The Twitter Experiment

The Twitter Experiment

In the subjective mood, let me say, would that I could write poetry all the time, alas, and if I could but lie abed, or sit beneath a greeny bough, with quill in hand, I would so like to for hours on end. write that is.

However, “poetry,” being one letter and a transposition away from “poverty,” makes making a living a necessity. I must support my poetry habit, and ironically, the very act of working seems to weaken my focus on writing. I arrive home too tired to concentrate.

I find when I spend my days waking, preparing for work, working, the commute to and fro, and finally, if I have a moment between supper and bedtime, writing, I can’t be consistent. Sometimes I get off a good shot, as in this poem, which I wrote as part of the Poem a Day Challenge from Writer’s Digest.

Pakicetus

It was the cows and pigs that did it. Seeing what
Was intended for them, what their futures contained;
Seeing how their herds would be gathered and numbered,
Drove us further out into the sea. From shores, bays, rivers,
Feeding in the shallows, we swam out further, deeper, away.
The vast oceans became our pastures, our grazing ground.

Eventually, a hand became a fin, leg variations formed a fluke,
The canals of the ear lessened and the lungs grew and changed -
Fifteen million years, a day against the age of dirt, the age of water.
Now with one breath held for hours, diving down negative mountains
Deep into black waters, we sing arias to each other, with low notes
Few others can hear, long mournful songs of grass and flowers, sweet
Water and green fields waving in the wind as far as the eye can see.


I am incorporating some of the language and thinking in a new piece I am writing for the theater about Darwin. I try to keep working on poems and stories and even plays, but I always seem pressed for time, and when I have time, unable to go uninterrupted for as long as I need.

I fall asleep at the keyboard. Weekends seem to slip away. Holidays often involve family or travel. but always consume time. And now it is wedding, graduation, vacation season, all of which take time from writing. These, of course, are excuses, a long list of crappy excuses, actually for not writing.

Which brings me to my Twitter experiment. I have, since March of 2008, been twittering, at least a line every day. I have 500 plus updates, most of them small poems, some fragments, some just ideas or observations that I might grow into something more. Sharing these spontaneous utterances is fun and freeing. I don’t pretend to be submitting them for publication, but the poetry process, or at least the one I follow, is there for the 400+ people who are following the experiment to see, comment on, share, etc.

One of the best parts of this is my reintroduction to haiku, one of my favorite short forms that I had gotten away from in my drive to be accepted by American academia. Once, I was much more a citizen of the world, who sought out other poets, other forms, other heroes. Here are a few of my haiku, published on twhaiku.com.

Climbing the mountain,
I look back to see how much
I have forgotten.

King Dandelion’s charge,
armies overtake the field,
laughing yellow flags.

The toddler stumbles,
walking wobbly on weak legs.
An old man recovers.

Crows flock to spilled grain.
In the wagon's path feeding
on the farmer's luck.

Take away ego.
You do that and you are there!
But, how will "I" know?

The short form is back
“Mot just!” Disciplined. Succinct.
It did not leave me.

The essence of these short forms is a single thought, or ideally a binding together of two different thoughts into a unifying whole: this string of words implying polarity, a syzygy with each pole linked to its opposite, two forgotten thoughts tied in a knot.

That thought like most of the poetry that follows was thrown out like a verbal improv that I then recorded on twitter, through thwirl or another offshoot, sometimes at home, or at work, on a desktop, a laptop, someone else’s device, always attempting to get in my head a complete burst and then release it like a thrown dart. Here are some samples:

This poem is like candy: chocolate-smooth right off the bat with a caramel center chewy-Louie, gooey, topped off with more smooth-chocolate.

A short soft song, or a subtle, sensuous dance, a poem can be made at once, like Sumi, an image of shape in rhythm, inked in thought & gone.

We are peeling this poem's skin, slowly revealing the flesh of the fruit and the seed buried within. Juices are sluicing on our red tongues.

This poem is like a fortune cookie, gluten-free, paperless. It cracks open and says, You must swim in the now, not dream of an island beach.

