It's National Poetry Month! What Are You Writing?

It's National Poetry Month!  Many of us will be seeing a lot of poems, either famous or written in the previous ten minutes, posted on blogs and Facebook for the month.  A lot of people will write a poem a day.  I haven't written poetry since my first year of graduate school, and I haven't felt the urge to do so since.  But I do have the incredible urge to write nonfiction.  Being on sabbatical means I am supposed to be writing, so I have a plan for the month that may not celebrate poetry but will get me writing.

I have a lot of writing books, some focused on poetry, some on nonfiction, but many just on writing/journaling in general.  They are filled with exercises of all types.  So, each day of April, I will pull a book off the shelf, flip to a random page, and write in response to that exercise.  This is in addition to the actual nonfiction writing I have already planned to do this month, which is revising some essays and getting them ready to go out to journals.  And I will be doing these exercises with the larger context of the essays I'm writing (all about my undergraduate years) in mind, allowing them to push me in new directions and explore something I had not already explored.

Today, I had to write an ode to something ordinary.  I set my timer for twenty minutes and ended up writing well over a page.  No, I don't plan on posting what I'm writing.  I have learned that my first drafts are pretty much all telling, and I have to transform that into showing--into a narrative--during revision.  And a big point of doing this is to write without fear, without the editor in my mind getting any attention.  That means, for now, writing alone.  But I should end up with over thirty pages of random material by the end of the month.  Hopefully.

And don't be surprised if I ask people for random numbers on Twitter or Facebook.  I may ask for numbers between one and two hundred, turn to that page in a book, and do that exercise.

What are YOU writing this month?

Songs from 1988-93

I'm working on a series of essays that focus on my life from 1988-93, which are my undergraduate years (though the essays are not really about college).  I've been thinking for a while of creating a playlist of songs from the time because music was always in the background, whether from my car radio, my CD player when I was riding the bus, or the background in bars and clubs.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I am able to find out when the songs were released and put them in order.  But that's not just my Virgo mentality at work.  I can look at the list and see a kind of progression, my transition from boyhood to manhood.  I just set my timer for twenty minutes today and got the list started.  It'll be fun to listen to on the treadmill, though I better have a notebook handy for the memories that arise.

If anyone can think of any songs from that time period, feel free to let me know in the comments.  My only rules for including them on the playlist are 1) only one song from an artist or I'll end up putting all of Depeche Mode's Violator and R.E.M.'s Out of Time on the list and 2) they have to be something that played a role, however minor, in my own life.  Perhaps your memories might trigger some of my own.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

From Edwidge Danticat's "A Little While"

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while.

(more)

A Just Kids by Patti Smith Blog-a-Thon!

Over the last few weeks, a few people I know on this here internet thing have been talking about Patti Smith's Just Kids and how they have just read it or want to read it.  I'm in the middle of it right now (at the part where he first starts taking Polaroids).  I've said now and then that people should write blog entries about the book, and we should have one of the old-fashioned discussions us bloggers used to have before the Twitter and the Facebook came along.  So, how about it?

If you have read or want to read Patti Smith's Just Kids, write a blog post about it.  Then, email me with a link, post a link in the comments to this thread, or tag your post in Delicious (or tweet with a link to the post) with #jkpost as one of the tags.  I will create a post with links as they arrive and keep updating it with posts that appear until January 31.

In full disclosure, I am writing an academic book with a chapter on Mapplethorpe, so I'm always looking for interesting thoughts on him, but my work is more about what happened with the exhibit of his work in Cincinnati in 1990.  In regard to this blog-a-thon, I just want to see a bunch of smart people talk about Smith, Mapplethorpe, and this amazing book.

Simplicity Itself

From the looks of my research interests, it's clear that I engage with a lot of traumatic issues in my teaching and scholarship.  This is a bit of a contradiction in that I often tell my writing students that they do not need to focus on the most traumatic events of their lives to write a compelling essay.  No student have ever called me on the fact that I say one thing but so often teach and study something else.  Now, if they do call me on it, I have an answer.  I just finished Julie Powell's Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, and it's pretty damn amazing considering that it's a somewhat ordinary story.

Yes, cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year is pretty remarkable on a lot of levels, but it's not heroic or traumatic.  And one of the cool things about it is that it is a somewhat ordinary thing to do, so ordinary that most people don't think of doing it.  Anyone can pick up a cookbook and make it all, but no one does.  No one does because there's no reason to do it.  She didn't know that it would make her famous and provide her with an income that would enable her to quit her government drone job.  At the time, she just cooked food and wrote about.  She just lived her life with all of its quirks and ordinariness wrapped up together.

But she wrote a pretty compelling book, and it's compelling not because of what she does but because of how she writes about it.  I just love her use of language.  I adore how she connects events in her life with the food she's making.  I'll just keep repeating that there's nothing especially compelling about what she does, but she composes a narrative that is compelling.  Her friends are contemplating affairs and ending their marriages, and Powell reflects on that while cooking really detailed meals in a cramped kitchen.  She has a mother her loves her and annoys her, and that relates to the food.  Her pipes freeze.  Her power goes out.  She experiences what we all experience, but the way she tells that story is unique and special.

Powell makes a point in her first chapter that Child uses the phrase "simplicity itself" to describe a potato soup recipe, and Powell realizes that simplicity does not mean easy.  Yes, the recipe is quite simple on a lot of levels, but it does take care and effort to make.  The same can be said of this book.  It looks simple, but I doubt writing it was easy.  I couldn't write this way, and I've been studying writing for years.  I almost didn't pick up the book because I really didn't think it could be as good as it actually is because it didn't look that amazing on the surface.

I was wrong.