izanobu's bad poetry corner

I might as well go to bed. I fall into this trap all the time. I should just change my name to Ms Tomorrow.

Having a degree in English seems to mean that if I want to get something done, I go buy a book about how to do it. Or even a book about how to think about how to do it. My writing is no exception. It isn't that I'm waiting for the magic formula. They taught me that in Kindergarten when I learned the ABCs. Writing is like walking, just stick a foot in front of the word and go. And to stretch my metaphor further, some people are more determined walkers than others. The books I buy reveal these things to me. The tell me more about other people than about my own process. There are two themes common in most books on how to write or revise.
A) Idea generation. Where do ideas come from and how to capture them. Etc.
B) Finding your unique voice. How to make your writing sound like it's yours. Etc.

So, the first theme: I have no problems finding ideas. My head is exploding with them. I have notebooks full of sentences, random notes, half started characters or stories. I don't need to go looking for inspiration, it comes looking for me (sometimes with a sledgehammer).

Second theme: I have a voice. I don't know where or when it showed up, but somehow at some point in the last few years, all my writing started to sound like me. There is a quality I can't quite define that shows up in anything I write that makes it uniquely mine. Others who have read my work agree with me. I have a voice.

Thus I'm chock full of reading books about writing that don't really address my issue. What is my issue? Well, I hate writing. I like the process of having created, of knowing that the little pictures and people in my mind can stop pestering me now because they are free and real. I hate the actual doing part. Like all problems, this one appears to have a simple solution that is easy, plausible, and completely unworkable. Namely, to stop writing. Give up. Go home. Keep my day job. Etc.

I can't. I've tried. I have had some dry years where I didn't jot down a thing that wasn't academic or holiday greeting in nature. Those years usually ended with a flood of late night/early morning writing. Manic periods of creation in which I was the eye of the storm channeling its force out onto a page with hateful fury. I can't stop. I'm healthier when this stuff is getting out. And I don't really want to stop. I want to have written.

Unlike so many others from what I can discern, writing for me is real work. I need unstructured time. Writing counts as structured time. Therefore spending my unstructured time on writing requires that I also have unstructured time to spend not writing. Which, on my current schedule, is nearly impossible.

What it comes down to is that I'm due for a lifestyle change. Whether or not I can implement it is another question. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to make the leap. Meanwhile, I have to get a novel edit done in a little more than 3 weeks.

Good thing deadlines have never been my issue. Sigh.

This is supposed to be my writing lj. Heh. I really should update it.

The editors at the publishing house liked my novel. so I have to re-write it. I have a book on editing your own fiction, so hopefully that will motivate me into action.

Taking a book editing class at PSU this fall. My first Graduate level class ever.

And I'm going to be doing the 3-day novel writing contest. Details can be found here: http://www.3daynovel.com/

That is all the news so far.

I revised Conversations with the Dead today. Drew some things. Typed up a couple poems. I have 15 pages of story to type as well. And so many things to finish. Meep. But at least I'm creating again.

I've decided that on the days that I don't work that Knifeboy does I'm going to spend the time he is at work writing or working on art. Those are the days that I'll have a little space and quiet in which to work.

I'm working on stuff now to get a portfolio ready for applying. I think I'll probably send the Conversations with the Dead story, since genre fiction often gets a bad reputation. I don't want to be seen as just another sci/fi/fantasy writing wannabe. Even if I am.

I really need to figure out how to make Karli's present. It has been years since she graduated and I still haven't gotten her thing done. Sigh.

Also, I fixed my favorite sestina, just by changing one word. I think it feels more complete this way, more precise. It still has some awkwardness to it, but oh well.

Sestina #3

There is within these walls
A weeping slow and longing.
The dark of the room provides shelter
But the cage it creates lacks a lock for the mind.
I have nothing to say. Yet my life
Hangs on my language like grains of sand on water

Held in suspension until the tension of water
Is broken. I stalk the ramparts of inner walls
As a defensive guardian, afraid of life.
I stop occasionally, my ears strained and longing
For comprehensible words, but all to my mind
Is discord, cacophony. I hear the world cry out “Shelter

Me” I have no answer, no words, and a shelter
To me is a barrier. Here within is only water,
And pain. To stay safely surfaced is to mind
My boundaries, to keep my walls,
But I am stuck underneath, submerged in longing.
I repeat and repeat and repeat lives

Until the questions become my life.
I want to say it isn’t my fault, that the shelter
Here is built with only room for longing,
For questions. And what do I want for me? Water
These desires like seeds until my vines overgrow these walls,
Both mine and my questions. With all this in mind

Please believe I want solitude only to clear my mind
Not to abandon it. I never meant to let go of this life
I only wanted space, silence when I laid out these walls.
I meant to seek not isolation but shelter.
I realize I again state nothing in my longing
But to gloss over it as no big thing is to water

This pain down. For denial flows the downward way like water,
And with these repetitions, is no better for my mind’s
Growth than laying here alone in the dark longing
For soft silence of sleep. The vines are life
Creeping up over me. I cry out “Shelter
Me” for there is weeping in the walls,

Carving away the walls like water
Carving water. The mind weeps for that life
And only longing is my shelter.