This poem is a box; here's a lid. The sides are straight & the bottom flat. Inside are the words you dare not reveal to anyone. Quick, lid!

I have other examples of ideas that are leading to longer things. I am still working on how all those pieces come together. Meanwhile, I wanted to keep anyone who cares posted on my progress.

The Language of Trees

Tree language is like the notes only dogs can hear. Tree roots touch tendrils ‘neath icy earth; glass twigs chatter; limbs clatter, leaves rustle. Shhh, the trees are whispering histories.

Nothing understands stillness, or silence like a tree. The pine whispers, the twiggy stick rattles, the empty bough moans in the wind: each of these sounds means something. We instinctively know this.

Trees look down on us. Because they live through seasons, trees understand and pity us. The spirit of trees comforts us. We surround ourselves with wood, cradle to coffin. In the heart of the tree and rings of a tree’s growing out into the world, we see a heartbeat echoing in time’s soft trap.

Whether tree of Life or tree of Knowledge, sacred trees of incense, or sacred trees of the Norse and Druid they are soulful. Knock on wood! Acknowledge the spirit in the flow, the life in the grain, the ghost in the door and the soul of the chair and the floor.

Tree roots like gnarled serpents writhing in the earth, bodies joined together in one enormous trunk, branching back into a thousand snaky tails shaking in the winter sky. Spring's thunderous arrival, every stick and twig burgeoning with buds. Leaves everywhere green sudden and complete.

Then the chlorophyll miracles and heat of summer, the change in the sound of green rustling from lush to dry whisper, the colorful chaos of fall, when all leaves leave. Naked, the trees take in one long, enormous golden breath, which they hold, all through snow and ice and frozenness, waiting, awaiting, spring.

The Long Count

In the coming months and years leading up to 2012, there will be increased volcanic and seismic activity as well as solar wind and weather-related effects on the earth. If the Meso-American calendar is right and the enormous cycle of the turning galaxy is complete on December 21 of that year. As the date approaches more and more charlatans and con men will interpret the legends and find a way to profit from prophecy. Doomsayers are already calling this "the end of history" or "the end of time." Evidence suggests the same culture that predicted the cycle, also predicted events far beyond 2012, strongly suggesting that one cannot claim the accuracy of a doomsday based on a calendar whose high priests named events beyond that date. The excitement of an immense and world changing possible future appeals to me more than the fear of its end. http://tinyurl.com/37kdr4

Time, timelessness and the void

Fewer than five centuries ago, Pope Gregory placed the Gregorian Calendar's mathematical model on our concept of time. Lillius and Calvius and dozens of Vatican mathematicians worked endless hours to figure out how to adjust for what the stars and sun and moon counted out, which they calculated was drifting a bit from the Julian Calendar, the previous model. A model for measuring time that is linear and narrow and focused entirely on one point in time is a totally Western idea. Other cultures besides the Judeo-Christian one, might measure time differently and might impose entirely different frameworks, but these are not taught in our schools.

The very idea that one could look at time in other ways than as a linear string of events goes counter to our own individual experiences. We are born, age and die. We are all "Button Benjamin," and not the other way around. Anyone with children, and then grandchildren, etc., knows this in their very flesh and blood.

Yet some civilizations, some human intellects, could comprehend this concept. In fact, their calendars are more predictive and more accurate than our own. Most interesting to me is the Meso-American system, which incorporates cycles of the moon, in addition to numerous eclipse and comet cycles, and counts back some 3,111 years before the year one on the Gregorian Calendar to the beginning of the cycle it was made to measure.

The initial date, the year one of the Olmec and other Middle American Natives, refers to an ancient beginning, a change that these peoples, (who may have been predated by ancestors who lived through such a transformation,) considered just as real as the birth of Christ. These peoples counted accurately and studied the stars and their cycles and concluded that time was not linear. They believed that just as the sun and moon and stars revolved through repetitious cycles, (the entire galaxy, indeed the universe,) passed through an enormous cycle, known as "The Long Count."

