Muse Calling

One of those days, where I've meditated almost without choice, pulled easily in, and where I keep trying to enter the external day. I am tired. Is it because I've only eaten fruit, cheese, antipasto, and toasted multi-grain walnut bread for the past few days, and my body needs meat even if I don't get around to cooking it more than once or twice a week; or is it financial, I expected to be working more this month than I have; or is it emotional, with some strange responses from women to my output that leaves a discomfort that requires rest to heal; or, as I reach down deeper, is it creative? Is my muse pulling me into somnambulance, the place from where I write, even though today is not a 'writing day.' As I wander about, intermittently laugh or argue about writing with my daughter, I have an odd sense of writing emerging. Why can't my life go on when this happens? I have so many things to do...

An image of a great frozen polar cap shifting, the voluminous depth of the mind working things out in its billions of neural connections, and when it's ready, a piece of writing breaking off like an ice flow, and floating into the ocean where it melts eventually into all the other words.

Is this a Zen of writing?

Do all of our words flow together when we've shut off our computers and closed our books? Into a great linguistic ocean sweeping the globe?

Ecdysis Recording (1:41min)

A recording of my poem, Ecdysis, which may be found at qarrtsiluni.

Take a listen; comment over there.

Does it work? This little poem was difficult to record, not sure why. The short length? How many times did I try, each time finding a different intonation, which led to a different set of referential meanings in the cadence of voice.

In the cacophony of recordings on my screen, I just chose one. For better or worse.

This one: DSL/Cable, or Dial-up.
_

African Angel

A re-posting to join Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.


tags: angels, crafts, African angel, memories, photopoem, Illustrated Poetry Marathon.

Miss Muffet

It clung to the inside of the jar not understanding liberation. It was content above my bed, awaiting flies. I banged the Mason jar again on the door frame under the moth-flicked light, not out of kindness, I just didn't want squished spider in a tissue. Holding an empty jar, I called my dog back in, and shut the door.



I could say, not after Woody Allen's Scoop, after all that laughter and the 71 year old icon that he is despite the magic tricks, or the Life Salad at Fresh with organic carrots, beets, sprouts, spinach, lettuce, basil and a tahini dressing, or the mango, coconut milk and banana shake, or the fine Summer evening spent with a friend. I could say that the last time I tried to squish a spider it dropped fast onto my daughter's bed and disappeared. I could say it's because, well, that's just the chance a spider takes, and it lucked out tonight. But then it might have suffered a concussion being rudely knocked out of the Mason jar on the way down to the ground; I'll never know.

A Day for Bastille

A recording of "A Day for Bastille"... high speed; dial-up.

A Day for Bastille

Hard couple of sweaty hours. Time, incorrigible, leaden. Like a rusted French crown.

Beer holes, bag moulds
thumbs
stuck on tacks.

Empty boxes
of styrofoam
caskets.

Leaned over the small cupboard, over a hot plate. Pushed back the tacked table cloth. Pulled hundreds of bags left by the previous tenant out that my dog would never use; let's face it, the cornstarch will evaporate the plastic first. Collapsed boxes saved for a move that hasn't happened. Hauled out a picnic blanket, a folded umbrella lawn chair, a large backpack on wheels with one wheel broken.

A collection of cardboard tubes line the back like fallen soldiers.

Then shoving
the full cardboard wardrobe
with its dried blood smell
in.

Thinking about ontologies,
multiple trajectories,
about events that disrupt,
about Alain Braidou's
Being & Event.

About how French postmodernism bursts critical space as I seque from area to area of impossible overflowing clutter, from splintered to post-Cartesian thought.

The musty back room of spider shadows repels: during the day bleary hung-over light from its tiny funerary window; at night an unexpected red bulb.

A half wall enclosure built in the corner, inexplicably, and an iron lock;
a bastille perhaps.

Where I store suitcases,
collapsed boxes.

Queen Margot,
sweeping through this cloistered closet,
oh, its been a long bloody revolution.



tags: closets, Bastille Day, Alain Baidou, Queen Margot, poetry.

The Editor

She was a good editor. She delved so deeply into manuscripts that she could write revisions seamlessly: linguistically, no-one would be able to tell the author's original words and her extra phrase, or sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs. It was a talent for mimicry perhaps. When she was finished editing a book, it was an indissoluble whole, with her words etched in like tape, like patches, like embroidery over the holes in the arguments, the lack of logical connectives sewn over, conclusions woven clearly from the evidence of the material, the indisputable truth of the argument, she sewed and sewed, using invisible thread, using thread that exactly matched the original, so that nothing appeared amiss, it didn't sound like two voices had written the book, the author and the editor, but only one, improved on, and the other, hidden, and whose invisible mending is ultimately forgotten.

Writing in someone else's voice depleted her. She worked on non fiction books, and many of them were tedious and dull. It was up to her to spruce them up. To make the language shine in its simplicity without letting her movement through the text become visible. And working on other people's writing blocked her own. She couldn't leave "so and so's" style in his or her manuscript when she closed it for the night and turn to her own writing. It was as if her entire vocabulary was being used in the service of someone else's writing, being used to make someone else's writing better than it really was, and there was nothing left over for her. They wrung every ounce out of her, those manuscripts, those managing editors demanding a good job be done with what was often a mess. You'd be surprised at how many educated people can't write. She was one of those editors, among millions of helpers, who come, and comb through your book, rewriting it, so that it becomes the gleaming tome you are proud of, but who are forgotten, while perhaps mentioned on the copyright page, remain largely unacknowledged.


©Brenda Clews 2006
___
This is from my first NaNoWriMo novel, and it's directly from my own experiences as an editor for the decade that I did it in College and University texts for large publishers (though I have done private editing assignments nearly every year since). 'Minor classics,' that's what I aimed for. If a book remained on reading lists, considered the best in its field 'still,' then I thought my editing successful. Became burnt out, though...


technorati tags: editors, editing books, publishers, burn out.

Cream Silk Pajamas

Unable to find my navy blue cotton pajamas in the chaos of boxes and piles of clothes, the loose ones, with the top of stars, I washed the silk ones I've had for seven years and never worn. Cream-coloured silk. Found wrinkled in the bottom of a large cardboard wardrobe box. The "Marilyn Monroe" set on sale at Simpsons in the Eaton Centre after working in a nearby office. The top is more like a shirt, and had a large red heart for its single button, which I removed and replaced with a pearl-coloured one. And then never wore. Silk seems too fragile and precious for constant wear. But this is thick, durable, and sleek and soft against my skin. I sit in the lake-blue Director's Chair with plant-green designs that I unholstered once, in front of the computer, typing, sipping coffee, wondering, should I go out and buy dancing clothes at Dancing Days?

Another sarong in golds and browns and oranges and a sheer top with small tangerine moons and shimmering lines like longtitudinal threads of stars to navigate by?

And when will I dance, and where, and with whom?

I pick a purple plum from the fruit basket; it has a slight tang in which its sweetness and succulence is contained.

tags: silk pajamas, dancing, fruit, creativity, writing.