In the Table

If I look
closely,
with my head
pressed to the wooden table,
and if the light
from a warm, April afternoon,
hits us
(me and the wood)
together...

If I look
closely,
I can see myself,
trapped,
in the table,
in the wooden
lines.

My nose
(its faint outline-long and German)

I am there,
if only for an
afternoon moment.

quantum scimus sumus

To become aware for the first time,
bringing myself to light:
refracted rays of sunlight;

Grabbing at its tail,
slipping through my fingertips,
I glisten in the warm glow.

I am what I know:

Nonconforming helps be sleep at night.
I write because I have to.
Reading is good for me.
I am solid and sound and insecure and brave.
I am one person.
I am emotional.
I forget.
I reconstruct my memories again and again.
I am constantly learning

quantum

               scimus 

                             sumus 

I create this space, this silence
for me, for you, for us.

In vino veritas

When commotion starts: kids at play,
I steal away;
A glass of wine in my hand
and disappear into my land
to read poetry.
And calm my mind.

Light

The quality of light from my window is black.
An absence of light.
Cold.  Dark.  Frigid
wind blowing outside.
A single car drives past onto some black road
into the black night
leaving my window behind.

He will never escape the darkness.
He will just drive onward trying to
lose it, but he cannot.

A writer with nothing particular to say

Flirting isn't the right word.  I am teetering with the idea of being a writer.  It is unsteady and lonely.  I like to write.  I love to read.  I know that I am capable of penning my thoughts.  I can definitely structure my days (blocking out specific time) to include writing.  Hell, I got my Master's and PhD while working and having kids.  I'm no stranger to late nights.  The difference?  With those, I had something specific to say.  I had a required format to communicate my ideas.  I wrote essays and papers and theses and a dissertation: hours and hundreds of pages.  It was difficult and sometimes I just wanted to go to bed, but the words always came.  They always came.

Now, I journal about my days, copy favorite poems, and every now and then I notice something that I try to fit into a poem.  The words come, but what do they say?  I'm not a pastoral poet.  I am not trying to communicate my love of summer evenings.  I'm no Allen Ginsberg.  I am not trying to describe getting drunk or the misguided politics of 2017.  I'm a dad.  I'm an educator on summer vacation.  I'm a writer with nothing particular to say.

I Hear America Crying

I hear America crying, the multitude sobs and sighs I hear,
Those of mothers, each one crying hers as they should be,
The child crying hers as she is called inside before dusk,
The father crying his as he makes ready for work, hoping he returns,
The student crying foul at the misogynist comment made by
his professor during a lecture,
The immigrant crying as he sits with his family fearing the
knock at the door,
The lawyer's song, the 25th Amendment rolling around his
head and off his lips,
The angry sobs of the mother, or of the sister, or of the
grandmother, or of the aunt -- all singing their laments together
for those lost lives: stolen from them instead of protected;
Each crying what belongs to them (undeserved and forced) and
to none else,
The day what belongs to this 4th of July -- at night the party of young
fellows, somber and scared,
Crying with open mouths their strong fight-song:

knowing where wheels and people are,
knowing where cops and traps are,
knowing where deaths are, where the kind kills are.

Converting all sounds of woe
into fine fury.

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Every summer I begin the process
of unsubscribing from mailing lists
I either don't read, or I forgot I joined.

And so begins my process:

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looking for the fine print;

becoming lonely.


See, an inbox of 25 new emails
(3 of which are important)
makes me feel connected and important.
I delete them
because I can.

Slowly, by the end of the summer,
I open my email to discover
I have 0 unread messages;
No responsibilities:

just my pen and paper
and thoughts.
See, I want to remember

what it was like before
the clicks and retweets

and empty importance.

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Summertime

He collapses in the grass:
the shade of a baby tree
not tall enough to provide anything.

Every so often, he turns and
looks at me: ten turns to two;
he seems so tall for a toddler.

The neighborhood boys stand sentry
discussing summertime,
passing around a water bottle

flipping it to stand on
it's own.
How proud they look

standing and loitering on their own.

Get busy and do some actual writing!

Stephen King just told me to take the act of writing seriously, and he's right.  Perhaps that is my problem: I write as a distraction, but I don't get serious; I hold back, attempting to pen poetic phrases instead of just saying "Fuck it!  I'm lost and pissed off."  Some of my best writing (at least the prose I enjoyed writing, where I felt I actually said something) came from those times when I sat down with a strong purpose and something to say.  Lately, I have been floating around a bit, reading book after book after blog post after Twitter feed after poem after poem after poem, looking for something to grab my attention and say, "Adrian, this is important!  Write about this.  Tell us now!"

