The Poet Game

Where do poems come from? I wish I knew. And I do know, in some sense because I can feel the place they arise from but I cannot manifest it with words, which in and of itself is ironic.

I can try to explain it as the place of contemplation. The place where you work yourself out. Where the poet mind meets the earth. Where the poet mind meets philosophy. Where the poets make their own philosophies.

I find myself writing poems after small moments that feel important. Minute tragedies of living within small moments of beauty. Moments where the lesson learned was in front of me all along.

Poems can come from a plane's wheels leaving the ground. From wishes and nightmares. More likely they arise from the space between the two.

Sometimes, I can feel a poem coming on. This has happened to me since I was young. The need to put words to paper. To let the metaphor of living poor out.

I sometimes forget the poet side living in me and when I don’t have one of those moments for months, like recently, I fear it could be gone forever. The flux of life gives us the small tragedies. The large ones. The whispers of perfection. The continued fall of mankind. As poets, our job, duty, liveliness is to grasp these pieces, make them whole, if even for a moment; to try and make sense of what is real.

Poetry Has Been Around the Block

I love slam poetry. The good stuff with some poignant swearing, double entendre and a clear message.

There are poets I know, who shall remain nameless, that don’t view slam poetry as real “poetry.” Poetry is something of academia, movements…LITERARY. Slam is viewed as some sort of bastardized child that resulted from the one night that poetry broke up with nonfiction for a night and slept with rap.

I don’t view it that way. I think poetry took some lovers (and shit, why WOULDN’T it): hip hop, soul, R&B, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and stayed friends after. Birthed a few beatniks and revolutionaries; true poets wandering the line of nonfictional storytelling, musical expression, and filmic scene. Mudblood poets who deserve their full birthright. I think montage and monologue got a lot of action, too. Is there any shame in that? I don’t think so.

Do I have a point? Well, not particularly during these wee hours of the morning, but I will say this, poetry is poetry, whether it sits on the page or comes writhing out of our lips in front of a crowd.

Check out these links and go see The Whirlwind Company perform here in Spokane on April 13^th.

Jon Sands

Shira Erlichman

Anis Mojgani

Andrea Gibson

Of Mice and Failure.

As much as I like to pretend that I have it all together, truth is I am always hanging on by a thread. Ani Difranco said it best, “As bad as I am, I’m proud of the fact that I’m worse than I seem.”

I have been officially divorced for a short time. The whole process has been like pulling a deeply rooted plant out of the pit of my lungs. I’ve had to find strength down in me to remove myself from a dysfunctional marriage and now I am trying to have the courage to write about it through nonfiction which, let me tell you is a task for me, a poet.

I feel like I have been hiding behind my poems during this whole process. Not to knock poems at all. I love them. They provide an outlet where I can tell as much or as little as I want to about my life. I know my pain and confusion has come out in my poems but for me, to just say Hey, this is REALLY hard for me has seemed impossible to do. And frankly, a bit weak.

I feel that a stigma can surround someone who is divorced. People who might want to date me, acquaintances, the barista or even friends could wonder What did SHE do wrong? I believe there to be a self-imposed stamp on my forehead that says I’ve failed.

Now, I know I didn’t fail at marriage alone. It takes two to tango and all that but there are times when things get hard with regular life and that is when I miss having a partner in life, such as, I have mice in my apartment. I have lived here for a year and a half and the mice show up this month. My lease is up and I am just grossed out. I’ve tried to trap them but nothing. I have no bodies as evidence. And with no evidence of dead mice and continued “surprises,” I feel I can’t go on living here. It seems silly to move but having mice droppings in my drawers makes me feel like a failure of a mother. I have failed to provide my son with a safe and healthy home.

It also makes me wish I had a person that I could still bounce fears and situations like this off of. You can’t do that with a guy you casually date because 1) you don’t want him to know you live somewhere with mice and 2) leaning on someone in that sort of domestic crisis could scream “I want to be serious.” Which may or may not be the case, but shit, it’s a game out there and I’m not up for playing. It's 'take me or leave me' time.

Heavy boxes depress me. The idea of moving to a new apartment makes me cringe. I have to figure out if I can handle it all cause frankly, the divorce and the ex-boyfriend “Section V” have shot my nerves all to hell.

So, I guess what I am saying is: I want to be able to look fear in the eye. But I have: every day for the past 2 years. I’m tired. And saying this in prose makes it seems more real.

In the poem version of this blog, there are mice machinists, torturing the feet of women and we then turn to the sad longing gaze of a hungry cat. Autumn leaves cover the ‘lost hope,’ disguised here as a fallen pet rat, run over by a bicycle. He blinks at the clouds as his life gives way. Somewhere, a clock strikes eleven.

In Which a Confession and a Wish Occur.

I can’t be a Bitch.

There, I said it. My ex-husband may not agree, though, I have a suspicion that he might. Our divorce could have been way worse.