To accept that thought is more than most Westerners can feel comfortable with. Not that time could not go back thousands and forward thousands of years, but that what looks like a straight line could, just beyond our vision, curve subtly and curl back around like a great serpent with its tail in its mouth. To get past the myth and look up at the Milky Way Galaxy and see what was studied for thousands of years, perhaps to understand an event so cosmic that their ancestors could not explain, takes an enormous leap of the imagination.

I am not certain that my mind can make this leap, but part of me can stay open to the idea. Watching the effect of solar wind and cosmic dust that always has and always will touch us unseen. Trying to understand what might motivate a civilization to adopt such beliefs and evolve such elaborate mythologies, completely outside of my own, interests me. My curiosity is piqued. I can picture myself back in the jungles of the Mayans, that canopy of stars whirling overhead. I can almost hear the high priest explaining the Serpents turning and how, when the complete cuircuit is made, the planets will align, The Long Count will "click" like a giant clock, be completed, like a giant bell at midnight striking, and the cycle will turn completely over to begin once again.

A New Planet

Sputnik, silver spider in the air, shook us in our beds. Then when the Vanguards and Redstones failed again and again, and finally The Right Stuff, clean cut Glenn and Carpenter and Shirrah and Armstrong, and so many more. We were entirely more aware of our planet than any generation before us, not only for these positive Star Trek dreams, but for the dark nightmares of mushroom clouds and ICBM's, shelters and survival stockpiles.

Those of us who came of age in the era of satellites and space exploration were raised on TV and Rock and Roll are all over the internet now. The post WWII generation includes the innovators that created a culture of communication that is fed and feeds innovation. American culture has spread over the world and world culture is drifting into America from wine choice to AlJazzera and Al Queda to the internet itself from Britain and Berners-Lee and all the other cultural transformations our generation has experienced. The new webs that are world wide include many that are rarely considered or even visible to anyone but those entangled in their data. I think boomers and their children and grandchildren are evolving and will have more to offer and more innovations to create and spread.

Social Media is rapidly knitting profound new relationships across country and culture and chasm. The consciousness of humanity is becoming more capable of expressing Jungian concepts of archetype and collective unconscious. One could even argue that information overload has and will continue to push the mind to evolve. We know that focus and attention can create new pathways and synapses in the brain. As much as I fear the emoticon infested abreviated, vowel-deprived world of "txting," I don't fool myself that I can prevent the changes it will create in my culture any more than I could prevent the predominance of rap music.

The new technologies of communication that link us all, in spite of all the reactionary, conservative, jingoistic, one-worlder paranoia that resists them, are changing what it means to be alive on this planet. The cross-cultural myths of Joseph Campbell and the stories that timelessly connect the whole earth are being exchanged and intertwined as humanity mixes races and myths to reach toward the clichéd "Age of Aquarius."

Three Mornings

	White frost coats the black earth. Dark water solidifies, turning a brown puddle white. Scraping the windshield, I hear leaves whispering. 3:46 PM Nov 19th from web
	Frost, thick on the windshield, an image of blindness, white and complete. Driving in the dark, while glass, small hole, more melt, clears. 7:24 PM Oct 20th from web
	Mu Ch'i painted persimmons with few strokes, ripe and sweet. Like persimmons, we are nothing like our true selves until bitten by frost. 2:27 PM Oct 17th from web

The Opposite of Overwriting

I have been working on a new idea and have been away from the blog, per se. I have kept up my twittering. I have kept up my quillpill stories. Anyone who has an interest in my experiments on brevity and these new ideas on the Zen of the moment, will find examples of what I am currently exploring in my work. The blog, I realize is becoming my way of thinking out loud about writing. It is a kind of talking to myself that I am sharing, unashamedly with anyone who wants to overhear it. In the spirit of a gift I am leaving my creative work out in the open without a desire for profit, merely because I have made it and it has no value unless it is somehow shared with someone.

