Skip to main content

Calendar and Domestic Poetry


I have a pretty big deadline coming in up in less than two months, and to honor it, I've begun a new poetry project! Finally. It helps me a little bit to think of the shape and content and big ideas in the project when I'm thinking about new poems to write.

In this one I want to pursue a couple of ideas 1. Time and 2. The Domestic.

That's pretty much my life right now, and whereas for the past few months I haven't been thrilled about it, I've finally come around that bend in the country road where everything illuminates and you realize you're in the right place.

So my next blogs will focus on ways/forms to help shape and show the passage of time, and forms that duplicate the domestic.

Project the First: Rag Rug.

I'm totally in love with the rag rug I've been making for my second spare room.The rag rug is an old-timey thing they still make a L.L. Bean, we had one in our family room growing up. It's made out of long strips of fabric crocheted together around and around. The one I've been making is pink, green, yellow and raspberry, totally cute. For more info, if you want to try one: http://vintagechica.typepad.com/the_life_and_times_of_thi/2006/10/rag_rug_tutoria.html

So for my rag rug poem, I was thinking about taking lines out of a journal or something, or maybe a paragraph and cutting it into lines, and then wrapping them and tying them together, around and around, until they form the whole. I'm debating too getting the "fabric" from non-literary sources, like taking snippets from books that I find and interesting "color" and using them to make the rag rug, like my Grim Fairie Tale collection, Lives of the Saints, and The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Armantrout's Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity

Because it doesn't seem to exist in digital form AT ALL, here's my annotation for this totally foundation feminist poetics essay. Rae Armantrout’s foundational essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” offers a way of understanding the social in experimental poetry that is critical of a particular type of lyric subjectivity, described as univocal, closed, Romantic, imperial, and appropriative. For Armantrout, the stable poetic subject is inherently appropriative, serving epiphany demanded by mainstream form, constructed by metaphor’s appropriative nature. Armantrout specifically calls out the type of poems that most agree constitute conventional poetry of witness: “The conventional or mainstream poem today is univocal, more or less plainspoken, short narrative, often culminating in a sort of epiphany” (Armantrout 288). Elaborating, Armantrout argues that “such a form must convey an impression of closure, and wholeness, no matter what it says” (288). Closure an...

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...

I'm officially over 12x12

Deciding which poetry books to take with me to Charleston for 6 months while I pack up the rest for storage. I think I'm going to skip at least a few 12x12 months, and those books I'd planned to read and give away are stored to donate another day. On the bright side I think I've got enough to read, and maybe I'll even write :) Trying to find one last book, a chapbook by my friend Charlie about distance between lovers, the physical kind, to read when I'm lonely.