Repose - After Ed Roberson's "The Counsel of Birds"

Consider the night owl
bird or man, whichever you like
that spends it's waking time in nocturnal hours
Life's little sanctuary

Bleak expanse broken
Electric view and hues
used by the waking
Tools to make it our own

Solitude is safety
and cherish it as such
Consider the night owl
Did it choose this for itself?

Give pause, thought
momentary sapience (of which all need)
the answer may be a surprise
Avian fells need not fly together

Sonnets

Deluge

Intruding here without a place

I found the souls alive within

And came not seeking affection's embrace

But in this space it were to begin

Through painful nights we clung close

Although bodies remained far away

Our minds did speak and found verbose

And in time our hearts would sway

There was no goal nor a set task

With which I began pursuit

But remain in your presence and there bask

Togetherness, for which, I became resolute

Romantics exalt, with prose and pen

All I cherish, my truest friend

City Eclogue Response

I noted several of my favorite poems while reading City Eclogue and figure the best way to respond is to examine what I enjoyed about them. In Sit In What City We're In (pg 26), Roberson describes the urban center "our hive grid as plumb as circles flanked into the insect hexagonals". Much, if not all, of the poems in this collection are concerned with, unsurprisingly enough, the city and typically urban decay. As such, the work is filled with stark descriptions of the city as seen by Roberson's mind's eye and I found those to be very engrossing and helped me to keep reading. Another of my favorite descriptions (pg 41) "The buildings stood, a bunch of garbage odd-sized barges lashed together between currents of the railroad and river,"

Roberson also writes on disparity, of economics and rights.On page 48, the passage "what kind of really bastard son wishes his father had won election to eradicate his sister for the fucker's birthday?" brings to mind, to me, politicians whose platforms are to keep away or abolish the rights of others. A few pages later (pg 55) we have "Get me a piece of that fall off the back of a truck first economy I can pick up like, Y' know, with the bootstraps!", a clear allusion to the idea held by the well to do that the poor and underprivileged simply aren't working hard enough, not that they are without opportunity. Finally, it'd be unfair to mention disparity without touching on racism, as Roberson does in the Open / Back Up (breadth of field) on page 88 "...lost in midst of the security of local mounted police. Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university I.D.".  The passage calls to most clearly to mind the civil rights movement, first blows to racial bigotry.

Lastly, there was a certain poem I liked, Escape Training: Instructor's Flying Rappel on page 121. It begins "I jump backwards off the cliff to show how it's done:" and ends "This is an emergency maneuver done right it'll 've been music once it's sung. You can't hold a note forever you run out of breath you run". The poem is actually fairly clear from in its imagery, between the name and the verse, but by the last line it has me thinking of suicide. Perhaps the act of killing one's self can be though of as it's own "escape" or maybe it's just that the image of throwing yourself from a height has been so ingrained in my mind as self destructive.

Three as of yet Untitled Poems

She hobbles
wobbles
falls in the dead of night
AM hours
yells, shouts
no one awake to hear

Her days are spent
barely in control
one moment she's composed
on her feet
next are tears
sobs
great bawling moans

We can't help
we sit and think
she dies
we cannot bear it
she dies
we cannot bear IT

She is alone
She thinks death is her new life
She cannot bear it
We cannot bear her

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Fyi

I'm gonna start using this blog to upload the drafts of my poetry and short stories written for class (and maybe after too, who knows) since I have a few people that'd like to read them.

Poetry Response in Verse

A length of poetry was assigned
twenty pages give or take
I thought of how best to respond
now you're reading my mistake

Reginald Shepherd we read in class
and for him I've no more words
and of the few I didn't understand
the authors feelings I looked for

Three Japanese poems were
among those I liked the best
perhaps, interestingly enough,
they were clearer then the rest

Shakespeare and Ted Berrigan
I found unbearable
Dickinson and Mullen
were much more palatable

Langston Hughes I found I have
begun to appreciate and what's more
consideration has been given to
reading his work outside the classroom's door

Prose above verse has always been
my general inclination
this exercise perhaps shows why
for my verse is pedestrian

Writing Down the Bones

I've just finished the assigned reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, first half of our first assignment, and  I have to say it evoked some strong negative feelings in me. I quickly got tired of her cosmic point of view, quotes from her Zen master and, what I felt, was a somewhat presumptuous attitude toward how other people conduct themselves (particularly in the instance of the fat friend buying exercise books or the speculation on alcoholic writers).

With all the negativity I'd been building up squared away I can say that the advice was very good and much of it rung true with me and, as Goldberg says in the beginning of the book, can be applied to nearly any pursuit, not just writing (though I'll discuss it from that perspective). Writing what you know and love, learning not to censor yourself, practice, focusing on detail; all are just a few of the simple points we often forget to exercise.

I particularly liked the passage on artistic stability where she discusses the piles of notebooks, filled mostly with junk writing, and the neighbor who finds confidence through reading them. It's about recognizing your flaws and insecurities, coming to terms with them, and using them to make our writing that much better. I've spent time recently trying to deal with my flaws, particularly involving depression and low self esteem. Seeing that other people, my close friends and people I admire, have similar or even identical problems filled me with the confidence to believe I could overcome my own flaws. I hope to apply such lessons to my writing.

You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?

Hello and thank you for visiting my blogosphere super web log write space on the Net (tm). I'm Richard Hardy, a senior Computer Science major at Eastern Michigan University and this is where I'll be posting writing responses to my Introduction to Creative Writing assignments.