FORM!

sigh... this blog butchers the form of my poems... oh well (for now!), the title of the last poem is EXERCISE. I figure that's all you need to go on.

Workshop Try

Exercise
Our gravel road
is steep to the point of
hallelujah.
We ride bikes – the neighbors say –
towards the grass shoulder,
and you alert me to a new notion:
grass is slippery – watch out for
cows.
Sometimes
neighborhood kids
grab our spokes, the chain-rings
piercing their hands.
I say it reminds me of Christ;
you assure me I’m being
myopic.
And when it rains, I’ve promised
to always put a bucket
(you prefer “metal pail”) at the end
of the ruts made from
larger tires than ours.
We can drink
at last,
but I can only ever
find a Dixie cup to collect water.

Long Time

Hey, long time no see BLOG. Well, grad school has taken a better turn. Just about finished grading my first round of papers, and I already have realized that I need to look into going about that a little differently. I need to embrace this 9 - 5 office situation, then I bet I'll have more freedom in the evenings to do some pleasure reading and writing. My biggest concern right now is that I can't seem to balance myself among all of my schooling facets. I've got to be a teacher, I've got to be a theory/pedagogy student, and I've got to be a poetry student. Why am I here in the first place? Poetry. But I care about what I do, even to my own peril and contradiction sometimes. Right now, I either have weeks that are weighted towards pedagogy, weeks towards poetry, or weeks towards teaching. And you know the real kicker here? I don't even intend to have this flux. So, my new approach is this 9 to 5 and we'll see how those cards are played out. I'd also like to get back to the intensity and passion I had for the poetry and this blog, my whole idea of poetry online, of a NON-concern with publication (professionally). Don't get me wrong, it'd be nice, or rather "not bad," but I don't think that should enter a writer's mind when they are writing or editing. If it comes it comes. Of course you need to submit, but getting down on rejections, that's just a little naive I think. Hello, Life, good to see you again.

Well, more poetic musings to come, I hope. If not, those few and proud, hold me to it!

Schomburg

Link to a couple Zarchary Schomburg poems that I absolutely love. This is what I want my poetry to be like:

http://thediagram.com/4_3/schomburg.html

Poetically Powered

Feeling a bit off lately. I've been thinking a lot about how workshop went last week and wanting to turn something in that, I guess, they think is good or what they are "looking for." Yet, most of me resents this. So, I'm putting a poem on here that I likely won't turn in (at least not this week... might not turn anything in. I'm really fried).

Some Notices

1. 1.Charred men slowly exchange a bowl of water.

2. 2. A baker squeezes parchment out of a purple cow intestine.

3. 3. Gray typewriters catapult into recycle bins adjacent to the Hudson on a bright winter morning.

4. 4. Raw sewage in soufflé dishes, topped wi –

5. 5. I walked up a long, gradual hill last night – paved all the way (some fresh, mostly old and knowledgeable), challenged by crumbling sidewalks – in pain: I ingested fast food quick enough that nothing remained of my 4 piece nuggests and chicken sandwich by the time I parked the car (e.t.a. from restaurant = 3 minutes).

6. 6. Ancient Communists take up Vaudeville for an afternoon.

7. 7. Wooo! Free Fatty Acids!

8. 8. This is a car battery; it will be your husband.

9. 9. 9,

Deep Image

This is a poem from my other blog (AA/P) that I feel fits with what I am trying to accomplish on Jet Plane:

Vive

He draws the hills in meditation
with the lead on his tires.

They are thin, not unlike
the pencils used in
standardized tests.

The hills come smooth,
and rugged, with animal skin.

Leaves pass in a blur,
his morning and afternoon:
squirrel’s tail.

In his calf muscle
are deer with full racks
and frost.

Format

A note on the formats of the poems:

I had this problem with my other blog, AA/P, but for some reason my formats for the poems go completely askew when I post them. Just take that into consideration. The last poem, "Oddities," is supposed to be entirely comprised of couplets. So, there you have it...

Dusty Poem

This is a poem I found in the back of one of my journals that I remember being utterly consumed by when I was writing it. It was like I couldn't stop. I wrote probably half of it at an open mic and read it right then. Enjoy, I guess:

Oddities of Boulevard

M.L. London

Men and women surging against my path,

I put on a raincoat, feeling excited.

One child twirls a straw that makes howling noises;

it clips my sleeve and sends me into a frenzy.

The men and women surge, I rebuttal with echoes of my school teachers:

wherewithal of yellow desk chairs.

Before it gets loud – the surging –

my pockets open to the memory of my summer at sea.

I feel sand in the corners, and my lips

are a brilliant, muted purple.

God save the queen, a woman says, surging.

She picks up her toaster oven and moves away.

I slip back into the wooden hull of a boat;

my mother is statuesque against the brig.

The boat is our boat, but my father hasn’t signed for it.

Crew members scuttle the boat, and we are left out of the mad-dash.

Men and women surge – my path inhales

and exhales the beating of rubber shoe soles.

My mom carries me out of the water.

She sees an abandoned light house erected on boulders near a river’s mouth.

I weigh more than she does, so the sand compacts and breaks

and dissolves into stars along the sea’s rim.

