Words and pictures

Or word pictures. That's part of what we do, right?

I'm getting ready for our annual anniversary trip to Lummi Island—our seventh year celebrating our anniversary there and our tenth anniversary.

I thought that maybe I should get a real camera—maybe one of those disposable digital cameras, which is real but not too real—instead of relying the pictures that my cell phone takes.

Then I wondered whether I would still need poems if I had pictures. A momentary anxiety, sung to the drum of "a picture's worth a thousand words." And a face could launch a thousand ships. Anything else?

But it got me thinking about how visual images and written images play off each other and add to each other. And it led me to think about what a poem offers beyond visual images. For me, a visual image is often, or more often than not, a starting point. The poetry part comes in moving beyond that visual image—and sometimes I don't get so far. I think that in The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo calls this "writing off the subject." For me, that's the challenge.

Any tricks, tips, suggestions, or exercises for moving a poem beyond the visual?

And I'll try to get my act together and bring back some photographs.

3…2…1… Launch

My new poetry website: www.poetryonthesofa.com.

Why a website? Why a sofa?

I don't get out much. Other people—some other people—don't get out much. And some of my poems don't get out much.

I remember this wonderful commercial from the '90s in which a woman was lounging on a divan and looking languid and exotic and a salesman was trying to explain to her why she wanted wireless. She looked bored until he said, "It will bring the Internet to your sofa."
She looked up. "To my sofa?!"

I thought, "That's me!" (except for the exotic part).

So I decided to make myself a virtual sofa and supplement my publication efforts by putting some of my poems online—dance poems for my dance friends to read, proverb poems because they work best in a batch, and a few other things.

This is an early version. I plan to add more poems and even more media. I'm also hoping to make it look a little swankier.

But here it is: a little metaphor, a lot of HTML, and maybe a pillow.

Feel free to stop by anytime.

And now, it's time for me to get back to writing.

Coming soon...

Poetry on the sofa

Not my person, not my personal?

This morning, while riding down the hill, I was thinking about my Camargue poems. Actually, I was thinking about a friend of ours from France and how she might enjoy reading them and maybe, when I really think they're ready, I should just throw them up on my website and skip the whole submission/rejection cycle.

I thought, "No one will want to publish these."

And then I thought, "Why not?"

A block or two later, I thought I might have found an answer: Personal experience.

I'm writing about characters—other people who aren't even real—but they still need to contain something of my real personal experience, those deep down emotions that are central to who I am, who I've become.

What?

Fiction writers must do this all the time. I suspect that Peter has been doing it as he pounds out his novel.

Maybe it's part of that emotional arc. Or (I thought) maybe it's more like acting—specifically, method acting (specifically, the Stanislavsky method one hears, or used to hear, so much about).

Is this an integral part of writing any poem? Am I doing it already and don't realize it? Or have I been holding back, staying on the outside?

(Note: I was never a very good actress.)

I'm not sure. But if there's a flaw in these poems, I suspect this is at least a big part of it.

Do you ever feel like you're missing the personal depths?

Pushing limits, a little bit at a time

This summer, I'm noticing a difference in my bicycling. It's an incremental (tiny) shift: I'm still the slowest thing on two wheels, but I feel stronger, less tentative, less winded.

I wish I could get that same shift in my poetry, take it up a notch or even two? How to do that, other than writing, writing, writing? Metaphorical hills?

If only my poems were as solid as my calves.

How do you stretch? How do you grow?

Orange-colored glasses

Forget rose—an orange outlook is what you want in gray weather.

This is a strange summer: rain in mid-July. I can't remember the last time this happened. But I am well-equipped.

Earlier in the year, when I bought some glasses for cycling, the pair I picked out came with three sets of lenses: dark for bright days, rose for the other days, and orange.

"What does the orange do?" I asked.

The guy at the bike store said that the orange lenses don't really do anything, except that when you wear them in the rain, they make everything look brighter and they cheer you up.

It's true.

As I rode down hill in the drizzle with my books and clothes stowed in a plastic garbage sack inside my cool-but-not-too-functional KUOW messenger bag, I felt happy. Summer still looked pretty good.

So if the rain has you feeling blue, you might want to find some orange glasses, too.

As for writing, I'm still coding HTML. And I'm getting all my best ideas for and about poetry at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning—which is when my half my brain wants to work and the other half claims that my body needs its beauty sleep. Maybe tonight, one side or the other will win.

My next obsession

On Thursday, I became the owner of a domain name—and since then, I've been coding, coding, coding HTML. Very little reading, and less writing poetry or even here.

Smarter, or better-prepared, people have software, but I don't, so I've been building a little website in Notepad.

Stay tuned.