Stephen King is right: I know what to say (if not exactly)l I just need to sit down and write!  My creativity isn't dead or hibernating or too ill to get out of bed.  It is just waiting for me to get busy and do some actual writing.

"If you can take it seriously, we can do business.

I know that I can take writing seriously.  I don't need a publisher, an agent, or a book deal.  I just need my pen and the balls to write down what I actually think.  I still have stuff to say.

Song of Myself #20

--Walt Whitman

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; 

How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? 

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? 

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, 

Else it were time lost listening to me. 

I do not snivel that snivel the world over, 

That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. 

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d, 

I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. 

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious? 

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close, 

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. 

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, 

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. 

I know I am solid and sound, 

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, 

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. 

I know I am deathless, 

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, 

I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night. 

I know I am august, 

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, 

I see that the elementary laws never apologize, 

(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.) 

I exist as I am, that is enough, 

If no other in the world be aware I sit content, 

And if each and all be aware I sit content. 

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, 

And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, 

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. 

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, 

I laugh at what you call dissolution, 

And I know the amplitude of time. 

Aubade

I will think of you
alone in your study
3:00 AM blinking on the plastic face of the clock,

or perhaps you have an old grandfather clock:
long chains attached to circular disks,
slowly ticking the moments.

I will think of you
awaiting the first bird to deliver his call,
those 3 notes.

I will think of you
while I am putting on my socks,
lacing up my running shoes,
fighting my inner daemons of laziness,
plugging in my iPod,
putting in my earbuds,

awaiting aubade.

The Poems of Billy Collins

The Poems of Billy Collins--
I shouldn't be surprised
that I'm writing again.
It only takes about

half-a-dozen of your poems
to cause that itch,
forcing me to write again.

Do you use special ink?
Magical, mind-altering ink pens?
or are your books laced
with a drug that eliminates

even the most stubborn
writer's block?

Lost Ideas

I’ve had
more attempts of
poems
than poems.

I have sat,
pen in hand;
(actually,
open laptop,
white screen,
blinking cursor,
fingertips pressed lightly
on the keys,
almost feeling each letter)
to be more accurate.)

I almost hate
when an idea hits me,
square on the back
of my head,
like a hot slap,
after a sarcastic remark
to my father.
If I do not have
pen and paper,
computer and outlet,
the idea is lost.

So, I run
frantically
looking for
napkins,
tablecloths,
scraps of paper,
a pencil, pen, marker.
I would use a knife
and write in my own
blood,
if the idea was
that good.

Most of the time,
I wait,
looking over my shoulder,
for a periodic
slap,
that is a poem.

Jagged

The grey mist
swirls
around jagged and cracked rocks.
I’m staring out onto
an endless ocean:
“Am I alone?”

The glowing, grey dimness,
full of shadows,
approaches from the sea
like a messenger,
soaked with rain,
bearing ill news.

I hear the sound of waves
crashing on the rocks
below
my bare feet.
Cold, damp penetrates my skin
vibrating my bones.


The silence in the sky.

So much depends

so much depends
on
a little boy
held in my arms,
so many hours to go
before he sleeps,

so many hours to go
before he sleeps.

A Suburban Spring Evening

"Love is the last light spoken."

I'm either too tired or drunk
to continue reading poetry by the dying
Spring day light; waning
as evening approaches the gloaming
sun dims.

I can still see the blossoming
plum tree across the street, exploding
whites and dusky yellows iridescent
against drab background of model homes.

Listen.  The sun is setting in suburbia
and children are finishing their Sunday evening movies.  Listen.

I turn to poets' voices reading to me.

Dylan Thomas awakes me to the vivid 

and wild  barbaric nature of poetry (of words);

stirs me to the quick.

Robert Frost brings me down to the synecdoche

of poetry; the whole of his experiences

and his woods.  I prefer reading Frost while it storms outside,

horizontal rain obstructing my view of blossoming plum trees.

W.H. Auden elevates and stirs my imagination:

the pomp and circumstance and traditionalism.

Hearing his voice reciting villanelles

speaking to the importance of simplicity and a simpler era;

staves off chaos with reverence.

I shall learn my mother-tongue.

April 4, 2017: Thunder-snow 49 years later

for Martin


Thunder startles the sky
reminding me that you were shot today.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness."

Can thunder, lightning, tempestuous rain?

I've never seen snow fall after thunder
cracked the sky; shattered into a spiderweb
of fear and hate.  Thunder-snow?
Snow acting as an acoustic suppressor,
dampening my experience, telling it is close.
You were suppressed.  You were close to achieving
justice everywhere.  Thunder-snow.

Nothing is more dangerous than silence.

I can't see through the snow-rain.
I can't see where I'm going.
I listen and keep moving forward.
The earth grows loud.