Two gentlemen with accordions trot past me, surge in their step,

making it hot inside my raincoat.

I tried to smile, but their cigars caught me by surprise.

Somewhere I remembered I smoked.

Indian chiefs masqueraded their totem pole

as a lighthouse: so my mother was mistaken.

They welcomed us all the same –

but we don’t smoke (I know my dad does).

The street sweepers are too busy this time of year

to do anything about the melted popcorn on the side of the gutter.

It looks as if the crowd will clear

and men and women surge on my rocks.

My father always told me to drive standing up,

but I was never a fan of attention.

The joke was on him, I think, and before he could tear up,

gasoline became like the red chairs we had on our boat.

Perhaps the taxidermist could make a new one;

afterall, the joke never sank this close to the Indians.

I saw a taxi over the heads of the men and women surging.

I would have to take off my raincoat if they’d let me pay the fair.

The shore was light like yellow,

but my mother was far from my cradle.

There were bank tellers attached to sycamore trees

that told my gypsy-mother our dream was closer than the Indian smoke signals.

Men and women surge against my path with sticks and dowel rods,

and I can’t see through the sewer steam.

Our bodies wafted through pools of black absinthe,

numbing my middle-school days with pink elixir.

My mother and gypsy-mother wandered ahead

holding a Christ-torch with enflamed flame engulfed Black Christians.

Newspaper delivery boys and girls in pink gingham berets

trickled through the surging men and women, all on bicycles.

The red bell hop helped open the doors to a Gothic abbey

for my new sister; I held her thigh.

The thought of blood-elephants portrayed their breasts

to a jury of prostitutes, and I only looked on.

Any mention of my sister being pregnant made my mother sick,

but my gypsy-mother could only sit.

Men and women sure around my raincoat,

the buttons and lapels resemble the path.

Cry-baby-Daves and Dakes flourished for

our pocket money. My father signed for the boat.

And six gifted merchants traded purple belts

for a night’s stay in our adjoining satchel.

Red ribbons tightened in the hair of a new wave

of men and women surging against my path.

Tee-pees and horse carriages brought home my father;

my mothers and sister left me in a pine needle thicket.

They sat and chased a dragon on the clapboard ceiling

to the tune of an 18^th century organ melody.

Gothic barriers to grotesque, jaundice serf

bombarded the doors of the building – windows depicted the flesh-maelstrom.

Lauren Bean and Parsley stew, split pea soul

drenched the petticoats of the men and women surging against my path.

Three sheets to the wind, my father remembered then ink pen;

the boat was never ours, and he complained about his knee.

Workshop: Try #2

Full Size

Matt London

This blanket used to have form.

It could walk into a restaurant,

and the waiter would snap out a table for it

just like that.

It cursed like a sailor, said he was its bride.

Nobody cared about its manners, they just

let it be… let it be cool.

One story goes like this

(and this is from at least 2 different sources):

it owned a fast car, something red –

cops would never dream of pulling it over.

New Desk

On a positive note(!): I am starting a new desk fund and planning stage. It's exciting because I'm gonna get rid of the behomoth in my room now and put in a corner desk to better utilize my space. You say "blah blah blah, Matt, get to the point..." well here it is: I'm going to get a "cheap" black corner desk from Walmart made out of that compressed/composite wood stuff (who knows what it's really made out of) and take a silver sharpie and write my favorite poems, quotes, lines of stories, titles, and conversations on the desk itself. I got the idea from my very influential friend Josh Giacometti, but he did this to the walls in his room (outrageous, right?! love it).

Pictues to come.

Grad School

Grad school is harder than I thought, and it's only the second week still. It seems all I do is read, and, get this, it's not even the stuff I came here for. I've read a little bit of poetry, but most of my time is taken up with students' papers and a tertiary class that I've been required to take as part of my GTA-ship. I like teaching, so I don't mind that. I guess my real hang-up is that required class that I have right before my poetry workshop. So by the time I get to poetry, I'm completely cooked, as it is at 7 tonight and my pedagogy course preceeds it at 4 and I taught all morning. Whew, I don't know how I'm going to get through this...

Read This

Jim Goar's book that I highly recommend to anyone. A friend lent me this book over a year ago in undergrad and it changed my whole writing sytle... forever. The poems seem like they were born with the illustrations and conventions of the book.

Workshop: Try #1

Poem I turned in this week for workshop; it's based on Jerome Rothenberg's work in Shaking the Pumpkin.

Sacrament of a Newborn Parchment

Matthew L. London

A man stands with his face towards a young tree. He thinks of garbage – condiment refuse. Two women hold 3 day old newspapers and look at the man. They draw leading men from Hollywood’s golden age in purple oil paint on page two and five. The man does an about-face and remembers the first time he had an erection. More men stand beside the young tree. The women become exhausted and use the newspapers to stuff in their shoes and put them on a metal folding chair for display. The men set the shoes on fire and recite the alphabet, leaving out the letters “D” and “W.” After the shoes become glowing embers, the women shout the Pythagorean Theorem and everyone takes turns improvising Anton Chekov scenes (not “Uncle Vanya”).