Spent some time with Shane McCrae's Mule this morning, and it broke my heart. I'll be writing a review/endorsement of it at greater length, for The Lit Pub later this month. I'll say a few things about it--syntactically, it requires some close listening, but shouldn't all conversations that are worthwhile?

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Concerning my own work, I spent all morning watching Sportscenter and thinking about my "Nocturne" manuscript. I've come to a certain limit of understanding about the project. I've come to the realization that the "Camera" prose poems that I had written are not a part of the labyrinth sequence at all. Nor are they a part of the "Dear Empire" series. Rather, they are collaborations with the "Nocturne" series. I've realized this as I've continued to work on more ekphrastic poems dealing with the grotesque and the monstrous.

Pouring over photography books like The Body, A Morning's Work, The Bone House, and a lot of Rosamund Purcell's pieces, I've pieced together some correlation between the earlier war "Nocturnes" and what's taking place in the newer work. And somehow, the "Camera" poems seem to be the transitional scaffolding necessary to make this manuscript "go."

Now, I have to contemplate just how they'll coincide in sequence, which is a whole other narrative. In many ways these poems have been a meditation on control. And what I mean by that is that the ekphrastic writing process can be dominated by the image and so the writer must exert their own control on the work. What captivates me about writing in this mode is my struggle to reiterate the image's action without duplicating the image too faithfully.

My understanding of the ekphrastic is that the written work should never be an imitation of the influence. An attempt at imitation will always result in the written work's failure.

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Speaking of homage . . .

Once again I'm writing everyday for a month. In my case, I'm going to take weekends off, but I'll also try to write an extra poem here and there to make up for my weekend breaks. I'm still working on the "Labyrinth" series, and I'm trying to get to 25 poems to see where I'm at. I'm also going to try to carve up some more "Dear Empire" and "Nocturne" poems.

Truth be told, I have no idea where these poems are going. I'm just writing them and they're coming to me rather quickly. I don't know how they work adjacent to one another, since I have yet to sort them out into a rough manuscript of sorts. A few folks have asked me for copies of the manuscript to read for manuscript exchanges and, frankly at this stage I think if I gave them this manuscript it would be an unfair exchange because there IS no shape to this manuscript and the poor reader would be doing far too much work. I'm having a difficult time conceptualizing what these entities are. I'm now certain that the "Camera" and "Labyrinth" poems are separate from the "Dear Empire" poems. There's just no way I can successfully transition from one voice/style to the other in a graceful and articulate manner. This is a good problem to have, but it is still a problem. Essentially, I'm dealing with two separate manuscripts. So as I rambled on above, it seems I'm trying to write myself through these sequences to find an arc.

The "Nocturnes," which I'll be dipping into once in awhile, are the verse pieces and I haven't written that many . . . maybe fifteen or so. I hope to have a few more to gauge where to go next. I plan on continuing the poem-a-day through the end of September, so I'll evaluate from there.

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I like the idea of carving a poem. There's a joke about the violin maker. The violin maker was asked how he creates a violin from a piece of wood. His response--it's easy. I just take out whatever isn't a violin.

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Currently reading Mei-mei Berseenbrugge's I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems. Years ago, I had the pleasure of introducing Mei-mei during the Asian American Writers' Workshop poetry festival. I had no idea who she was. So I did what any person would do and "Googled" her. I think I wasn't equipped to read her work back then, but I did write a good introduction. Now, however, she knocks my socks off. I love her introspection. So much of her work is about the artistic process--not just writing but painting, sculpting, dance. Wow.

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The work on the vegetable garden is stalled because the ground isn't level. I need to borrow my neighbor's Bobcat to scratch out a flatter plot. Here it is:

The plot actually goes back a ways. It just doesn't look as large here. In fact, the size of what's been plowed is actually much more than what Meredith or I envisioned for our garden. We may have to build a shed or something . . .

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Current Spin: