Rampant thoughts after a weekend at C-ville

Man! This weekend was amazing. I'm really tired right now so this post won't be very coherent, but I want to get it while it is still loose and running around in my head. These will be rampant thoughts.

Kate Singleton is sort of the female version of me, and I can honestly say that I will soon end up loving her. She is always sincere and picks out the nicest things about people. Her observation of others is always a refreshing truth too, either an affirmation of what I've noticed about another individual, or something completely fresh that I can agree with. When I speak to her in private, I feel that she is always so intimate and open, genuine and perceptive, almost wise... (I shrink away from that word because we all do silly youthful things, but what I mean is that she knows what is more important above that silliness). She is always a good time, laughs at all my jokes, loves farts like I do, loves Edith Piaf, sings with me always, and loves poetry. I also admire her ability to declare love for people openly, whereas I'm not fully comfortable with that yet. She makes me feel really good about myself too: one of my earliest memories of her was her putting makeup on me for Queer Prom. She basically picked up a wounded doe (me) from the side of the road and nursed him back to health.
Kate, I know you're reading this,
and I meant every tired, scattered thought I just typed out.

Alex Maliwanky (har har) is not as impersonal as I thought he was. This weekend was the first time I really had extended conversation with him, and beneath his attractiveness and disconnected poise (which I guess is hot to people?) he is actually just as vulnerable as me or anyone else. Maybe more.

I miss Victor. I haven’t talked to him in more than a week. I wonder what we will be in the future.

Note to self: don’t dress too weird at Escafe and show up early. People look at you funny, and the only compliments you get are from chicks and fat, old men. Make sure to keep things sorta hot, but not too costumey.

I want to watch the full season of RuPaul’s drag race online. Jujubee is my hero.

Michelle needs to stop being petty.

Inception was amazing. I cried twice watching that movie, and it’s a fracking sci-fi movie.

I have Oral Allergy Syndrome and I’m specifically allergic to alder pollen.

Leah Funk is sorta rude and fake.

I need to get this blog link off of Facebook because I’m talking bad about people.

Only my closest friends can read this. Or those who are irrelevant.

My pee smells like sulfuric asparagus pee

And I sort of like it.

I’m afraid that my family will hate me, but I think there is more to what I think is fear. I’m not quite sure what it is...

Amanda Chase, break up with her. Nothing is worth cheapening yourself. Just do it, please. It hurts me just thinking about you lowering your own worth to be someone’s “another”.



Ian Dohm is FUCKING annoying, hypocritical, self-absorbed, a user, and generally immature.

Here are some poetic thoughts that I had and heard at Chuhern's place:

Rocking Chair Kamasutra

Arms extend to sky
Wave.
I am tall grass.
Hide your face in me.

Fall out of chair and flow
to hardwood floor.
Splay.
I am an oil spill.
Set me on fire.

Line

My heart has melted
and now flows in your veins.
In pound, out pound
against the walls of your veins.

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds upon the heel that crushed it."
-Mark Twain

3:46 AM July 08th, 2010

Haven't posted in a while

So dear blog,
I've been cheating on you. On two different sites too...ouch. I've been sort of distracted these days with my new summer passion of being a Youtube starlet. It's not easy, you know? An internet celebribante has to put as much time into her art as any Hollywood celebrity.
From articulation lessons, to acting workshops, to late night video-editing, the glamor life is never at rest.
Really, what I'm trying to say is

it's hard being an attention whore.

So, I've been busy with Youtube and Dailybooth, both of which I am excited for. Dailybooth seems supercool; the concept of the site is that you upload a photo of yourself everyday so that a slice of your life eventually gets encapsulated onto the internet, open for anyone to see and comment on. And the sense of human community is pretty strong on the site. Post a picture asking the public a question, and you're bound to get some responses, in text or in photo. That is if you're not hideous.
But don't worry! I'm not hideous and I'm a good enough photographer conceal what deformities I carry, haha.
But jokes aside, another aspect of Dailybooth I really enjoy is that it almost gives me a prompt for photography. For once I have a real reason to take pictures of myself. And how little pictures of myself I had before this, too! Being considered "the photographer" in my group of friends, I've taken oodles and barrels of photos of other people, most portrait-like photos. But now, I can set up my own photos how I envision them AND be the subject in the photo. It's a dream a come true.

So yeah! Check out my Dailybooth and Youtube channel! Follow/subscribe if you like me or want karma points. Oh and I highly suggest you making a Dailybooth, too; it's really fun.

