17 posts tagged “poetry”

I've finally done it.  I just uploaded my book to lulu.com and ordered the preview copy.  The book is not public yet, because I have to check the preview copy for mistakes and and for poems to personal to publish.  Just kidding about that; the personal poems are staying.

Exposed to the Elements is about 44 pages, including title page, copyright pages, blank pages, etc.  The collection contains 32 poems, most of them less than a page long.  The poems span 2001 to this year.

So, give it a week or two for the book to get here, and then an unspecified amount of time for me to get used to holding my own raw words in my bare hands.  I'll post another update as soon as I make the book public.

Thanks to Brian and Steve, my writing buddies, who encouraged me to keep working on this project. 

I've been working on the book for over three and a half hours, and I've managed to solve the page numbering problem!  Plus, I put the poems into their final order (keep your fingers crossed), adjusted the index, and did some minor editing.  I'm dead tired and kinda shaky, but it feels good knowing that all I need to do is upload the manuscript to Lulu and order a review copy.  I think I'll actually look over the manuscript once more before I do that; it wouldn't hurt.  Maybe I'll forget about the book for the weekend, and come back to it on Monday evening.

This process of getting the manuscript ready reminds me of the old joke:
Q: Why did the man repeatedly bang his head against the wall?
A: Because it felt so good when he stopped!

I've been working for six hours on the book.  Almost there, but I have missed my midnight deadline.  I'm trying to get no page numbers to show up on the title page, roman numerals to show up after that, and normal numbers to show up on the first real page of poetry and the following pages.  I'm using OpenOffice, and the help file say that I have to mess around with styles.  I've never really used styles before, and I'm having a problem setting different styles for different pages.  The help file say that I have to do that in order to assign the different page number styles.

I was really hoping to be able to order my preview copy from Lulu.com tonight.  Oh, well, I have gotten a lot done tonight.  I wasn't planning on writing a preface, but I did after all.  I also write the acknowledgments and generated the index.  The writing part was really fun.

I'm going to bed now because I have to go to work tomorrow.  (Actually, it's already tomorrow.)  I want to go to work  without obsessing over the frustrating thought that the book is this close to being done.

I've been wildly editing my poetry collection over the past couple of weeks because my self-imposed deadline is on Wednesday!  I actually uploaded a version to Lulu.com, but it is not public yet.  I want to go over it some more for spelling mistakes, plus I have to make some more formatting decision.

This evening, Steve and Brian helped me come up with a title!  The poems often mention the four ancient elements (fire, earth, water, air) as well as the weather-related elements (wind, rain, snow, small rodents, etc.).  Once Steve and Brian started talking about using the word "element" in the title, it made a lot of sense to me.  The word not only provides an important part of the four-word title, but it also gives me a way to understand the themes and organization of the poems.  Plus, now I have a good idea of what the cover art should look like.  I'm not going to tell you the entire title because I want you to stay curious readers.  Maybe Wednesday would be a good time to tell you.  Stay tuned to the continuing adventures of this twenty-something poet!

Brian, Steve and I have started a writing group that is generating significant interest within our friendship circles.  The group has grown pretty rapidly, so on Sunday we had a smaller-than-usual get together, just the original three of us.  We had to hash out what exactly we want to get out from the group.  Then we got down to exchanging ideas and actually writing.

The guys were very helpful, giving me ideas of how to break out of the slump I'm in with my poetry collection.  Both Brian and Steve gave me good ideas about presenting the poems.   I've always had this ideas of presenting the poems against a backdrop of commentary.  The guys helped me think of great new ways to approach that.

However, thinking about it afterwards, I started to wonder why I didn't just publish the poems by themselves.  Throw them naked onto white pages and see if they can speak for themselves.  I think I've just been trying to pad the collection.  But hey, my poems may not be the longest, or the deepest, but they represent my thoughts and feelings.  I'm pretty much done writing them; let them sink or swim by themselves.

So, my new deadline is Wednesday, November 15.  In that time, I will edit the poems for the final time, organize them, design how I want them to look in the book, and upload the final version to Lulu.com.  That does not mean that it will be available to everyone on November 15.  I want to order a preview copy from Lulu before I let the people get at it.  I can edit all I like, but I know I will probably spot some mistakes in the preview copy.

Hey, it would be cool if I beat this deadline!

I watched about forty-five minutes of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining this evening.  I've never seen it before, and I didn't watch to the end, but I noticed three things that made the forty-five minutes I did see quite spectacular.  For one thing, the music is spooky, with a dark, ambient thing going on.  Also, the editing was amazing.  There was this one part where the boy is looking down an empty hallway or something, when you suddenly see the image of two freaky little girls, just for a fraction of a second.  I got chills.  It was so well done.  The third thing is that there are a lot of scenes shot in a straight line.  For instance, you first see Jack at his desk, and during the scene, you gradually see the rest of the room as the camera operator walks backwards.  (Wikipedia says that this is called a tracking shot, and that The Shining is the first time a Stedicam was used so extensively. A Stedicam allows the camera operator to walk without shaking the camera.)  You also see the boy peddling his trike down the hotel hallways, and the camera follows him from behind perfectly and at about his eye level.

All of these things combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts.  From even a portion of the movie, I get the idea that Kubrick was serious about affecting his audience any way he could.  It's the tiny details that count.  I also like the location of the story.  It is one of those stories that was conceived from a what if question, such as, "What if a small family lived in a large, empty, snowed-in hotel?"  The juxtaposition of a small young family onto such a large and roomy building is slightly chilling to begin with.  It provides the basis for scary things later on.  I guess that is Stephen King's doing.  Is the book also set in a hotel?  Let me know if you've read it.

