I try to buy a copy of Poetry Magazine every month. I love reading it on the train, and fitting it into my bag is easy because it’s all slim and pretty (the cover art is usually exotic and curious). This month’s edition I had a problem with the wording in one of the poems, so I wrote a letter to the editor asking if this was perhaps a grammar issue. Needless to say, a few days later I received a very short and hurried response. Apparently, per the editor, I had “a problem” with the way it was worded, and no, the poem wasn’t in need of editing. Ok - thanks for pointing out that my reading was “wrong” and what was printed nationally was in fact correct. Jeez. Note to the Editor of Poetry Magazine: If I write a letter to you in the future, I’d like a grammatical explanation describing the issue versus a letter that lays issue with my “problem.”
Knowing that I am on a bridge writing this, I will just throw over my line and see what I catch.
I went away this weekend, and when I came back, I wasn’t happy about being home. Sure, the city of Chicago has grown on me, sure there are a handful of people I care about, and sure I have three jobs that I am passionate about. Yet, I knew that as soon as the plane touched down, that my urge to get off that plane had more to do with moving forward than going home. If that makes any sense?
Everyone has told me the past few years that I consistently give too much, that I am more accommodating and understanding and tolerant of my relationships than most. I tend to give allowances where they may not really be due; though after this weekend, I am starting to doubt my backbone.
This weekend I attended a tattoo festival. I’ve come to love them. They give me an opportunity to be around people that have as much invested in skin and ink as I do. And I don’t just mean monetarily. The majority of the people I see at these conventions are there because they’ve sought after a certain artist that will be tattooing at the event. It’s just like any AWP conference I’ve been to, or music festival. You’re there because you share a common passion, a drive, an obsession, a desire that moves you more than most things.
After spending all that time going from booth to booth looking at people’s art and pictures of their livelihood inked on bodies of people I’ll never meet, I was baffled by how far away I feel not only from those that I will never meet, but even those that on the surface profess to having a “relationship” with me.
Though – the furthest relationship I have at the moment is unfortunately with my writing. My poetry has taken the proverbial backseat to hands that have almost nothing tangible to show for it. There comes a point when you just have to start making choices. And those choices may not be beneficial to anyone but yourself. But I’m a firm believer in taking care of oneself in order to take care of everyone else around you. Too bad writing and poetry have been the only formidable ailments in my past, and too bad they have been so distant.
If you’re feeling far from your writing and would like to revisit your passion, maybe look to one of our awesome one night classes this summer? You’ll probably find me in the Time Management for Writers.
This weekend my boyfriend and I are going to Hell City Tattoo Festival in Columbus Ohio. To our benefit, both of us are pretty seasoned when it comes to spending multiple days at a tattoo event, and we both boast volumes of skin art all over our bodies. When it comes to the tattoo culture; and I’m not going to even discuss the current state or rather the current “fad” of tattoo culture ie: Miami Ink, LA Ink, the Rockabilly and Pin Up Culture – instead – when it comes to the meat and potatoes of my link with the culture in many ways it is deeply connected to my love for poetry.
When I actually sit down and consider my writing, I am struck instantly by my own personal and overwhelming affliction with symbolism. In many ways I have found my inability to escape symbolism as perhaps the largest hindrance toward my advancement as a poet. Though through all the trails and error I am driven constantly by the motivation that lies in the metaphor, the imagery, the core movements of my own interior working itself to the surface; wholly and unapologetically symbolic.
I often hate when I have to explain my tattoo work. It’s personal – though I understand the contradiction of having artwork so available on my skin that of course I’ve laid the groundwork for those questions. Yet, the reason I hate having to explain my work is that it often feels like a draft of a poem. I am already at the end, and somewhere at the beginning, but the lines are all blurred together – and there is always room for something else to creep in and “mean” something.
Symbolism is a currency that has spent itself in ink, over my arms, my legs, my torso – yet the language that I expend is not as easily translated. When I come home from tattoo conventions I am always a little more aware of the creativity and innate compulsion we have as human beings to use expression as a guidebook or a road map.
Our Story Workout class gets folks writing fiction in class and all week between sessions. But what a lovely surprise when some of the exercises inspired Judy F. to write a couple poems:
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE
At 7:00 a.m. my mother crashes into morning,
Tanks up with a good breakfast for a good day:
O.J., milk and cereal for the kids,
For herself: coffee, black, and a beer, frosty cold.
Mother hangs laundry, pausing only to vomit in the tulip bed.
Mother 7-Crowns her morning with a call to the cabbie
To circle by Cut-Rate Liquors for a bottle and a pack of coffin nails.
Mother drives three blocks to her mother’s house for
Afternoon communion: coffee, wine and gossip at the kitchen table.
Home again by 4:00. Lukewarm condiments decorate the table,
Ruptured hot dogs float with globules of grease in a pot on the stove.
Did she remember to eat lunch?
At least she remembered to turn off the stove this time.
For dinner mother fixes Chinese chop suey no Chinese would recognize.
Then dishes, homework supervised, the children dispatched to bed.
The sullen husband follows soon thereafter.
Dreary evening slides into somber night – my mother’s own time.
Another cigarette burns down to mother’s yellow finger tips
While she reads another novel of human folly
And drinks herself quite jolly.
Time: This Way Out
Mr. Attila: released with love
Silence stands about me.
Loneliness attends.
Love did not bind you.
Tripped out of time by the disaster of disease,
You plunged out of life and into memory.
You snatched my heart and slipped away.
Great care hardly hindered you
as your little self slipped through my fingers,
like minnows sinking into opaque water,
like dreams dissipating in the sun’s resurrection.
Time: mine like swimmers sucked by relentless currents
into the expansive sea.
Time: yours like the waves’ foamy fingerlets
sucked into the anhydrous sands of the never ending beach.
The ties between us stretch to tenuous,
then imperceptibly desist.
It was that time again last week. When I make my students write poetry. After the collective sigh has dissipated and they actually put pen to paper, the magic happens. Take a read:
by Melissa J.
Poems annoy me.
Let’s talk about some sad stuff!
Dress it up a bit,
tear it apart and slap it on the griddle.
It’s art!
See?
You cried!
How universal, art!
How relatable!
Publish me,
please.
by Robert G.
The hours tick by.
The days race, blurring from crib to cane.
Soft skin turns dry.
Every crease turns to wrinkle.
Every wrinkle deepens with despair.
The child in you is old and dying,
tarnished by the life not wanted,
the life poorly chosen.
Bones grown old,
always cold.
Awaiting frigid embrace.
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