Arrest

Arrest

If I could hide within the hoops of bone
the surgeons cracked and spread like swallow wings
to free your heart, I would. You cannot doubt.
I’d ease beneath the sutures in your skin,
breathe only when you breathed, stop up my ears
to any noise but hushing blood. And when
you died no one could pry me out again.

I think I’ll do a sound file of this one soon.

Rhyming poetry and Arrested Development

Well, my experiment on a general interest board has borne some fruit. I don’t think anyone said anything that we all haven’t heard before, but the defensiveness of the reactions told a new story, for me.

My question was: “Why don’t you read poetry?”

The answers varied. The first is that old standby, “It doesn’t rhyme.”

That answer spurred some defensiveness in me in turn, from “some of it does!” or even “mine does!” to “wake up and smell the 21st century!”

Critics and a handful of fans adore the show “Arrested Development.” I like it, too, though I’ve only watched a few episodes. I understand why, at least to a certain extent, the show hasn’t caught on. It doesn’t follow American sitcom traditions, the dialogue is too fast, too many funny lines are simply tossed off without the expected build up and pay off of “American” humor. While it has quotable lines, the humor is too interconnected for easy translation to someone who hasn’t seen it. It’s easy to forget important details, easy to overlook important clues about what is happening and what will happen.

AD is, in short, an unrhymed poem.

Rhyme is pretty, it’s seen as traditional, and most of all it’s a mnemonic device that allows the audience to recall passages or whole poems, to quote at length based on aural clues that are built into the verse.

Flash back to the last time you sang along with a song on the radio. You can remember how the song is constructed partially because you can follow the logic of the rhymes. I can remember most songs after hearing them only once or twice, because I can reconstruct them in my head so long as I can recall a couple of lines’ end rhymes.

AD has more structure than its critics give it credit for, but because it’s not always the expected structure, what it has is overlooked. Compare to “My Name is Earl” which is also funny, also breaks with some sitcom traditions, but embraces the sitcom structure in an easily recognizable way and you see the difference between a critical darling and a critical darling that people actually watch.

So what do I think this really means for poetry? You know what? I don’t know. I do think that we expect too much of readers, or viewers, if we deny them any sort of understood structure, expecting each poem to build its own. But like sitcoms are not dramas are not news programs are not skit shows, all poems needn’t share a structure or identifiable structural elements.

This brings me back to genres. Genres allow an audience to form expectations about the work, providing footing and also providing a jumping off point for subverting those expectations. Such subversions won’t always be successful, as AD shows, and the categorization in itself will limit the audience to some extent. After all, some people won’t watch a sitcom. Some won’t watch the news. But what would happen if television or movies actively resisted categorization? “What kind of show is it?” “A television show.” “Yes, but what kind?” “The kind that’s on TV.”

The Westing Game

I was Christmas shopping with my mother and she wanted book recommendations for my niece. Mom wanted to get Narnia, but the bookstore only had annoying editions with that badly glued type of spine that makes the book too hard to open without breaking the spine and then the pages fall out and bah!

Anyway, I suggested Angie Sage’s charming fantasy Magyk, plus one of my favorite childhood books, The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin.

My love for this book bordered on pathological. There was only one book I checked out of hte library more often, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. But ever since I recommended it, I’ve been anxious about it. This niece and I have nothing in common. Nothing. We annoy each other. My liking the book means nothing. But I will still be hurt, a little hurt, if she doesn’t enjoy it.

And that’s just damned stupid, on so many levels.

What’s my line?

I am suffering from the most annoying problem any writer ever had.

I write in my head, often while I’m driving. I often do a complete rough draft that way, at least of a shorter piece, and typing it out is just a method of working out the kinks.

So today, as I drove into town, I wrote a dizain. It was still rough, mind you, and it might not have been worth keeping, but I wrote it.

And now I’ve forgotten it.

This never happens.

Will I remember it soon? It’s been six hours. Oh god, seven hours. I can’t recall the slightest thing, even the topic is gone. I need more tinfoil. The mind rays are leaching my memory!

Rabid weasels are in my sinuses!

But that isn’t what woke me.

My Spidey sense told me that the noise I was hearing was my trashcan rumbling down the street. And I was right.

How did I know it was my trashcan and not my neighbor’s trashcan or, indeed, a Trashcan of Unknown Provenance? That is another mystery for the ages. But I knew. I was asleep then awake then fully aware that there was a danger to my trashcan, and it took the form of a Dodge Neon.

The lesson in all of this? If vandals steal my trashcan I’ll know, and I’ll hunt them down and do inhuman things with elbow macaroni and a cd of Aaron Neville. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Love is in the Air, sound file experiment

Love is in the air

I walk point on the line, with Joe
fifty feet behind to double check I don’t miss
the hiss or the fumes. Step and stop.
Step and stop. There’s a crack somewhere
in the two miles of two-inch running
from the ridge to the streambed meter
where the pressure reads ten instead of twenty.

It’s too cold to yank half-buried tubing;
it could snap and arc a hydrocarbon rainbow. But holes
can hide under a year’s dirt, muffled, and you hope
that the line’s curl lifts it up like a rollercoaster,
or that salt will leak and melt the top-lying snow.

If hunters knew how brine pools
in the line when it follows the ground’s curve,
they’d all be out with hacksaws, making
saltlicks in the tree cover. There are flickers
of camo through the grey web of branches;
and shots, but they’re maybe a half mile off
and my head’s an orange.

There is some squeak at my feet, enough
that I stop and hold my breath in time
for a grouse to burst with a delirious chuckle
of wings. Two miles, and the light is purpling–
no time to hunker by a tree trunk
until my knees steady.

And it’s too cold to breathe through my mouth
but my nose wants to whistle like methane
through a cracked pipe. Step and stop
like a bridesmaid. I can’t hear
hissing if my feet crunch in snow, or if I sing
at the top of my lungs to alert man and deer
that I have only teflon tape, a coupling, some clamps.

Different recording software and microphone.

So has "The Book of Daniel" caused the apocalypse yet?

I finally got around to watching it and was fairly amused. I mean, damn, these people are more messed up than the denizens of Wisteria Lane, and Jesus looks like Bo Bice, but still.

My only request is even less on the Alzheimer’s patient, please. My grandmother died of it and there isn’t a worse disease I can imagine.

I’ll give it another episode or two, but I’m as fickle as the day is long. Here’s hoping it manages to piss off more people before its cancelation!

I just discovered I’m loathed

Never ask, on a general interest board, if people read poetry unless you’re wearing asbestos underclingies. ‘Cause dayum.

Still, in the interests of science, I persevere.

I’ve already learned that I’m snooty, incapable of coherence, trying to impress, and wasting everyone’s time. But then I knew that already!

Surviving is Underrated