So this line kept popping up in my head today

Your faith is as shallow
as the lines you carve
into your wrist, as shallow
as our footprints
in the first snow of last year.

4:56 AM--July 7

An offensive image in words

My heart sails across oceans
like an 18th century vessel.
Flesh packed too tight in bottom cargo,
and the heart dies of its own heat.

3:23 AM--June 24th, 2010

Casual post of fragmented thoughts upon finishing my first full bottle of beer

Well, half of Operafest is now over... I've gotten my Papageno scene out of way. I will post a video of it soon when it goes up on Youtube. Look forward to it!
Recently I've started making flamboyant music videos of me in makeup (or not in makeup) singing over-the-top power ballads. I am now making a Youtube account named MrKatKween where I can hopefully compile my collection of videos involving me singing in my room, hahaha.
Anyhow, Operafest is almost over, THANK GOODNESS!

I'm sorry but
I carve in you
only to reach your soul,
only so that I can touch
your expansive soul.

2:15AM--June 18, 2009

The sestina form is something genius

Well, it isn't often I do form poetry, but one poetic form I do enjoy is the sestina. The joy of the sestina lies not only in the satisfaction of successfully fulfilling the form's requirements, but also in the surprisingly strong sense of obsession the poetic form weaves within. This sense of obsession, a sense that one is chasing circles in memory, is unavoidable in the sestina because the principle requirement of the sestina is that the poet must end on the same end-words for each six-lined stanza. The six special end-words of each stanza must be reused in every following stanza in a specific order. With each stanza composed of six lines (a sestet if you will) and the poem itself composed of six stanzas, followed by a three-lined envoy that uses each of the six special ending words in a specific order, the sestina forces the poet to dwell on subjects, attacking and reattacking the a subject anew with the same words (taken from different angles if you're really good with your words!)

Wikipedia explains the specific ordering of end words in the sestina form pretty decently:
 "If we number the first stanza's lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza's lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531...These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet's first line usually containing 6 and 2, its second 1 and 4, and its third 5 and 3..."

If this isn't making very much sense, I apologize; it is late and I am making this post on 5 hours of sleep (wah wah! I'm a whiner at times I know). Anyhow, here is a Wikipedia article to clarify things if my explanation still doesn't make sense.

For an example. here is a popular one by the dear Elizabeth Bishop. We all probably read this in high school:

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop

* * * * * * *
Aw, wipe those tears from your face dear reader... anyhow, this post is ultimately about the first sestina I ever wrote. I spent 7 hours on it--on and off--in about 2 to 3 hour increments. Crazy, right? But I never even felt the time passing. It's moments like that that convince me that I want to be nothing more than a poet...Alright, anymore of this and this post will come to uncannily resemble a can of Cheese-Whiz (it's a lot of cheese compressed into a small space, get it?) This sestina is about some childhood memories because they are the things of all our obsessions, no? It was published in Inkstone Magazine, the Asian-American magazine at UVA, and I had to give an awkward reading of it to like 25 people... by that time I had come to sort of dislike this poem, but I guess people liked it. The reading was super awkward because I was just standing on a hill in the beating sun reading about intimate things from my childhood...to a crowd of people that I really didn't care for eating fake Chinese food.

Deconstruction

Imagine how the Chinese boy could know

to ignore the double-u in “answer”.

It was impossible in first grade, not

saying he thought that “ants were” wasn’t wrong

so he asked a girl, “How to say this word?”

and she taught the sound of double-u through silence.

Years ago, the boy had constructed a riverside palace in silence

when on the first day of school they asked “Do you know

what you want for lunch?” He knew the color of bok choy but not the word

so seeing lettuce, he pointed and that was his answer—

for a week—it was salad and it tasted wrong.

Even if he knew the concept of dressing his greens, he did not

because he was used to vegetables being naked and Asian, not

unlike in the kindergarten bathroom where there was no silence

and anatomy was louder than three boys giggling in one stall. It was wrong,

but why they giggled while he peed the boy would never know

and nonetheless he was almost proud because his silence was answered

with giggles, the only understandable words.

There was a time when the boy could toss words

like rough pebbles in a yellow river, but not

across the river, where yellow pebbles weren’t answers.

So he swallowed jagged rocks in silence

and played alone, because the kids he didn’t know

enjoyed throwing boulders, while he could only chew gravel that tasted wrong.

Years later, the boy learned the shades of left, right and wrong

long before they washed up as yellow pebbles. These were English words.