This word-pain is brought to you by 3am and http://www.brunching.com/cgi/gothquote.cgi?

Isolated Vision

Retreat into the pebbled shadow
like gravel or sucking on broken teeth
Fear the crystal ball of panic
the heart flutter of a bird
two beats before it leaves your hands for
dappled foliage huge and wet with
angels tear
growing things displace the world
particulate by particle grind into
loam to be rolled by our stick bodies
celestial
I'm undone

I'm in the car and tired and don't want to be here. There is no desire for music within me. This is depression speaking. My brain comes out of its funk long enough to register the pretty music on the radio as soft angsty vocals and power piano pulls me down into the parts of myself depression can't stunt.
"I need to know who this is." I say idly to my kidnapper and gaoler. The radio informs me this is Brian Free and that he is opening for the band I'm being dragged to see. I must clarify, I bought the tickets, not realizing I'd be exhausted and surly. I'm always ahead of myself.

Brian Free is a rock star. He is a Portlander but has all the makings of a rock star. Not the herion addiction or the tattoos. Neither of those were in evidence. He has a smile like sunshine. He's the younger, hotter, talented version of an ex of mine, seriously. His piano is rock star, but it is easily identified as having roots in classic study. There is a recognizable hint of wrists that were tapped to be straight and elevated, posture that has decayed from the rigidity of nervous youth, the ghost of a seven year old crouched on the edge of a hard wooden bench. He's so appealing because he is echoes of familiar things, his songs echoes of familiar themes. After that, the cookie cutter Brits are nothing.

Actually, they are scary. She stands at the front with no bottom teeth in evidence, her skill seems to be mostly skinniness and wiggling hips. We stay watching the weird Brit Idol cookie strut until she does the song they were flown out to do. Wicked Games and we're gone.

I'm gone. Lost in a shining smile and haunting piano cut by odd bass tones and the memory of my own childhood and the strains of music I forgot long ago.

I think I hate live music. And I think I love it. I have this problem with many things.

I mostly made this journal so that no one else would steal Izanobu. But hey, I might as well use it. I plan to (erratically) post writings, sketches, and such here. Nothing I plan to sell of course, since my friend Urs warned me against posting that stuff on the net. But just tidbits I feel like sharing.
And so to begin I'll explain in my own language what this journal is about, and not about:

She's tired of writing about the nights when the air won't come inside and there is always the ache that starts in the throat positioning itself for a full frontal assault. Someone told her once she uses words like weapons. (They also told her that she's her own worst nightmare.) Language is all she has holding her on the solid side of the edges. She needs a weapon to defend herself from fear.
She's trapped in the problems of language. It is possible to be too good at something. Language is flawed. It is a symbol of something, that something often being just another symbol. Removed from reality and yet both defined by and defining it. Like using nothing in the definition of nothingness, language leads to itself. Everything is something being made like, or unalike, something else within language. The world of language is a copy of a copy of a copy, representation over representation. And when you control that, when you have the ability to make anything alike or unalike anything else, you start to believe you can define and alter the very world itself. This is a powerful weapon. She never runs out of ammunition because every interaction, every time she or someone around her defines or explains or converses it is like they are handing her belts of bullets for her big ass gun of a mouth. Bang.
Of course, this means that everything has infinite meaning, which makes it meaningless by proportion, like saying one word a thousand times fast. How does she reconcile her form of understanding and expression being everything and nothing at the same time? Buddha might say she doesn't, and Christ might agree.
But somewhere in the maze of making everything into everything else and undoing it again, there is a path.
This is part of the path.

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Or you could say a lot of that in the way my boyfriend might, (I am roughly quoting him here, although he was very tired) "Hey, cereal is just carbs surrounded by dairy, and mac'n'cheese is carbs surrounded by dairy, so they are pretty much the same thing. Weird." Yep, anything can be like anything else if you break it down or build it up enough.