douse

This is it! The final day of the 30/30 Tupelo Press poetry challenge. I'm delighted to say that I made it to the end without missing a day, and it was a challenging pleasure. Thanks to those of you who have been reading; I'm astonished to talk to friends and family who say they have been consistently reading the poems daily; there is no greater compliment. Thank you!

What didn't occur to me until about halfway through my version of the project (using the word of the day as a jumping-off point) is that I couldn't really cheat even if I wanted to because I've been attached to something--a word--that is released daily. I can't even work ahead and write, say, three poems on a particularly creative day. I really trapped (???) myself inside of the project, and the process really has been exquisite.

If you haven't already contributed, please consider giving something, anything please, to Tupelo Press in this final day of the challenge. I'm still pretty far from my goal, and every $5, $10, or $20 gift would help a ton at this point.

Today's NY Times word of the day is douse. It's not a articulately "poetic" word, but then again, what is? I think of douse from the perspective that it defines a change, a transformation, usually one of excess. I'm horrified by what is going on in Indiana, so this poem is written as a gesture against this injustice. The poem is not entirely political, but it has leanings and works towards images that welcome all kinds of love, regardless. I can't imagine having any kinds of leanings otherwise.

douse
against Indiana's Religious Freedom Act

what you know of gratitude
knows you too. it is with swollen
experience that I tell you this.

your body has a place or
maybe it's folded and walking
on its way to pray, half-covered

in snow and the relative weight of endings.
another self is drafted
and fought against in passive voice.

what a blue moon you cling to.
what a risk of being on the wrong side
of what we know

to be tenderness. rhetoric, birds.
the feathers up to my ankles.
I will swim in the green space

that holds the mitochondria.
to believe it starts there,
where we manufacture cellular energy,

where we begin to be drawn
to another body like the navigation
through a maze and over and over

arriving at the same place,
the same and other body that fits
& becomes someday utterance, love.

the child draws a flip book, images
moving down the page like gliding
towards you. catch her. it's your chance

to hold something that floats. so did the
white and effortless line
on the white and effortless paper.

globular

We are in the finishing stretch: day 29 of the 30/30 Tupelo Press challenge. To recap, I've been writing a poem a day for every day of the month of March. I've been using "words of the day" from the NY Times Learning Network as well as Dictionary.com (on weekends when NY Times doesn't put out a word) as points of inspiration for the poems.

The point of the 30/30 challenge is to raise money and awareness for Tupelo Press, a poetry press that supports voices of all shapes, sizes, and colors in their publication of new work. If you like the work I'm doing here or you believe in the power of poetry to initiate change, please consider donating.

Today's word of the day is globular. I think of something gelatinous when I think of globular, though what I want to think about is an actual globe. Not sure what's coming out here.

globular

she asks about the eggs. where.

the surprise when they open.

snare drum. a clock and it's sounds.

sunday would have been a good day

to speak honestly 

about the weather.

to speak honestly about how

you pinch the happiness at the stem

before it manifests. I recuse. a fresh

cutting off. I was waiting for a space

to think inside of. 

that is the tragedy of today's story.

I haven't been following, you say.

I've known it all along. the crown

unravels from the friction.

her body is so small

and cubic. inside, the screen door

fails to hold me in. I've lost so many of these

battles with myself. cannonball. pieces.

preparing for another end.

occult

If you can believe it, it's day 24 of the Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge! Today's NY times word of the day is occult. I'm drawn to the less popular definition of the word, which is a verb meaning "to hide from view, conceal, or have its light extinguished." This would be the version of the word more closely related to occlude.

As I described it to a friend, this is a bit of a "therapy poem" for me. The past year has been quite a journey for me, including a lot of letting go of crap and opening myself up to the possibility that two seemingly apparent contradictions can be true at the same time. Sometimes these contradictions keep me up at night, and I have to do visualization exercises (the breathing out of smoke in the poem is what I picture in my mind as I try to go to sleep) to let go of anger, polarities, pain. It works, and continues to work. And the complexities continue to unfold and be difficult. And on and on. So poems exist.

occult

i.

it's as if you can't find me

the last year so many drifts & contradictions

(sometimes finding dark is finding light

contrast: opposite colors draw the eye

it takes a certain looking to see)

happily the stars

were almost here

ii.

we see them as squares, the days

because they accumulate 

into patterns of bigger squares

only when she slept on my floor

was I able to sleep

sometimes she is me as a child

& I need to tell her things so she can sleep

things no one ever told me

but I needed

need now to hear

her small body like kindling

cradling the light from the hallway

so perfectly slumped

she needs me

& is far gone now into dream

iii.

only in winter does breakfast

smell like heaven

& at night I breathe out

the dark past

to sleep

like a cloud of black smoke from my mouth

this letting go

this breathing towards rest & quiet

each exhale closer

to the perfect juxtaposition

finding the light

somewhere in my body dream

the future way I will speak, breathe out

patterns of light and shadow

that anyone else can hear

extenuate

It's day 23 of the Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge, and thanks to some amazing and generous coworkers, I've actually raised some money! I'd love to raise a lot more, though, so please, please donate. If you enjoy the poems I'm writing, or if you just consider the project to  be worthy, please consider donating something. Don't forget to put my name in the "comments" section.

