Won’t be hard to keep up with my Poem a Day challenge this week, since I signed on for another month of Just Do It at Theatre Charlotte April 16th. If you’re in town, you should check it out. It’s $5, and a whole fun mishmash of different written stuff, poetry, spoken word, theatre and whatever comes out of the crowd that night. This will be the third one I’ve participated in and I have a great time. The theme this time around is “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” This is one of the pieces I came up with for the evening. I’m gonna try to come up with three total. I always try to write stuff fresh for the event because as we’ve discussed before, I’m worthless without a deadline, and this gives me another deadline. Lemme know what you think in comments, this is still a work in progress. At least for 11 days, then I perform it.
Apologetic Antecedents
Sorry seems so hard
because it’s just the beginning.
There’s never a “sorry”
then a yank,
a little blood,
and “all done”
like pulling a tooth when you’re eight.
It’s always something painful and awkward
like “sorry I was a dick and screwed your sister
on the washing machine at Thanksgiving
while you were in the kitchen making cranberry sauce”
just to give a possible,
yet completely fictional
example.
Sorry is always the precursor
to something that sucks,
but has to be done,
like putting iodine on a cut,
or breaking up with the girl
that cheated on you with your brother
and his wife
even though she’s all kinds of a freak
and does that thing you like
in bed.
So it’s not the word that’s hard,
it’s what follows.
For National Poetry Month (yeah, I didn’t know either until I started reading poetry blogs, because apparently I’m a poet now, which while may sound gay as all get-out does not in and of itself mean that I will commence to smoking cloves and I am still far more likely to be found wearing a luchador mask than a beret. That is all) there’s a Poem a Day challenge at Poetic Asides, a Writer’s Digest blog written by Robert Lee Brewer. I’m going to try to keep track and write a poem each day, but let’s be reasonable here, I have a job and a wife and plenty of other bad habits to indulge, so it’s unlikely that I’ll manage one every day, but here’s the first one. Robert’s prompt was loneliness – this is what I got to.
Enforced Solitude
Sitting in the window
looking for you,
watching the birds
and dog run free
while I content myself
with clawing up the new toilet paper roll
and pooping in your new heels
again.
Mondays are the hardest day,
I think,
for cats.
So last night I went to the monthly Open Mike night at Jackson’s Java hosted by Jonathan Rice of Iodine Poetry Journal, just to check it out and see what I thought. I took several pieces to read and figured I’d gauge the vibe and decide what to read by how things were going. Several people were working the Valentine’s Day thing, so I decided to go in a different direction. I read “Beer Goggles,” which is a piece that currently has found no love from any of the places that I’ve submitted it to, but is very popular whenever I perform it, which just goes to show that what works on the page may have little or no connection to what works in live performance. I also did a piece called “Better Home” from Returning the Favor, which I’m always a little nervous about performing live. It requires me to sing a couple of segments of the poem, and since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket I always feel like I’m taking the audience’s life into my hands when I perform the piece. But both pieces were very well-received, and I sold three books before the night was done, so that was great! I also swapped a book with Jessie for a copy of one of her chapbooks, which is good for both of us.
Here’s a video of “Better Home” that I recorded a few nights ago in my home office.
But I had a good time at the Open Mike and will definitely be back next month. Everyone was very welcoming, very supportive, and generally very good. I was concerned about the quality when I first arrived, because it’s hard to know going in what the level of suck will be at any open mike event, but there were only a few people all night that I thought couldn’t really write, and one of the best ways for them to improve is to be exposed to better writers. Several folks weren’t terribly good performers, but I might be a little bit of a snob there, with 20 years of theatre in my background. But most people were pretty good, and one girl in particular did a slam-style memorized piece that was just beautiful and made me wish I’d done video of the whole night so I could catch her performance.
She was one of only two people of color at the event, and it only reinforced the sense I’m developing about where poetry is sitting today. It seems like white people write their stuff down and read it out loud, while brown people tend to memorize their stuff and perform it. My friend Q is a member of the Charlotte Slam Team, and has been to the National Poetry Slam several times, and he’s one of the best poets I know. But I don’t know that he submits stuff to magazines and websites because I don’t know how much his stuff works in a written format. Watching him perform is fantastic, but if there’s no bridge between slam poetry and traditional written poetry, where is it all going to go? There are a lot of poetry events all around Charlotte every week, but they all seem to happen at clubs (and too late for me on school nights) that cater to a more typically African-American crowd. So I guess here’s my question – is performed poetry a “black thing” nowadays? Does that leave written poetry to be a “white thing?” And where does that leave people like me, white folks who are performers and writers? Is there a middle ground to bring the slam poets and the written poets together?