Here is a cool tidbit from this Wikipedia article: "It has been said that part of the reason for King's dislike of the film was that Kubrick pestered the author with constant phone calls during production. Kubrick reportedly once woke King at 3 a.m. to ask 'Do you believe in God?'"

The reason that I have written about a movie that I didn't even finish watching is because I learned something about setting, juxtaposition, and suspense from it.  I have a weird philosophy about learning how to be a poet/writer.  Take U2 for instance.  As a wannabe poet, I believe that I can learn as much about poetry from The Edge's guitar playing as I can from Bono's lyrics.  Bono teaches me about painting stories from raw images, but the Edge teaches me about minimalism, and how to use a few notes (characters, scenes, words, whatever) beautifully and effectively.  I think I have learned as much tonight from watching forty-five minutes of Kubrick as I have learned from reading poetry.  I have a poor memory, so I try to log stuff like this as soon as I can.  All the learning in the world will not help me if I forget it by tomorrow morning.

Beehive

Here, buddy.  Take a look at this.  I found it at work today, and I don't really know what it's for.  Is it a piece from some kind of learning toy?  For some reason, I like it.  There is something about it; it is a piece of mystery.  It had a use once.  Now, it can become anything.

Sometimes I wonder what happens to information and objects that we don't need anymore.  Think about all the pieces of information we create every day: to-do lists, schedules, doodles, rough drafts, etc.  Most of it goes straight to the garbage, but I bet that some of it floats around for a while.  We often assume that our discarded info is not relevant to anyone else.  But what if it can find a new life for itself?

Found poetry, for example, gives a use to words beyond their intended use.

BookCrossing.com is an interesting project. Basically, people leave books lying around for other people to pick up and read.  Inside the front cover is a tracking number that you can use at the BookCrossing website.  You enter the number to find out where the book came from.   You can also leave a brief journal entry to help the book's previous readers can keep tabs on it!  After you read the book, you leave it lying around for someone else to pick up.  Cool, eh?  Kind of like a message in a bottle.

Have you encountered a BookCrossing book or something similar?  What other types of information continue to have a life after we have discarded it?

Ander Zed took the good luck charm from his pocket, staring distractedly at it for a few moments.  In a few minutes, he was going to board a starship bound for colonies of the Riiven System    After two and a half years of space travel, he would step onto alien soil.  He wondered if he could raise bees there.

He wondered where the ancient charm had come from.  What was its history before the day the strange old lady had pressed it into his hand?  That had been a good day.  That was the day he had decided to become a colonist.

Charm held tightly in his fist, Ander Zed boarded the starship.

Thanks to Robin and BASS for their encouraging comments about the importance of dark poetry!  Robin said that dark poems can be encouraging because they help people realize that they are not alone with their problems.  I can see that. Sometimes we feel alone because other people's surfaces look bright and undisturbed.  I certainly do, sometimes.  Once I sink beneath a person's surface, I start to realize that they are not so unlike me.  Thanks, Robin!

BASS said, very eloquently, that dark poems, "are more rooted in realism and create something beautiful from the darkness."  I usually equate darkness with death, instead of with creation.  But, when I think about it, God created the universe in a dark void, and we are all born out of a dark womb.  Thanks, BASS.  Shoot, now I wish I had written more dark poems!

Putting this collection together is a real learning experience!  Remember how I said that getting at the truth of a poem helps me to proceed with it?  Well, the previous entry and the very encouraging comments have helped me envision the collection more clearly.  Imagine the project as a buliding.  A tall building needs deep foundations.  I'll build the collection on a firm foundation of deep, challlenging poems.  After that, I'll work on the lighter, brighter poems.

If this metaphor continues to work for me, maybe I'll finally find a title for the collection!  Something to do with skyscrapers, maybe?

Sometimes when I am writing a poem, and I hit a wall, it is because I am not telling the truth.  Something about the poem is off; something about it is too contrived.  In order to fix the problem, I have to rethink the poem, and get at the truth of it.

Something has been bothering me since I began putting my poetry collection together.  I had decided to sort the poems so that they showed a journey from darkness (depression) to light (joy).  That's just not true of my own journey in the last six years.  I did not begin writing poetry at a dark time in my life, and gradually journey into the light.  No.  It has been a roller coaster ride.  The poems are a mixed bag of laundry: some of the poems are clean and bright, mixed in with muddy, blood-stained poems.

The trouble with this truth is that I now wonder what I have to offer with this collection.  I think I wanted the journey-into-light theme to give people hope.  However, the truth is that trouble haunts us throughout our lives.  Likewise, light dawns on many of us now and then, off and on.  Maybe the hope that I can offer from my own experience is that light does not disappear forever.  Sometimes we hide from light.  In the middle of stress and sadness, I know that there is still sunlight that I can walk out into.  The trick is to leave your book bag of stress and trouble in your locker, and step out into the bright sunlight. Hmmm.  Doesn't the warm sun feel good on your back?  Feel that fresh breeze?

It's like the old joke: if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes!  Grab the sunny moments as they happen.  Store them up for a rainy day.

That last sentence is a variation of a line from one of my darkest poems, "Old Man Snoring." What if there is more light in that poem than I could see when I wrote it?  What if my dark poems are nothing to be ashamed of?  What if they are powerful and useful in their own way?