Goose Hill

Inspired by poet-professor Jehanne Dubrow's blog post "Someday Soon" , I've decided to create a new list of my personal goals for the near future. I also did this last summer, but with pen and paper, and it really can be helpful: * to plant (and not kill) the basil and rosemary seedlings I have waiting out back in their temporary containers. * to write one poem a week even if it's crappy (although I'd rather it be wonderful and fulfilling). * to get Chester Cat Press started with Emma . * to find some suitable, non-plastic lawn furniture. * to make some more pesto (hopefully, with the basil in my tiny herb garden), and pesto mayo. Mmmm... * to make something tangible of my collaboration with my painter-friend Emily , maybe a handmade chapbook, poems and illustrations, bound with red linen thread. Hmmmm... * to submit more poems to literary magazines. * to get my grandmother's 1950s Smith-Corona manual typewriter fixed-up and unstuck so I can use it to type...

So says Neil Gaiman. And I agree with him, but he also clarifies that statement saying that we do in fact get stuck on occasion. It's not as serious a situation as the term "writer's block" suggests with it's clinical sounding name, kind of like "tennis elbow" or "library knee" (which is when the knees audibly crack every time one bends them due to years of book-shelving--so, I made that one up, but I definitely have it). The point is, that kind of hypochondria won't fly around here anymore. But I have been stuck in my writing for quite a few weeks now, which tends to be a bit depressing and frustrating. I think my problem right now is more a lack of focus. I have all this pent up creative energy, this great urge to write, but I am really struggling with the ability to focus this energy on a particular subject. I want to write, but I don't know what I want to write about and that doesn't really do much good. My hope is that,...

Lately, I've been considering the fun of collaboration. My new friend Emily is a painter who has similar obsessions with folk and fairy tales and the like; and right now she's mulling over a few poems of mine to illustrate. I can't wait to see what she imagines visually from my words. Not to mention how flattered I am that she even wanted to use my poems as inspiration. I've often said that one of the reasons I was drawn to poetry as far back as I can remember is that I have no talent for visual art. Poetry allows me to express these often very visual ideas that I have, but with words rather than line and color and texture. I'm excited to see the reverse of this, to see what someone else sees when they read my poetry, to see what I could not draw or paint on my own. While I'm waiting on that project, I decided I'd try it the other way around: write a poem based on one of Emily's paintings. Ironically enough, I had actually started a poem a few months a...

Bookmaking is another activity of mine. Put that together with the writing, reading, letterpress printing, and library-work and I'm a very well-rounded bibliophile. A recent project of mine was making reversible poetry journals. By reversible I mean that the cover art allows for either end to be the front. It could even end up being a two-headed notebook; it's just full of possibilities, as most blank pages are. This "cover art" though is actually segments from "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop (one of my favorites).

Everything in the apartment is just a bit crooked. The false tile lines in the kitchen linoleum slant into the bottom borders of the cabinets and the sink. The slight diagonal of the light switch in the spare room is exaggerated by the decorative switch plate. And I don't think the ceiling and floor run exactly parallel either. But it's all somehow fitting. My cat is a found cat. My friends discovered her outside of their dorm and gave her tuna fish and named her Kione (meaning "the one who came from nowhere"). But eventually we had to take this refugee off-campus and my place became her sanctuary. That's been nearly a year and a half ago. Now she's a luxurious housecat, although in some ways she seems to be part dog. She always greets me at the door, she wags her tail when she is in full purr-mode, and she drinks out of the toilet. She's perfect. We also happen to have a dog lodging with us for the moment. She is (or was) my brother's dog, whom he nam...

Not only is April National Poetry Month, it is also the month of my birthday. So exciting. Seriously. I also like to boast every now and then that I share my birthday (April 23rd) with Shakespeare. Granted, I'm sure LOTS of other people have this same birthday, but it makes me feel special sometimes. Oddly enough though, for someone as poetry-obsessed as I am, I don't actually have a favorite poem. I know, weird. Someday I will sit down and think about it and maybe then I'll decide. Or maybe not.

Since December I have been working on a particular poetry project. This summer I wrote a poem of which I was really proud called "Jack." It took bits of the Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale and mixed them up with a child learning how to speak. I began with an image and just elaborated on it until I had a bit of story (which seems to be my primary poetry-writing method). But I think it became more than elaborated image when I made a little discovery through the writing of it. I had been stuck for a while smack dab in the middle of the poem; I needed some direction. Then one day it occurred to me: "Fe, fi, fo, fum." What is particularly of note, linguistically-speaking, in this folktale refrain? It contains mono-syllables using all the vowels in alphabetical order (excluding "a," of course). Silly or not, this was the point at which the poem really began to take shape and become one of my favorites: Jack for little Anna Sovich Lips full as lima bean pods, ...