Since I will have to write more than 10,000 words in new papers alone, never mind the ones that still need to be rewritten (oh, like the one that’s so bad it got no grade at all), there will be most likely no blogging.

But to tide you all over, I wrote a very bad poem about “dead week.” Just in case you were wondering what it is I have to do—and I admit, my list is pretty light. E’s been working non-stop for the last three weeks with no let up, and Ame hasn’t seen her boyfriend for more than 2–3 hours a week in awhile. As English majors, we’ve got it pretty easy. And no group projects, thank heaven.

So, I’m turning my radio up, tuning the world out, and going to give myself finger-cramps before the week is out.

Poem after the jump. I didn’t want to torture you with my bad poetry unneccessarily.

Dead Week

They say that this is dead week.
There was a memo sent out,
Instructing the instructors
“No tests this week, review only.”
Isn’t a paper a sort of test? And what about
Projects and assignments and reports;
Aren’t they all tasks designed to see if
We’ve learned what they’ve set us?
By the end of the week, I will have written

How Ethnicity Affects My Life:
Three pages double spaced,
About how my family has tried —
In the way that only a caucasian family can—
To return to roots that they’ve
Never had, to give their children
A sense of belonging in a world
That everyone assumes belongs to them.

Town Hall Rhetoric: Who’s Listening
2000 words not about the topic—
Education in California, and the budget
Cuts that are affecting the CSUs,
Just in case you were wondering—
But about how the participants
Responded to each other, or didn’t.

Gender and Sexuality in Dracula:
The longest of the papers, but the easiest—
If I can move past the the literary
Criticism that bewildered while it explained
Gender and sex, sex and sexuality,
Sexuality and sexual proclivity—
I could write this paper in my sleep,
And the way this week is looking,
I just might.

If this is supposed to be dead week—
Not even counting the rewrites of past
Papers still due in a final portfolio,
Or a graphic poster advertising a farmers’
Market that the English majors
Have been copyediting as they go along,
Not part of the assignment, but we can’t
Ignore bad grammar and construction,
And the most glaring of errors, 12noon.
And of course there is a press release
For the chapbook we’ve been working
On all semester, an in-class assessment —
Then obviously, what they mean
By dead week is that by the end,
With all this work set, I’ll be dead.
Resurrection just in time for finals.

It’s still working it’s way through the cogs of my head, trying to find the right images (words will follow later, I hope). I’ve taken E’s advice, writing everything down that I can imagine, trying to figure out which images to string together, where my emotion is.

(By the by — does anyone know how to attach something physical to music? Because that’s the image I’m struggling with right now. Everything else has had actual physical equivalents, but music eludes me. I want to attach something to a song, so that everyone can see it, not just a copy that I own, like a CD.)

Instead of struggling with the most awesome awesomeness to come out of my imagination, I’ve started on a poem that is inspired by a single line: I wanted to write you a love poem.

This work is entirely different that what I usually write. To begin with, couplets. I don’t think I’ve ever actually written couplets, and it’s interesting to try to think about where the line breaks should be, and as I add and change lines throughout the poem, I have to be mindful of the couplet breaks.

The imagery is different than usual, too, since usually I attempt a single running metaphor (the universe, perhaps?), and this one switches up three times, but it makes sense because it’s more stream of thought than I usually attempt.

Think Billy Collins, really. I’ve been gorging on poetry between chapters of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins required for class, and his poetry moves me like nothing else, and there are no “love poems” so much that there are poems filled with love.

My poem is… I know I know, this would be so much easier if I could share the poem with you all, but I’m working on it for submission for the Sigma Tau Delta lit mag, and I don’t want to put it up here and have that count as prior publication and thus get excluded solely for that. But once it gets rejected, I promise to share it with you all.

But I’m really excited. It’s like my muse has decided this is the week she’s going to be awesome. This week, I heart poetry. And to show you, here’s one of my favorite Collin’s poems, animated. I think all poems should get the “music video” treatment.

Which makes it so odd, then, that so often there are poems that attempt to worm their way out of my head.

I have every poem I’ve ever written since I was 10. I started collecting them into a journal notebook when I was in the eighth grade. I started actually writing poetry in drafts when I was 23. I have never written anything that I would send out for publication.

It is very interesting to flip through that self-made poem book, and see how my poetry has evolved. I look back on those high school poems, so full of angst and anger and death, and can’t remember a single event that caused me to feel that way. They read a lot like the journal from my sophomore/junior year. Full of emotion, hardly any images. And so very much crap. Only the thought that I’d probably burn down the condo keeps me from burning this book.

My poetry now revolves around images. Scenes in my head that mean more than just the event. The hardest part is to get out the emotion behind the image. It’s like for some reason, my brain cannot process both into the same poem. It’s always either/or, never both.

I am very lucky that I have a wide group of friends who all write, or all understand the process of writing (but deny that they write), and are willing to listen while I hash out ideas and images and emotions. I’m never at a loss for finding someone available when I need to talk through my writing.¹

Right now, there is a poem that needs to fall out onto the page. I’ve been thinking about it on and off for the last week. I have an image that’s been building. I know what the emotion is. I have absolutely no words to string together. ME and Am think it’s an absolutely brilliant idea. E tells me to write about it like I write stories — describing everything I see, and maybe the poem will come. I day dream about the poem while I’m in class, the image running through my head like a music video to a song with no lyrics.

I need to get these lyrics out. It’s a love song, both happy and sad. Hopeless and hopeful. Haunting and haunted. It’s pretty much going to be the best thing I’ve ever imagined.

But first I must get the damn image on the page without losing the emotion.

1. Thank you! omfg thank you! I’d go crazy without you all!

This is a different type of piece for me though. It’s based in real life on real events, but from someone’s point of view that is not mine. It’s an exercise in imagining what it’s like to be someone else, especially someone I don’t know very well. It’s also focused more on the internal character development, as opposed to the dialog that I usually rely so heavily on.

I don’t think that this piece will ever see the light of day, except with a few select friends who I trust with my life and my secrets, because the piece is intensely personal for being from another point of view.

However, it’s good to finally be able to stretch my imagination again. I haven’t written anything but half a poem since January; the words have been bottled up inside me, which is always an uncomfortable situation. I’m always coughing up chunks of dialog or exposition that goes no where, free to roam the wind because I didn’t catch them with my butterfly net and pin them down.

This piece though, has got me thinking about writing another story, with the same starting inspiration, but with entirely fictional characters and fictional events. Of course, some true-to-life events will slip in, but only because I couldn’t make it up better than it happened, and it’s what caused me to open up a text window and tap out a few words here and there until they were lined up into a story.

It’s such a relief to have the words back, to finally pour onto the page what is inside me. I was afraid they would be gone for good, that nothing would come to me again.

I can’t wait until my characters start taking over, when things come out that I never expected or imagined. I missed my imagination taking me someplace new, someplace unmapped and undiscovered.