Emerging Now

It has been one week since my last post and two weeks since my last posted poem.  I am emerging now from a deep study of sound and rhythm.  I have been binge-listening (following along faithfully) to the Caedmon recordings of Dylan Thomas's poetry.  I have always been mesmerized by his voice, such a booming baritone for such a shy poet.  I felt that I needed to listen to him in his entirety when I stumbled upon these albums.  How could I not peek in on the hunchback in the park as he eats bread from a newspaper?  How could I pass on the opportunity to tour Fern's Hill and Sir John's Hill?  I have never traveled to Wales, but I felt myself transported to Loughharne with each poem; especially "Poem on his Birthday" and "Poem in October."  The best part of these recordings is that they are the poems that Thomas wanted people to hear and read.  I have always been a Thomas fan; his language and metaphor exquisite!  But I wanted a deeper dive into his use of sound, alliteration, assonance, and consonance.  I mean, who else write and speaks lines like these?

"Man be my metaphor."
"Now I am a man no more no more"
"seesaw Sunday nights"
"midlife mourn"
"tumbledown tongue"

His poetry can quicken and slow down immediately with his tongue-twisting language! Thomas' use of the personification of time as an omnipresent, binding force is mesmerizing.

Read this from "Fern Hill":

"Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes"

and

"Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means"

When I sat in my chair these last weeks, listening to his roaring roll of a voice, I began to really understand the intentionality of language in poetry. Poets use words and language to discuss and interpret their thoughts and feelings and interactions with the world around them.  Poets, especially Dylan Thomas, choose words pack a powerful punch and crafts lines that could not be written in any other way.  For example,

"When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row"

What an image!  So, I am emerging once again with a renewed reverence for the language and imagery that I use in my poetry.  Dylan Thomas loves and reveres language.  He "cared for the colours the words cast on [his] eyes (Thomas, 1951).  He knew that he "must live with [words] and in them, always: a "writer of words" (Thomas, 1951).  He played with language, dragging up images from the depths of his mind in order to see how they would look and sound on the paper.  Listening to his voice reminded me of his 'imaginative purpose, which is to write the best poem he can" (Thomas, 1951).

I enjoy poetry.  I enjoy reading and writing poetry.  I feel that I can communicate through poetry.  My hope for the rest of the poems I post here, is that you, too, will enjoy them, because that is all that matters.  I will work hard at crafting my images and alluding to other moments only when absolutely necessary.  I promise not to just throw in an obscure Greek or Biblical reference!  I will concentrate more on how my poetry sounds, as well as how it rests on the page.  I may not be able to write a successful villanelle, but I will write more and more and more!

What's next?

It has been a week since my last Project: #UndiscoveredPoetry post.  I reflected on the process and took some time to figure out where to take this blog in the future.  April is #NationalPoetryMonth, which is always exciting.  When I was creating Project: Undiscovered Poetry, I purposely placed it in March so that I could give myself a nice head-start moving into April.  That is exactly what has happened!

Even though I have not posted any complete poems in the last week, that does not mean that I have not continued reading and writing poetry.  In fact, taking the pressure of posting every day has allowed me to go back to some of my favorite poets and spend more time diving into their work.  I am continuing to push myself to write every day, even if that means just journaling my thoughts, with the hope that I can mine through various entries for some precious poetry gold.  I am happy with a few images and ideas for poems that have come up in the last week.  So, what's next?

I would like to continue using this blog as a platform for improving my poetry.  Although I did not receive a huge amount of feedback, the feedback I did receive was valuable and I got better as a writer.  I wish we all had access to our own personal community of editors and copywriters and creative writing teachers; where we could workshop our writing from the comfort of our homes and coffee shops.  I think there is a need for this.  Sure, there are online writing courses and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that aspiring writers can sign up for.  Unfortunately, many cost money to enroll, and more often than not, we all cannot invest 20-30 hours per week for entire semester in order to learn all the ins and outs of creative writing.  Yes, that would be fantastic!  I love being a student, but when it comes to writing poetry, I love diving in to each other's work, making meaning, offering suggestions, and rewriting.  There is something satisfying about the creative writing workshop process that I would love to create here on this blog.

So, my plan is to continue posting poems that may or may not be finished.  I will continue to solicit feedback from anyone out there reading.  Please feel free to leave any comments that will move the poem forward.

I am going to continue researching the possibility of self-publishing a book of poetry, since that was the original endpoint for Project: #UndiscoveredPoetry.  I am not sure if that means using Amazon's self-publishing services, or possibly submitting some poems to journals and various writing contests. That is another world that I know very little about, so I will be taking some risks putting my poetry in front of specific editors.  We shall see...