I have always wanted to be a bitch. To call the douchebag out in the bar. To shove the pretty girl telling me to “move back” at a concert. Get all up in someone’s face. To tell off the woman in the business suit that she is a horrible person for parking in the handicapped spot at PetSmart “just to grab Fluffykins some food.” But, I just can’t.

Seriously. The worse thing I have done is put an open barbeque sauce packet on a guy’s windshield because he thought it was funny to pretend he was going to run over my son in his stroller.

In my mind though, I do horrible things. Pour gasoline in the ex-boyfriend’s basement and then light a match. Pour vinegar into the pots of his most precious plants. Set the shed at the house I spent most of my marriage in on fire as a symbolic gesture. I put ex-lax in the mean girls brownies and spit in the new girlfriend’s shampoo. I imagine I scream at “that cute guy” everything he did wrong to hurt me, then point out how small his penis is and he doesn’t date for years. I have the potential to be a monster.

But instead, I admire from afar those who just say what they feel, risk it all and don’t care if anyone likes them for it. They trust in who they are.

My sister has always been known for not taking shit from anybody. She threw boys up against lockers for being uncouth in high school. When a couple of boys spit ALL over our bikes in grade school she made sure the boys who did it were not well liked and for one in particular, she kept his feminine hygiene product sounding last name memorable until high school graduation. This was before we called people douchebags. My sister is a revenge trendsetter. I’m in awe to this day.

My sister and I also work together. One day, our new boss was trying to be funny and throw paper at her while she was talking to someone. I told him, “You don’t mess with her. Trust me. She has been the one NOT to mess with in my family, forever.” I don’t think he took me seriously, but trust me, I think he is learning.

My brother is a quiet badass. Just hangs out and chills out but if someone messes with his sisters, all bets are off. He and my younger sister were at a hardcore show when some guy, probably messed up on meth or something, kept slamming into my sister. My brother pushed the guy away as one does at a hardcore show but the dude kept coming back. So my brother punched the guy IN THE FOREHEAD.

Two days later, he found out he had broken his hand.

Hardcore, indeed.

So, see, I am not a bad ass. I’m more like a wimp. My anger comes through in the metaphors of my poems and even then, it is more like pain and melancholy. And I guess I fear that bringing all of that potential bitch energy to the page would just turn the language into a rant or some other non-eloquent movement of words. Perhaps, I am meant to deal with everything life throws at me in my own way but sometimes I feel it would benefit me more if I could embrace my inner bitch. Maybe she just isn’t there and instead I am made up inside of lost souls and battered saints.

Ugh…that does sound like something I would say.

art: "Set on Fire: (2009) by Kristoffer Zetterstrand

Post-Divorce Dating is a Writing Exercise

Being single for the first time since I was in high school has been weird for me.

When I had been married for 5 years, I started seeing stories in the news about all the inappropriate things kids were doing on the school bus and learned what a “rainbow party” was. And it freaked me out. When I was in high school, there were still grungy riot grrrls who wore black eyeliner, knew who Mia Zapata was, didn’t take any shit or do anything they were told and guys still thought they were hot.

So when I found myself back in the world of dating, I think there was a huge learning curve. The first guy I spent more than one date with, let’s call him “Section V” because sadly, the last section of my thesis revolves around the fumblings of feeling something for him, this someone besides my ex-husband. Turns out, a year later, he is a manipulative, lying douche bag.

Oddly, I can talk about my dating life with my ex-husband (Yeah, yeah. It’s weird. We’re FREAKS. Whatever. Judge all you want…it’s just how it is) and he made the observation that perhaps my abilities to find a decent non-douche bag were not very good as I first stumbled out of nine-and-a-half years of marriage. And I think (I can hear the ex-husband patting himself on the back now…sigh) he is right. I just needed a guy who would say the right things and let me cook him dinner so I could feel domestic again. I was douche blind.

But on the upside, these events of crashing and burning with “Section V” and other men have made for great metaphorical weirdness in my poems. Men say some pretty crazy shit. Men also do some pretty crazy shit and women (I am talking particularly about me here) don’t do much better. But I am lucky because I find interactions between humans, especially those trying to care about each other (or giving the illusion they care) horrifyingly fascinating. Weaving together human contact is imbedded in the core of humanity and man, that isn’t easy. To give you a metaphor: you have to wander through the corn maze and sniff a lot of pumpkins before you learn to tell which one TRULY isn’t rotten. Apparently, I like finding a foul smelling gourd and then writing about it.

It is in these times, post-relationship and trying not to hurl eggs at his house, I can sit down and write a poem to focus. And the restraint in trying to use language to pinpoint my missteps, figuring out how exactly to juxtapose my perceptions against his actions in the relationship, and organizing it all brings about a reflective place inside me where poems can grow. Even if they are just about apple pies, hotel room doors closing or what his note said when it was over.

So, to those men who have mingled with me this past year: take heart…at least I wrote some poems about you.