I hope all that doesn’t get me in John Mayer-esque trouble, but it’s kinda where my head is at with trying to figure out how to make poetry more vital to people’s everyday life.
Today is better than yesterday – her mobility is improved a lot and her pain is more manageable. She’s off IV painkillers and onto oral drugs, so she’s in a little more pain, but nothing that she can’t handle. She’s moving almost normally, and I don’t think there will be any problem with getting her home tomorrow. Her staples can come out tomorrow, and that’s basically the only thing keeping her here.
Then the challenges with living at home will begin. Obviously most folks don’t think about recovering from surgery when they’re picking out a home, but just for the record, a split-level is not the way to go. No matter what you wanna do, there are stairs involved. Now if we were a little smarter, we would have set the guest bedroom up downstairs, so that Suzy could move between the guest room and the den, but no, that’s my office. So we’re trying to figure out if she’ll be more comfortable spending most of her time downstairs or up in the bedroom. I’m guessing it’s going to be downstairs, just because that’s way more convenient for visitors to sit. It’s not like we’ve got a lot chairs in our bedroom. So I think most of her waking time will be downstairs, which is okay, because she can sit or recline either in the recliner or on the sofa, and there’s a little dorm fridge down there for snacks and stuff. My sister is coming up tomorrow to stay a couple of days and help out, and friends have volunteered to bring over dinner Saturday and Sunday (tomorrow night’s dinner is still available if any of you have an overwhelming desire to feed people).
The outpouring of well-wishes through Twitter and Facebook has been simply amazing, and we appreciate the flowers (and yes, Otis, I will provide photos of me drinking beer out of the smiley-face mug). This has been a rough week, but all of you guys have made it a lot easier. So thanks. A lot.
This poem started life as a piece of a song that came to me in a dream, and I suppose I should be thankful it was as short as it turned out to be, since the last thing I wrote off a dream ended up around 65,000 words. I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think there’s something in there. Let me know what you think.
Homecoming
So I got an iPhone a few months ago. Yes, I love it. No, I don’t have any problems with AT&T’s coverage. Yes, I had Verizon before. No, I had no problems with their coverage, either. Yes, I think the commercials are witty, and no, I don’t like Luke Wilson any better.
Now that we got that out of the way, the point of this is that the iPhone has a free app that mimics the Amazon Kindle. Now some folks have wondered to me about the size of the screen, but let’s face it, the words are the same size as a paperback book, you just have fewer on the screen at one time than on a page. No big deal. So I love the app, and have bought several books for the Kindle as a result. And it was during some of my shopping the other day that I thought “Am I actively devaluing the book by searching for passable free books for my phone?”
Because I have a limited budget, and a stack of books waist-high in my house that I haven’t read, I’m on a moratorium on book-buying. This doesn’t mean I haven’t bought any new books, it just means that I don’t buy nearly as many and have the good grace to feel bad about it when I do. So I finished the last book on my phone, and went looking for another. And I cruised the bestseller list and decided not to pay any real money for an e-book this week, then moved on to the free books. Now most of these books are like crack, one free sample in a series to get you hooked, which I think is a good marketing ploy, but some of the others are just books that people have written that are out there for free.
And some of these are free for a reason. Namely, they suck. I’m all for the idea of allowing the market to determine the relative worth of a product, and allowing consumers to even set pricing for things by their decisions to buy or not to buy something. But I wonder about the market for writing becoming so devalued by the presence of so much free content out there. Already I see freelancers talking about rate cuts, and there’s always another kid coming along willing to do the same work for 2/3 the money, and there’s always somebody willing to sacrifice a quality writer on the altar of the dollar, but I wonder if the same deal transfers.
So am I devaluing my own work by becoming a lowest common denominator consumer? Is this the same as a local store owner shopping at Wal-Mart and feeling guilty? Or am I just overthinking again? I do believe that as people try to survive in a challenging economy, we need to make choices on where our money goes. And we need to make conscious, personal decisions regarding our spending, and on what we value. So I’m pretty sure I’ve answered my own question, and justified buying more e-books instead of grabbing free ones, but what about the bigger picture?
On the smaller picture front, here’s another video from Returning the Favor.
Welcome to the “John experiments with the built-in webcam on his Mac” portion of the blog. Since I’ve been writing about writing, and trying to sell my books, but I haven’t been doing a very good job of sharing with you what’s in my books, and since they’re already considered published by most literary journals and are therefore verboten, I thought I’d (in one very excellent run-on sentence) start recording them here and sharing them that way.
And of course because I’m a cheap fuck I didn’t buy a tripod for my new handheld HD camera, so I’m using the built-in cam on the Mac. Here’s the first one, the quality may improve as I go along. Or I may decide this is a huge pain in the ass and just watch football. Frankly, after I get this uploaded I’m watching football regardless.
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