NaPoWriMo
It wasn't a poem every day, but it was better than I did last year, and it definitely showed me something about the value of daily writing practice. Namely, it's easier to get started on a poem when you don't have to warm up first, and it's easier to live with sucking one day if there's a chance you might not suck as bad the next. I'm told Ammons--who is an ever-present spirit here at Cornell--took a walk and wrote a poem every day for something like forty years. And if the New Yorker is to be believed, John Ashbery writes every morning too. So bah! to the view that one should only put precious ink to precious paper when one has something Very Important to say. The world isn't going to be saved from bad writing through lack of practice.
Comments
You're doing some really interesting things in these poems, Ginger. I especially like "[amazing grace]" today...
Posted by: Steve S | April 10, 2008 04:30 PM
Thanks, Steve!
Posted by: Ginger | April 10, 2008 08:12 PM
Liked the "Lilith Abi" poem, especially the way turn it takes with the last two lines. As if it had been wisping among deep green bushes, fleeting in and out of shadows, then at the end it suddenly jumps out into full view in a fully constituted body.
What you said about the poem potentially being flagged as dangerous led me to recall an experience of many years ago.
When I was in a poetry writing class my last year in high school (1971-72) -- the class met away from the high school, in a large old house in south Minneapolis, strong hippie vibe in the class -- at the end of the year we each gathered our poems into a book manuscript, and the school system provided the money to print fifty copies of each of our books. (Not high production values -- printed on ordinary office paper, stapled with no cover, etc. -- but published.) --
-- and in a number of cases, one or more pages was sent back unprinted, because some busybody administrator in the School Board building decided naughty words and "adult situations" couldn't be allowed in poems. We kept score, who had the most pages censored, it became a sort of good-natured game. (Five pages of my book. A quiet shy woman who wrote beautiful sensual love poems was the winner, something like eight pages banned.)
Our teacher (who understood the bureaucratic nonsense for what it was) went hunting and found another printer, outside the school system, and printed the banned pages for each of our books. We picked various colors of paper for our books, though all of the banned pages (when they came back from the alternate printer) were white. That amused me for some reason.
Posted by: Lyle Daggett | April 14, 2008 11:01 PM
Thanks, Lyle. My mom was expelled from high school in 1974 for being pregnant with me, so I can certainly believe administrators were having none of those 'scandalous' poems. Glad you had a teacher who got it though. :-)
Posted by: Ginger | April 16, 2008 01:02 PM