In the meantime, thank you for all of your continued support and feedback.  I'd love to figure out a way that you can also share your undiscovered poetry with me and others in this budding community.  Perhaps you can start by leaving a poem in the comments section, asking for feedback?  I would love to read what you all have written, paying it forward for reading my poetry.  No matter what happens though, we all need to keep writing!  Write through the writer's block, even if it's crap, it is still writing and you are still improving as an writer.

I will be posting soon!

Adrian

Project: Undiscovered, a Reflection

When I started this project, my goal was to self-publish 31 poems in one month.  I wanted to force myself to get my poetry out into the open.  I thought that National Poetry Month eve was the best time to launch my poetry, hopefully soliciting writing advice from all over the world.  It is now April 1 and I posted my 31st poem yesterday morning.

I did not receive the amount of writing advice that I was hoping for.  In fact, when one writes a poem and shows it to another person, there is a moment when you feel both confident in your words and completely terrified that you are an absolutely terrible writer.  It is an odd paradox.  By forcing myself to write an original poem each day, I concentrated these feelings, slowly building up a tolerance to my dependency on the outcome.  I started letting go.  Each day, I let another poem go, releasing it into the void and cosmos of the Internet.  Some days, I released a poem that I had been holding onto for many, many years.  Some days, I wrote feverishly and let the poem go quickly, almost throwing it out into the open.  At first, I cringed each time I clicked PUBLISH.  Then, I realized that it would be less painful to schedule the release of each poem, and just watch them go out on their own.  Each day, however, this project forced me to let go, and had the unintended consequence of completely letting go of my original goal: to publish.

I felt that the more feedback I received, the stronger the poems would become, and the better writer I would become.  However true that statement may be, I became a stronger writer by doing just that: writing.  I wrote every day this month.  One week into March, I began flipping through some of my favorite poets for inspiration: Whitman, Hughes, Yeats.  I pulled down some anthologies that I hadn't read in years, reacquainting myself with poets I hadn't read in years: William Stafford, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Anne Sexton.  After two weeks, I began binge-reading poets that I needed to know more about: Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden,Tennyson, Wordsworth, Robert Hayden, Mary Oliver again.  I began seeing old poems with fresh eyes, new meter, and even newer imagery.  Project: Undiscovered reawakened in me a creative side that I thought had either withered away, or never existed at all.  Don't you need to take creative writing classes from some of the best poets in the world in order to become a poet?  How lucky are Billy Collins' students or Rita Dove's graduates?  Robert Frost was friends with Ezra Pound, who helped him promote and publish his poetry!

So, I hid my poetry away because I did not have any fancy creative writing teaching, or famous poet friends who took a particular interest in my work.  With all of those insecure questions floating around in my head, I had forgotten that the strongest writing teacher I could find, or the best poetry course I could take were sitting on my bookshelves.  Mary Oliver taught me the importance of sound, line breaks, diction, tone and revision.  W.B. Yeats reminded me that poetry can be startling and vigorous and musical all at the same time.  W.H. Auden reminded me of the importance of both the urban and pastoral landscapes.  Seamus Heaney taught me that it is okay to take some risks with more metered verse, and to always write what you know. Robert Hayden taught me to honor language and to be laborious in revising and editing my work.

Project: Undiscovered may be over, but my journey is not.  I have more to read and write. My goal is to keep reading and writing poetry, posting poems on Undiscovered Poetry as often as I can.  I do want to eventually take those 31 poems and bound them in a book, but that isn't as important now as is used to be.  If you are just discovering this blog and this project, I hope you enjoy my poetry. Please feel free to comment and leave feedback on any poem.  I really do read the comments and make changes accordingly.  If you know of someone who may like reading some contemporary poetry, pass me along! In the end, I will still be writing, no matter who out there is reading.

Thank you to Nanci and Laura and Gwen for leaving a comment here and there!  I really appreciate your support.

Anteros

Ebb and  flow throughout my short life!
Why must time be categorized,
organized,
led away
into our minds?
Are you and I not one

in the same day?
Do we not exist,
but for the love and beauty
of all things?

Are there not an finite amount of sunsets
(glories of life)
in the course of a day?
Can we not visualize our purpose unless
it has a deadline?

Closing my eyes,
the clock stops its tick-tocking;
the cars stop their honk-honking; but
my heart continues beat-beating.

In the darkness of my mind,
time is eternal, it is pure and is made
from my blood and tears.
Time does not exist

for every atom in my body
(My body, my soul
does not move back and forth.)
In sleep, all things are peaceful,
eternal,
pure.

In death,
the ebb and
ow will stop,
and all that will remain
is love
(a love for all things beautiful.)