The girls in the class began to lose their markers, not knowing

the boy was shepherding them after they rolled off desks and were not

found so he took them in and painted his palace in silence

and one day they looked accusingly, waiting for an answer.

Years later the boy would wittily jest and answer

that the markers were MADE IN CHINA, so it was not wrong

for him to rescue them and redefine the silence

of colors, where red should have meant fortune, not the word

bravery, and yellow would later be the shade of his tunic at the funeral, not

just an obscurity like the grandmother he hardly knew.

Imagine the silence of childhood deconstructing like words

and the boy knowing that it all sounded wrong,

but not hearing it until years later, like the letter double-u in answers.

10/18/09

1:15 AM--June 16th, 2010

First poem I ever turned in for poetry class

I like it when your hands are cooking

I like it when

your hands are

cooking

and your fingers

are moist

lightly with the

oils from our

spicebushes,

last year.

I like how your

breath smells of

Mexico

and of the days before

velcro and silica

taught our muscles

to contract.

I like how

your eyelashes

collapse

like mint leaves

in autumn.

I like how

you smile,

heavily.

10/08/09

4:23 AM--June 15th, 2010

Some new offensive things

Reading Whitman's Body Electric 

      while taking a massive shit 

Let me begin by clarifying that I am not 

actually reading Whitman's Body Electric 

while taking a massive shit, but rather I'm parked

at this yellow cafe table imagining

myself sitting half-naked 

in the windowless room 

a few feet off to my left, in tender release.

I write all these imaginings while I coax 
an actual oven, but why 
imagine instead of action?

Because the body can only handle
so much extrication

and with the tandem poetry and propulsions,

the sacred expulsions would be too much.

Outside the windowed doors of the coffeehouse a storm breaks

and the trees burst flowing in unified downbeat, wiry branches interpreting the world in dance,

dancing the universe as a single procession with measured and perfect motion

how boldly their body electric in this lightening storm, still I sit holding,

clenching to the cleave of the clasping and the sweet-fleshed day 

lost in the embrace of love and resistance in own my body electric.

A storm breaks out-

side by side the lovers on the outside patio share a frozen coffee drink

with fingers numbed awkward from the rain and the ice inside the cup

and him with cold fingers only pretends to drink for here swells and jets

his heart because he has loved a woman sacred and that alone

is caffeine enough for his soul.

But oh my body!

Outside a storm and I imagine myself

still clenched in body electric, push

open the doors of the cafe and step outside

into the windwhipping rain with pencil and pages blowing wet,

the limitless limpid jets of hot and enormous, quivering liquid,

blow-white and delirious juice into the sheetflooded intersection,

I sing:
"I am the gate of the body.

 I am the gate of the soul."
Squat and unleash 
my body electric.

5:30 PM-- June 12, 2010

 

My mother's face

My mother's face as she stared

upon her sister's bastard child

was one of pity and desire masked

lightly by a smile hanging crooked,

like a painting hastily hung to cover

the stain on the wallpaper,

but really,

mother just wanted to squeeze

the little bastard girl, embrace

her like a deformed

deaf-blind puppy,

unknowing of her own

three-leggedness.

06/12/10

4:53 AM-June 12, 2010

Poems not involving bodily vulgarities

Since apparently I post too many vulgar poems,

here are some uploads of poems I've done that aren't outright base. 

This first one is based off of Charles Beaudelaire's charming poem titled "Get Drunk". 

Make Love!

Always make love. 
That’s it! 
The great impetus! 
In order to not hear the shrieks  
of lovers past and pharaohs 
grinding  into oblivion, 
make love and make it last. 
To whom? 
To winter, volcanoes, nectarines, whatever, 
just make love and keep it made. 
And if you sometimes happen to awake 
strewn naked across gray sheets and glitter, 
tangled in the strings of deflating balloons 
barely breathing in the dark of whosoever’s closet, 
fading in the shadow of God, 
ask the winnow, 
the babe, 
the jurors, 
the mannequins, 
ask everything that flees, 
everything that groans, 
or rolls, 
or sings, 
everything that speaks, 
ask how any trace of day lives on: 
and the winnow, 
the babe, 
the jurors, 
the mannequins 
will all answer you: 
“By making love!  
Make love and make life breathe! 
Don’t be a prisoner of your own ghost. 
Make love! 
Stay loved! 

On winter, volcanoes, nectarines, whatever!”   

