| Performance 12/4/02 | |
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| MIT Artists Behind The Desk | |
| 12:00 noon to 1:00 PM -- Killian Hall | |
| Ideas guiding my planning: | |
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Fill 1 Hour. To prepare, read the poems aloud and time them. (Their elapsed times are recorded in parentheses with the link.) Expect poems will run over time. Leave slack. I actually had 40 minutes of program planned with the idea of presenting the Outwrite cafe series if I went way under time. We ended up starting rather late to give more people a chance to arrive, and 40 minutes of program filled the rest of the hour perfectly. |
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| Script for performance: | |
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Thank you all for coming. It will be my great pleasure to share with you my poetry. Many of you know me from an office setting. Some of you will be surprised to see a different side of me. We're talking poetry here, and that often means reporting from a deeply personal space. As many of you have learned while working with me. Expect the unexpected. Forgive me if I lean on my computer for notes and for my poems. After I write them, I often don't remember the words, and need reminders. For a long time, I said of myself, "I write poems" because I felt the title "Poet" was out of my league. But if you define poet as someone who can't stop himself from writing in verse, then I'm definitely a poet. Poetry began for me as a way to process my feelings. But as time has gone on, I've pushed myself to use it to tell stories or even just to describe things. If there's time at the end, I'll give you more of my description poems. What I'd most like to do is read for you some of my poems about finding my way in the world, and particularly about love and relationships. The centerpiece of this reading is a long poem about a short relationship. I wrote it as a memory book of times with someone who had a very profound effect on me. He helped me get comfortable with my soft side. After I wrote the poem, I decided to "make a go of it", to make time to write more poems, and to gather my poems of the past, and my new poems as I wrote them and put them on the web. (If the audience looks like it needs more warming up:) Here is a little warm-up for the long reading. It describes the person who is the subject of that poem, and how wonderfully different he was from what I'd come to expect from others. Qualities (1:10) In the peformance, I did read Qualities. Here is the long reading -- the poem that was the breakthrough for me in so many ways. "The Story of B." What's it like when you discover you're not really over someone? When you're just starting to meet someone new? Maybe a personals ad? 22 Year Olds of All Ages (:35) (Estimated elapsed time: 20:00) How do you reach outside of yourself to someone new when you're feeling vulnerable. When you don't trust yourself to be polite? Using an unexpected happy event to help frame one's needs, desires, and fears affirmatively. Yet some days, even the most basic things are nearly impossible. But poetry has something to offer. The switch back and forth between frenzy and serenety is a big one in my life and in my poems. As I shift in speaking about romance more towards finding one's way in life, I'll share with you an inventory of simple impossibilities. Let me share with you three discoveries I made in the realm of "How do they do that?". First a clue provided by a Hewlett Packard manager that helped me turn away from a workload that was burning me out. Recovering From Burnout (1:10) It's almost an anectdote, rather than a poem. It's in the genre of self help. As is this poem about finding a way to believe in being optimistic insead of pessimistic. On Truth, Faith, and the Cycle of Interpretation (2:45) Let me offer this last self-help poem to those in the audience like me, who suffer from that internal brain-chemistry clockwork that predisposes feeling bad about one's self. Breaking the Habit of Feeling Bad About Myself (1:20) As a last-minute decision I elected not to read "Breaking the Habit of Feeling Bad About Myself" So now let's loop back from self help, back through philosophy to relationships again. I want to continue the theme of philosopy with a little comedy to lighten up the mood. Manners was a poem that was a multi-way collaboration. The poem itself was an outgrowth of some brainstorming with the person who was the subject of the poem "I Need Your Help". He has come to be a close and trusted friend with a big influence. Another friend, a musician, collaborated with me to put it to music. That gave me a taste of the magical process that is musical composition. Poetry itself seems like a magical process to me. I've written a fair bit on my perception of the poetry writing process. If it's earlier than 20 minutes before the hour, add in Muse Reprise (:45) I elected not to read Muse Reprise in the performance. And this one: (Estimated elapsed time to this point: 36:20) "Solace in a Cup of Tea" was the poem that got away actually. I went looking for it thinking I'd written it down, and discovered I never did write it down. It all came back to me and I typed it in. At this point in the performance it's about a quarter to the hour, and I decide that yes, I have time to talk about process. My presentation suffered a bit here because I just read my prepared script. My spot decision was that I'd crafted the script well, and decided to stick to it. Next time I'll try and go more from memory. It is with some hesitation that I talk about the mechanics of how I write poetry, but Anne Hudson of Artists Behind the Desk has encouraged me to talk about it. People who observe me write question how I can use a computer in a process that is seemingly so antithetical to technology. My simple answer: Using paper, I scratch out a lot, and need to move stuff around a lot, and it gets distracting. In the text editor, I always see the poem as it will appear in final form without distractions. Mind you getting to the point where I use the computer and text editor themselves without distraction DID involve a process of making the tool an unconscious part of me. Switching from my Linux PC to a Mac was quite disorienting because for a time, functions were not where I would grab for them without thinking. Having long-ago learned to use emacs without thinking, that's where I compose. I use a typewriter style layout where the first line is always the title, the second line is always my by-line, and the third line is always the date. With help from a co-worker, I have perl scripts (of all things!) to convert the text file into html that looks the same. If I change my mind about how the poems should be stylized, I change the script, and just run make. How's that for "Mr. Nerd comes to poetry."? Scripts also maintain a page that has all poems alphabetically by title, and another one chronologically -- most recent poem first. The final clever nasty bit of scripting, is that the key word "(unfinished)" in the date line causes poems to be grouped into a "Works under construction" section so that I can publish works in progress. To track the history and evolution of my poems, I keep them under revision control with RCS. That information is not published on the web, partly because some poems begin a little too directly referring to a specific person. I leave it for the archivists as to do long term with my preserved historical data. Time was almost up, but there was just enough time to close with a poem. To close, let me share with you a poem I wrote about the experience of public reading. |
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| Last updated: 31 March 2010 |