Today's NY Times word of the day is extenuate. It's a great word, and I'm having a good time contemplating all of the different approaches one could take to the idea.


extenuate

In the most common light of mid-morning, he said to her, breathtaking. For a moment, it was as if she was looking sideways at a mirror inside of a mirror, and the hallway of her own lung capacity was endless. She could see the translucent wings of a dragonfly; she could even hear them; she could even feel them vibrating like ambivalence on her throat. She thought about the eye in a jar, how it was so far removed from his heart, how she helped them snip each muscle until they scooped it out. There it sat, on the table, waiting for her.

So he said it again, breathtaking, this time without a break in his voice, and he might have been talking about the architecture or the spreadsheet or the hint of grey that had entered the atmosphere in what was previously the most common light of mid-morning. But he was looking at her. She was thinking about the brushstrokes, how she would have painted this moment, how the light would have been brighter, how it might have smelled as it does moments before the snow falls.  How the eyeball had been sent, as it always is, for testing at the lab, and how soon, when we get the results, we will know everything we need to know.

bawdy

Here is today's 30/30 Tupelo Press poem. The word of the day, courtesy of the NT Times, is bawdy. I don't really like this word, but I guess that becomes part of the challenge.

I've chosen the  abecedarian form for today, a poem that starts with a word that starts with an "a" and then consecutively uses "b" as the first letter of the next word, then "c" and so on through the entire alphabet. This is a great exercise to throw poets out of their usual language patterns, which I'm horribly guilty of. The poems (and the poets) can get weird, too, which I love.

bawdy

alkaline biology.
carapace.
didn't eloquence finally gather heat?
it just keeps leveling.
multiple nuclei open purpose.
quantify ribald secondary tryst.
under violent water, xanthic yearning zygoma.

Incandescent

Today's word is incandescent--not a poetic stretch for me since so much of my work revolves around light and images of light, but I'm grateful for a gimme since we are still early in the game. I tried to also play with the language from the NY times usage excerpt, which I found to be full of bizarre and decontextualized references, which I love. Today, quatrains. Some capitalization. Maybe some end punctuation tomorrow!

Don't forget to donate to Tupelo in support of this experiment!

Incandescent

Idea of
you reading in the corner in the light of similar mornings
Vision of
eyes behind you always on fire

As a result of
in the red shine you come undone
Brilliance of
the forging circles, platelets, undefined carriers

Glint of
canvas you set fire to
Landscape of
color draft feeling the blowback

Painting of
the moment you're drifting you don't even know you're going away
Opening of
why a shy ray

Possibility of
glow, she says, her back blending with driftwood
Sketch of
gold, camera, a path among the wildflowers

In the foreground of
the day when you might almost collapse, but you glisten instead
Viewpoint of
the pivotal silhouette

The power of
conflagration, the way you open your spine
The stigmatism of
the spark and the shadow always behind it

welter

For my Tupelo Press 30/30, I'm definitely approaching it as an experiment. Here's what I'm thinking:

An experiment that I do every once in a while when I want to write but have nothing to write "about" (as if . . .) is to go to a dictionary.com or other definition-type place to find a word of the day. I will then latch on to the word in whatever fashion I can/will/do and fashion a poem around it. It's just a generation exercise.

Following the success I've had with this approach, I think I'll adopt the following process for my daily poetry experiments: I will go to the NY Times Word of the Day and use each word there respectively as the title (or maybe some variation thereof).

Here's today's poem: (also available at https://tupelopress.wordpress.com/3030-project/)

welter
for Violet

she will have been
the multitude
scroll of fractal cloud, wisp
the lift
tossed from glitter-skin folds
the place
to the softest cusp of arms
the reconciliation
how we couldn't go there anymore
the smallest explosions imaginable
slate blue like the corners of ocean
the curve
alive and strings and bare and open
the scrutiny
she is the slightest form of day
the cleanest version of immersion
she will fall into you
the sphere
the storm
the space you didn't know you had between your thoughts