03/30/10

*******

Recipe for Breakfast

First, you must drain the Pacific Ocean.

Then, pelt a few pinecones 
and knock the stars down, 
every single one.

Collect the stars before they are stale 

and drop them into the Mariana Trench. 

Then, make the moon cry. 

It won’t be too hard— 
the stars are already dead.

Now chill her tears in Siberia, 
and then pour them into the Pacific Crater.

Watch the stars float to the top. 

Next, uproot a sycamore tree, and use it  
to gently stir the bowl.

Before you can eat, you must pick a hemlock needle  

and climb Mount Sinai.

Convince the sun to wake up. 

It won’t be too hard— 
you’ve already made him cereal. 

While balanced on the horizon, half-asleep, 

leap up and puncture his golden skin,

then slurp the yolk.

11/07/09

*******

Alternate Recipe for Breakfast

First, you must take your shirt off.

Then, find a marker

and draw a dotted line

across your chest.

Follow the line carefully with a sharp kitchen knife.

Before continuing, wash your hands clean.

Reach inside the cut

and gently remove your heart.

It should resemble a bagel.

Do not worry—the hole is natural.

It has always been there.

Next, clean your hands again

and reach back inside.

This time, locate your lungs.

Spread your fingers around the membrane,

and then take a deep breath.

Gradually apply pressure

until the sacs are compressed.

Collect your breath on a small serving plate.

Do not worry—that’s natural.

The essence is something soft and cold.

Finally, knife in hand,

carefully bisect the bagel longwise

and split the halves apart.

Spongy side up, stuff your heart with soft, cold cheese.

11/08/09 

3:14 AM-June 13, 2010

Portraitures [tentative au cœur d'un jeune artiste, en colère]

Portraitures
[tentative au cœur d'un jeune artiste, en colère]

EXPOSTION A

Behind the skeleton of the cat are a
swallow ’s  beak and feathers , and
while it looks accidental , the brown
violence  on  the  lower-right   hand
corner  does have purpose.  A bird,
caked in saliva and mud, hurled into
the  canvas  makes  an   attempt  at
permanence ,  succeeds ,  and  dies.

 
EXPOSITION B

This  is  before  the   epileptic  cat   dipped   in   lightning   lemon
acrylics, a  seizure  liberally  applied  on  the  canvas. The  artiste
decides, “ Yellow ,  what  an  ugly  color ” ,  washes   his   hands,
and   abandons   this    phase   of    his    artistic   experimentation.


EXPOSITION C

The rest are empty bottles holding paintbrushes,
hairs  caked ,  a  stagnant  rainbow.  Stasis, the
spectrum  dries  ,  flakes  off  like  falling   sand.
In  the  bottle  on  the  last shelf, a relic from the
future,  electric  toothbrush,  for  his finer details
undoable by neither cat nor bird. Bristles in drip,
the brush is summoned; his art is run on batteries.

5:14 AM--June 10, 2010

Short poem written at Para Coffee in February

I sneak a fart

I sneak a fart
and the clockwork goes:
Across the table, the young professional’s hand
drifts from the keyboard, towards his face,
pink palm flesh soft over upper lip,
index finger under nostrils.
He holds his breath

and pretends to think.

5:02 AM--June 10, 2010

Stolen from Rachael's Blog

First, credit goes to Rachael for introducing me to this poem. I think poets crank out one of these poems once a year at their prime, something so delicate yet filled soaking raw. There is power in the phrasing of the words, a simplicity that is muscular, but graceful: it is the form that ice skaters strive to accomplish, the soft arch of a marble statue.

http://rachaelgtaylor.blogspot.com/

Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Jack Gilbert

I must read more of Jack Gilbert

2:43 AM--June 9th, 2010

Heart: so that you may return

Listening to Beirut, thinking about my old chapbook.

For Lisa Spaar's Intermediate Poetry class last semester we had to construct a chapbook focusing on a specific place of interest. I was taken aback by this project since I had never considered the "poetics of space" (as the course was titled, well thought-out of me to choose it, no?). Poetry for me has never been a thing of place, but rather a thing of people, object, and relations deftly wrapped in concise phrase. I can't really explain it; I have a feeling I will be trying to explain poetry to myself and to others for my entire life.

Anyhow, the previous poem I put up "First Intimacy" was the first poem I wrote for Lisa, and it was the start of my chapbook. That poem and this poem, "Heart: so that you may return" are my favorites of the whole chapbook. They serve as  the collection's "bookends": the former the head and the latter the tail.

