Month: April 2010

NaPoWriMo Fail

napowrimo_plum I’ve not been as dedicated to NaPoWriMo this year as I was last year, and as a result I’ve written, so far, ten haiku and five poems (one of which was very very long, but still). It’s day 24 and I don’t think I can write nine poems today to catch up, so I’m admitting defeat. However, it was still worth doing – I wrote five poems and ten haiku! I’ll continue to post the inspirational poems at my blog in case anybody is benefitting from them.

Instead this weekend I’m going to try to finish the transplant story I’ve been picking away at for the past two months, and get at least partially caught up on submissions.

Off My Desk

Christian Wiman‘s book, Hard Night, has been sitting on my desk for months, wedged open to “Reading Herodotus” and I have been able to set nothing on top of it—or nothing stably—for that whole time. Perhaps I can exorcise the need for the poem’s presence by sharing some of it with you folks.

It opens:

Sadness is to lie uneaten
among the buried dead, to die
without feeling a fire
kindled in your honor, that clean smell
of cypress rising and the chants, heat
increasing under you, into you, an old man
whose name the feasters weep and sing.

and closes:

Close your eyes
just this side of sleep and you can almost hear them,
all the long wonder of it, the lost gods
and the languages, the strange names and their fates,
lives unlike our own, as alien and unknowable
as the first hour on this earth for a womb-slick babe
around whom the whole tribe has formed a ring,
wailing as one for what the child must learn.

and dies the entire time in between. So powerful.

the saffron dies the jar

napowrimo_plum Update: I’ve written a seven haiku, and two short-to-medium-length poems, and one two-and-a-half-page poem. Today I’m going to try my hand at a short narrative poem. We set up a tent in the backyard yesterday, a really tall gazebo-like one, and it’s sunny and warm in Nashville, so I’m going to take my laptop outside and enjoy the weather.

*glee*

From Luc Reid’s “What Goes Around, Stays Around” (flashfic):

“Mechaieh … the poet?”

“Of course the poet.”

“But I heard that all of her poems turned into flocks of birds when you read them.”

“That’s only her recent ones. This is one of the old ones.”

“So you’ve read it?”

“Of course not. You think I want it to turn into a flock of birds?”

Not much going on with me poetry-wise at the moment, although I’ve got a couple ideas I might try to turn into flocks of birds later tonight, after the roasting of a chicken and napping à la cat. (One of these years I will swing a full night’s sleep before Easter services. This year’s was nice — the readings included two poems by Rilke and one by e.e. cummings — but I confess there were also stretches where I simply let my mind wander, focusing less on the sermon and more on the gorgeous cerulean blue of the thangka (traditional Buddhist painting) behind the pulpit.)