Copy and paste:
Always a good time at Nakachi’s reading. I always like reading there, because you get a genuine reaction from the audience, which for me is a helpful performance/editing tool. It made me mad at my own body for being sick in various ways for the past few months. But now I’m reading to get back out to all the readings I can.
I feel like, in the past year, I’ve started to finally “get” poetry. In the poetry workshop classes in college I always felt so lost, that I wasn’t reading poems correctly, and anytime I had to do an analysis of a poem I felt like there was a message I just wasn’t getting, and I had more questions than answers.
After my first class, I got burned out and pretty much stopped reading poetry, in any form, and writing “academic” poetry altogether, only reading and writing poems for class. I wrote poetry-like pieces, but a lot of them were just rants. They may have been labelled slam poems– I remember reading a couple of those types of poems at open mics in England and getting a good reaction.
But this year. I’m not sure how, or why– I suspect it may be actually workshopping with awesome poets and seeing some phenominal local talent– but this year, I went back to writing stuff for the page again, feeling somewhat like (what I would define as) a Poet for once. I don’t feel like a Real Poet, I don’t feel my stuff is really that strong to send out to journals, but I’m feeling more comfortable playing with form and line. I feel like my images are starting to become a little more focused, even if they are on a scale like they’re letterboxed. Somehow I started reading poems made for the page and they made sense.
I think just having more life experience helped with that, but last year I felt like reading and making poems clicked finally. It may explain why I did so much fiction in the interim between my junior year of college and last year– I just wasn’t in the mindset to get poems, so I didn’t read any.
I pulled a muscle right next to my right shoulder blade while I was sleeping last night. It makes turning my head to the left really fucking difficult. But I worked out for my half hour anyway, because I’m a glutton for punishment.
And going to work since my brother took the night off, which was fine with me.
Speaking of, if any of you local peeps are going to be around for the Super Bowl on Sunday and wouldn’t mind leaving me alone to deal with a bunch of drunken blokes, I’ll be at Noreen’s all day, eating hot dogs and trying not to get groped. Please, come down. It’ll be interesting to say the least.
I won’t be drinking, since one of us has to stay sober, but you can at least laugh at my brother.