************************************

Heart: so that you may return

Shh. Enter soft  

and extinguish light.

Tonight you return to the cratered ground, 

back, back through the kitchen knife exit  

of the cantaloupe sliced, the emptied core. 

Sight has no place in this familiar black 

and the light switch far far in the back, 

let us never, never again touch that. 

In here we fill our darkened universes, 

those spinning plates, our revolutions  

will sync again. Tonight you ease gentle 

into the lightless space and I will be waiting, 

feet set shoulder-width apart, I will be waiting. 

Tonight you return, and at the shadowed door,  

the wind will be my breath, a moist inhalation. 

At the doorframe, the light falling in like snow, 

innocence, it too will melt in here. Step in, 

and the fibrous ground will spring back. 

Amazonian topsoil, last season’s canopy 

is a silent rug, waiting. Shh. Just for tonight,  

lie down again. Familiar? The shedded foliage, 

a leprosy, the blossoms fell wet upon farewell, 

this gangrene ground, too heavy, begs fire.  

Lie down. You have come to set no fire, 

just lie down. Listen. Tonight, all the heart  

is music and flames, this air will quiver,  

this light will burst, and these walls,  

these walls will pound again.

3:06 AM--June 8, 2010

 

First Intimacy

Blog, I miss you!

It's been 4 days since I last wrote
upon your body,
I miss you, I miss you
I miss your expansive body.

This is the first poem that I wrote for Lisa Spaar. I hope to have more classes with her in the future.
****************************************************

First Intimacy

Ask me about Macau, and I will recite the numbers
one to nine in Cantonese, each digit marked by a tonal pitch—
nine phonic distinctions to which the world lays deaf.

Ask again, this time I will see the last thing I saw
in the cafetorium of the Catholic elementary school.
The bell rings and it is Morning Prayer for the flock
of schoolchildren. God takes messages in Cantonese at 8 AM.
A boy stands in the back facing the structural pillar
where the gray rainwater has puddled from the morning mizzle.
He is a flawless imitation of intimate speech,
index and middle finger extended like a gun barrel
he traces a triangle, the vertices divined by a tap
on each shoulder and forehead.
A silent lesson, and the watcher learns
intimacy lies in the gaps between words.

Again, and the last thing I remember:
A hand extends from behind and chokes the hairs upon the boy’s head,
with a violent musculature, the hand jerks down
and the concrete composes tectonic gaps across the skull.

First intimacy is written in bone. 

2:27 AM-June 8th, 2010

Comical poetry and transformations

I remember chatting with a good friend about humor in poetry once (whereupon I realized that a good percentage of my poems are about poop); She told me that my poems are either really sad or really funny in a meaningful kind of way. I have come to the conclusion that I want my writing to be more comically meaningful, humor with a insightful transformation, sort of like Houdini doing stand-up, no? Gosh, that would be horrible.. "And for my last act, witness the wonder, the spectacle of the Disappearing Punchline!!!"

Ahem. Sorry.

I wrote this poem a few months back, randomly at Starbucks. I want my poems to be more along these lines;

Motherload

Hugging your mother is necessary 
like landing your buttcheeks 
on the cold toilet seat. 
       It’s necessary, 
even the prelanding moment 
hovering above the white-iced surface, 
how the mother planet pulls 
how one yearns to dock and unload.

***

So yeah, it's goofy, but it has meaning, no? I guess I'm trying to say that meaningful humor in poetry is a gem. Check out the poems of Billy Collins, that man is such a beautiful comic poet.

4:07 AM-- June 4th, 2010

Advice for my future self

Do not even TRY to sing opera on three hours of sleep.
Infant mortality rates will skyrocket upon attempt.
6:48PM-June 3rd, 2010
(Don't be fooled by the clocks.
My body tells me it's 14 o' clock-January 27th, 2091)

Cereal sex: in the fourth hour of night

It's 4:30 AM and just made myself a bowl of cereal, wading carefully through the darkness of the kitchen, the entire unlit house. I've grown to know this hour very well--too early and too late for volume. All that is here is silence, and me waddling through the black, preparing a bowl of cereal.

Cereal sex: in the fourth hour of night

Not that you are fat or clumsy but you must waddle
through the blackness, through the unlit rooms
you must waddle with your knees bent
to space out the weight of your haunches
and buttocks tensed, keep your knees bent
and remember to keep your back loose, open
to any shift in sloppy weight or unbalance.
But above all, remember:
Tonight you are hungry.

