric, etc., but we still mine our lives for content from time to time. Or is that just me? Well, me or you or whoever---not in this class.

In this two-week course: 8 poems, a field notebook (studying another discipline), and a 3-6 page paper. We're reading:

Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
First Hand by Linda Bierds
An Aquarium by Jeffrey Yang
Cinema Muto by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Try by Cole Swensen

The professor is a woman whose presence I requested: Leslie Adrienne Miller. She was one of my first influences during my undergrad days. I was so excited when she said she'd come, and yesterday when I read her syllabus, I thought, oooh, ouch! I'm teaching right now!--how the hell am I going to do all of this?!

Then I thought, well, this could be great for my writing; I love the assignment she has laid out--poaching another discipline in order to write a series of poems (I'm still wishing I had more time, but it really is a great idea.). Now I just have to choose a discipline.

I feel as though all of my ideas are punk ideas: botany, sociology, ornithology, pulmonology...

I like the idea of focusing on a specific botanist who studied a specific type of plant in a particular area of the desert, or an ornithologist who tracked a bird that was three-states displaced by a hurricane (thanks, E), or a man who decided that if everyone felt they were being watched they'd reprogram themselves. All of these ideas intrigue me.

The last one, although I find it very interesting, probably treads too close to home. Researching this discipline will inevitably open up further ideas for the series I've begun on breathing, but it's still within my autobiographical stores (though, do expect a poem called "Chest Medicine" in the near future).

Where was this going? I'm not sure. Don't play games. Stay focused. Try to be positive when your earliest influences come to campus (even if they deliver you a tough syllabus).

There's a potential corner ahead. Cross your toes that I may potentially turn it swiftly.

And if you'd like to be a part of this course, I'll post these poems as I write them in the next two weeks (probably one/night) and delete them each w/in 24 hours.

Here. We. Go.