I am not going to quote sources ancient and modern that I have synthesized. I would have had to written down the exact words and the citations at the time. I can't be bothered. It slows me down. An example, an article I was reading about ancient India, in a time when the speech and conversation of the court was elevated to poetry and opera. One of the court poets was quoted as saying a poem must be like an arrow, shot directly into the reader’s soul. That is how I remember the quote but whether these are the exact words or not does not matter. What matters is that is how I received the thought, absorbing it so completely and agreeing with it so deeply that I can not forget it, at least this version of the thought that I remember in this moment and I am almost forced to bring it to others.

In trying to understand why I have spent my life, practically from the time I learned to use words, writing poetry. This has been a long, lonely, difficult struggle to understand words, to play with them and learn to use them in ways that make harmonies and rhythms. I have come to realize this is not a choice but an obsession. There is little practical use in reading poetry, poring over dictionaries, searching for and memorizing obscure poems, studying poems and trying to craft them, taking time to cherish words and roll them on my tongue, holding them in my mouth as they escape from my lungs and relishing the vibration of the sinews in my throat. It is a great waste of time when you have mouths to feed and work to do. As a career, poetry is as impractical as ballet. Perhaps even less practical. There are not countless parents dressing their children in frock coats and berets, queuing up to purchase poetry lessons. It is not as if it has ever been a choice for me. I have written poems since childhood, most of which will probably never be seen by others.

What I have been thinking about lately is that I write closest to my true voice when I am least self-conscious. If can completely immerse myself in the act of writing, in the moment when something takes me and from the idea, a word forms in the brain's synapses and fires my fingers at the keyboard. I can find a Zen like state of focus, one which blots out the world and yet totally enters it. That consciousness is as thin and delicate as a fingerprint on the keyboard. It is a fragile as surface tension.

Here is an example of some new work, written in bursts of 140 characters at a time, while rushing though the prosaic parts of earning a living. I stop and like throwing a dart, try to nail down the theme that I have been mulling over in my mind.

This piece was made of two tweets. They happened in the same hour of the day when I had no time to write but had an idea in the back of my mind for a while before throwing the darts.


Prose won't hold some notions.

Some inklings refuse to be contained
by the mundane and will only yield to
broken lines, rhymes & rhythms of
thought in poems.

Words - what crude tools to
carry thought.

Yet thought is naught
without a precisely built
container of words,

symbols for breathy
noises that carry it
from tongue to ear.

Trillions and trillions

I was in my grandson’s Montessori pre-school class the other day, admiring the wisdom and warmth of Maria Montessori’s vision of how a child’s natural curiosity can be used to build a basis for learning. It was grandparent’s day and my wife and I were deeply interested in anything our grandson had to show us from the tadpole growing little legs to the beads used to learn the concept of tens. After the joy of the experience on a crisp and sunny autumn day, the image of the beads remained in the back of my mind.

I kept thinking about how wonderful the visual aspect of the beads translated simple mathematical concepts and how if I had had that same toy to play with as a child, I would not have struggled as much with math. The toy is simple. A single bead is in the first place, in a miniature basket, a beautiful glass bead with a luminescent coloring. On the next square are ten of these beads on a wire, like a small glass caterpillar with ten segments. The beads, aligned in a row, perfectly show the quantity with immediacy.

On the next square of cloth, ten rows of ten beads are aligned on the wires in a grid of 100 beads, a concept that makes the idea of “ten squared” a visual concept that one can pick up and play with, count one side of and the other, count all one hundred beads in the decades like an abacus or rosary, an elemental handling of this abstract idea of mathematics. Finally, the last cloth square is a cube of beads, ten stacks of the ten-square 100 bead squares, wired together to make a gleaming glass cube like a giant glittery grain of salt or sand you can hold in your hand. The effect of holding one thousand beads in one hand is instant, the mass and weight, the size and feel, simply illustrate what it means to “understand” an idea in a concrete way.

I would like to use Madame Montessori’s brilliant visual illustration to conceptualize for you what a trillion of anything looks like. The cube of glass beads in the above math manipulative is the beginning of seeing what we have gotten ourselves into. Until we truly see the depths of our problem, we will never be able to see our way out. The thousand beads of ten, ten by ten stacks, is but one small part of this understanding, but it is the basic building block of my illustration. Consider its size to be approximately 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches, a solid, hefty cube of beads.