You have come
into a delicate affair,
the entertainment of hunger
and silence, latestayers of the night
but at this point it doesn't matter
because tonight, you are hungry
and that is all.
So close your eyes,
and waddle through the black.
Land soft on the the linoleum.
Careful. Soon your feet will stick
to the warm dead flooring,
soon you'll be wet,
sweat from the passions of hunger.

Keep the eyes closed, remember?
Tonight, the hands will be your eyes,
and every finger a pioneer,
combing across the surface of saucers
and bowls like the howling wind
returning to the night, returning
to the gentle crevasse of the earth.

Gentle return, soon your fingers fall
grasped around the rim of the bowl,
the smallest bowl, a delicate affair,
remember? And the milk uncapped
sits heavy, wet, waiting for you to tip
her over, slow and light, just tip her over.

And when is it over?
The the unload, the flow,
the overflow when is it enough,
too much for the bowl?
In this blackness,
you are nowhere.
No light, no vibrations,
not even memory could exist here.
Only the faint sensation of your bent
knees, buttocks tensed, your back
loosened, open. Your feet,
already sweaty, stuck humid to the floor.
Go on. Check the only way possible.

Stick your finger in
the bowl until
the tender tip,
just the tip, breaks
the chilly surface.

5:24 AM-June 3rd 2010

Cool quote from Pythagoras found at 4 AM

"There is geometry in the humming of the strings,
There is music in the spacing of the spheres."
-Pythagoras

4:06 AM- June 2nd, 2010

Why I don't write as well as Neruda

I don't have the same drive to write as I did in the Fall of First Year anymore... it's such boredom, I think. I've been reading Alberto Moravia's novel titled Boredom. The protagonist is a pampered, disimpassioned artist, and he described it perfectly: "...slowly but surely boredom had come to be the companion of my work during the last six months, until finally it had brought it to a complete stop on that afternoon when I slashed my canvas to tatters; it was rather like a deposit of lime in a spring which, in the end, blocks the passage and brings the flow of water to a complete standstill."
I haven't done any slashing yet, except when pretending to be an elf on Oblivion.

Here's something I forced myself to write yesterday at Starbucks

Why I don’t write as well as Neruda

…he knows not what company he brings—Eliza Marie

I could argue that Neruda had a beach house
and wind that waltzed in the shadows of pines
the sea licking the voluptuous toes of the beach
and twenty one horses beating hoof prints
into the earth: How could he not write poetry?
And I at Starbucks, the wind sweaty
with the steakhouse kitchen grease from next door,
sapling islands engulfed in the parking lot Black Sea,
and the twenty one hundred autocars all desperate
to leave, glide goodbye in single motion.
A crumpet-sized bird lands in the chair
across from mine and reads me, disapprovingly.
On this concrete shore, she knows not
what company she brings.
On this concrete shore: How could I not write poetry?

05/30/10
Wo Chan

2:22 AM-Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Forgotten existence

It has been so long, so long that I completely forgot that this blog existed.
Rereading my few posts from more or less a year ago isn't as embarrassing as I thought it would have been. I forgot that even before I started college, I had started writing poetically; not poetry yet, just poetically.
I don't know when I will actually start writing "poetry".

Since then I have really gotten into poetry, so this blog will take a new direction, as a home for things I write. Be it banal, frivolous, somber, or anal, I don't mind praise or criticism, just no accusations of pretension. Writing is a tool for myself, and myself primarily. It will not affect how I act towards others in the world, since I believe poetry is a preexisting outlook on life, a blik, a part of me from the beginning.
Seriously, I would love it if you to talked to me.

Which brings me to wonder, what is poetry?... At dinner tonight I started thinking about what poetry is, and the only way I could answer that was in poetic thought; useless, no? Manifesto:

"Poets are the photographers of invisible things. Blame the cracked lens or the perverted eye that pushes a poet in pursuit of the unseen, but a poet will never be happy with a still-life in focus--apples and oranges splayed out on a cherrywood table, lazing like underwear models--no, this pornography will not do. And so, in hopeful pursuit, every image, if lucky, exposes a blurry outline: a toenail of Truth, a patella of Meaning, the areola of Desire. Always the images zoomed-in too close, subject too large, receding out of frame, or simply invisible, a blurred outline before unfocused lens...; but reader, celebrate this: in these blurs is poetry--and where poets do their work--smudging, unsmudging, furious and eternal."

1:39 AM--June 2nd, Wednesday, 2010