Now, imagine a thousand of these, which would add up to 1,000,000 beads or 3,500 inches of glass beads, a cube that would stretch 291.666 ft., or just under one football field of glass beads in length, breadth and height. One thousand of these stadium-sized cubes of glass beads would equal a cube of beads 55.23 miles high, wide and deep. That is an hour's drive at fifty five, a little under a thousand of those football fields. Now imagine not ten but 11 of those cubes, stacked up like baby blocks, glittering in the sun of an autumn afternoon. That, my friends, is the legacy this generation is leaving for its grandchildren. It kind of makes me ashamed of the baby boom.

Loss and Love

What else is there to write about? To live is to slowly lose one's life to the heedless rush of time. The only way time can be stopped is when you can leave yourself and with another, become a new one. This becoming may melt through the throes of lust, the heat and juice of passion, or assume the slow osmosis of a long time together, learning so well the ways of another and becoming a family , a couple, a pair, absorbed each into the other's life. Love can transcend sex, species, sanity, separation. Lust can transcend logic, common sense and all reason. Whatever the cause of the loss of self, the result is always the same, a greater loss. That loss might be simple as uncoupling, or complex and difficult as divorce, or plain as death, but it always comes and it links the two together in a way that transcends language. It is in those depths the poet swims, dark and warm and surrounded and then cold and completely alone.

Carving a tower in my heart

In Italy, in the Middle Ages, before forts and walls, the nobility would erect elaborate impenetrable stone towers where they might retreat to withstand a siege or raid. Some cities had as many as a hundred of these bristling needles on the city skyline, narrow little skyscrapers too smooth and high to climb, to steep to scale.

All around me, politics and economics, passions and fears, attract my attention and pull my focus off of writing. My mind wonders to the temporal rather than the eternal. My heart is taken by this charming child, that lovely scene, another debate or song or headline. The demands of working with every word to make it just the right word, in the perfect order are complete. One cannot divide the self and keep the mind on point.

I am carving a tower in my heart, far from the concerns of today, or even tomorrow. I must make it high up enough to see what is coming and what has gone before, to take myself out of the temporal and the temporary and instead look deep within to evoke my very essence.

Updates

In the final galleys for the second edition of Coal & Ice, I am working hard to finalize them before the end of the month. Quillpill story: The Golden Room has grown another half dozen pages. English Journal has accepted Rumination for May of 09 publication.

One way I address the time wasted blogging is that it keeps me focused on the idea of writing. I need to spend time every day putting words on paper or keying them into a computer. Without making time for writing, I get less and less happy with myself and harder to be around. The act of thinking and recording those thoughts, editing and shaping them, helps me approach my imperfect life with more attention and less stress.

I am also forcing myself to read books, outside the internet. The blog has become part of a larger context of my work. It is one way to express myself and a means to weave the various strands of self expression into a whole.

Progress on several fronts

I am well on the way with "The Golden Room" my newest story on Quillpill. The challenge is for me to write a completely different story that is just as good if not better. If done well enough, one could pass the stories off as written by two different authors.

Additionally, I spent time during the month preparing the second edition of Coal & Ice for a second edition. The cover will be printed in color and the poems and stories in black and white in a perfect bound paperback available over the internet. Watch this space for links when the proofs and galleys are returned to the press.

Finally, speaking of links. I include this link to the Private Photo Review, the Poland issue: http://www.privatephotoreview.com/en/review/private.php/riv/63/page/8. My poem is featured on this page, but the pages are captive of the unique band of peasant performers that haunt the photos. This spontaneous theatre has existed in primitive for for centuries in the peasant-filled countryside. The people spend the winter developing plays and before the spring planting, perform for their neighbors their folk-inspired masterpieces. This sort of spontaneous creativity and experimentation among the less cultured of Poland gives me a little kick in the pants and an inspiration to create more.