15 days of Evolution

So why no posts for the last two weeks. Well it has been because I haven't been writing and that is because I have been lazy. I even turned in an older poem for my workshop the other day (with some edits). I just haven't been writing new stuff. But I have been forced to produce something new (not really, I bet I could have gotten away with using something older, but that probably wouldn't have been as good) for my Lyric poetry class. We have a draft of form poem due on tomorrow (Friday). I decided that I would use the sonnet form (although in retrospect it probably wasn't a great idea so I might expand it to a longer free verse poem) and I used a concept I came with when I was writing "Evolutionary Poem". Just as a warning this is the most I have ever cursed in a poem. I don't know why I just liked the title line and it kind of spawned the rest. I also want to change the title but I just can't think of anything for that now, so I'll probably change that after I get my comments back from tomorrow.

Fuck you, Darwin

Fuck you, Darwin and your damn theories
about how we came to be and how we
should be reproducing. All your queries
into the human existence will be
answered, but do you really want to know
that my blind eyes are worthless and that my
my useless brain is unthinkably slow.
This is my evolution. This is why
I say fuck you Darwin. There is more to
life then just the right combination of
parents and their genetic make up. You
have all the shit about the soul and love.
The unequivocal answer to this
enigma is that life simply exists.

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Not My Best

This is kind of a silly poem. I needs a little too much work though to be really salvaged. I was playing with complex ideas and then I went all simplistic so I don't think this poem really worked for me like I wanted it to, and in a way its name really reflects how I feel about it.

Regret

They tell you to live
without regrets.
Which seems silly
to me, because really
regret is a silly
thing indeed.

To say that you regret something
implies that you want to be
someone else.
Yes, many people do want
to be someone else.
Someone successful
or maybe famous.
But that isn't for me,
I want to be me.
I want my imperfections,
which are really
not all that imperfect at all.
I want my tummy full of blubber,
and I want the scars hidden under
my hair. I want my hairy toes.
And of course I want to
keep on wearing my glasses.
Of I want to change,
but it is the journey I want to go on.
And it is the journey I have been
on that I want to keep.
And I'll never regret
that it led me to fill
my joyous belly with cookies,
for without all those
tasty
tasty cookies
I would not be who I am today
rather I would be a will
with a severe lack of cookies,
and we don't want that.

So what do you regret?
I certainly do not know
what you would regret
or even if you shouldn't regret
regretting having regret.
All I'm saying is think about it.

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Proetry

When I was working on the evolution poem I was thinking about how many of my poems I've written recently have been about poems. I find it to be a very fun topic to write about because I can poke fun at myself while I am writing. But then I was thinking that I could write a poem that was not a poem. I don't know what I was thinking, but that hit me at the same time as the idea that if I ever published a poetry book I'd like it to be called "This is not poetry" or even the title of this poem "Not Poetry". So in the process of writing this poem the word proety came about, which was the combination of prose and poetry. I pronounce it "Pro-et-tree" (I know that is not a proper pronunciation key, but I'm too lazy to look up how to actually do it). I like the word because the "pro" part makes me think of professional athletes and I liked the idea of a pro-poet. Yes, we have professional poets who do poetry for a living, and yes we have poets who compete with their poems (i.e. publishing). But I wanted to go with the sports idea and have teams of poets who were literary fighting with each other, not literally fighting of course and I love the "literary" and "literally". So here isn't a poem.


Not Poetry

We all know what a poem is and is not.
And we all know what prose are, so
it isn't that hard to tell the two apart.
But this isn't poetry.
We've already said that we know what poetry is,
so why isn't this a poem. I don't know. I don't want it is to be one.
Or maybe I do.
Maybe I want a poem, but do I want a prose poem. I mean what is
a prose poem. Isn't that simply a short story with awkward
line breaks?
This certainly isn't a short story, there is no story. So what is it?
You tell me. You tell me is crap. Not a poem. Not prose. Not even a memo.
What do we do with this now?
Perhaps we give it another name, proety.
It kind of sounds like a professional poetry league,
where we will gather all the great poets,
we'll gather them into teams and then make them
duke it out literally, not literally but literary.

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Evolutionary Poem

I was walking around outside and was thinking that plant evolution didn't make sense to me. I mean is seems like plants should have evolved to not be tasty. That would be an evolutionary advantage, to not be eaten I mean. But I was thinking about it and, well plants were here first so really we evolved to like the taste of certain plants. And some plants have evolved to not be eaten, to have poisonous leaves and flowers, so there is still some plant evolution. Instead of writing a poem directly about evolution I decided to write one about the evolution of a poem, not the revising stage, but rather how poetry has evolved over the last few centuries. I mean we have gone from a very rigid meter and rhyme scheme to a predominately free verse society (not that society is that much interested in poetry anymore) . So I was thinking about where poetry is going to go. Is it going to continue in free verse, or is it going to have a some what circular pattern and go back to having a tight meter and rhyme scheme, or maybe something new entirely. I chose the title Evolutionary Poem because I liked how it reminded me of the revolutionary at the same time as being about evolution, and if you really think about it those words are really quite similar.

Evolutionary Poem

If my poem were to evolve,
what way would it go?
How would the words be grouped? Would the rhythm
fall into place? Would there be a set rhyme
scheme? Which way would it go? Would time
degrade the poem into
that terrible thing
known simply as
free verse?
Or would we have a poem that evolved
into the greatest works of Master Shake?
I don't know how a poem would evolve
and perhaps, it wouldn't be one or the
other, but a melding of the two.

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Poetry Emergency

This just popped into my head today, the idea of a poem needing medical attention. I don't know maybe it comes from all the medical dramas I've been watching (Scrubs and House), or perhaps the workshopping I do and how that relates to "fixing" a poem. Anyways here is my poetry emergency.


Poetry Emergency

We need to clear an airway,
this poem is going under.
Bring out the editors,
with their bright red pens,
we'll revise until it
has regained enough function
that we really can really go to work on it.
We will hack away lines like
old civil war surgeons and
we'll drain away its humours
giving the similes and metaphors
the cure they need.
Don't worry about the stanzas and punctuation
we'll throw it through a centrifuge
letting everything separate out and then
fall into place.

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Happy People

The few poems I've read from William Carlos Williams have been about very ordinary things. Things that I probably wouldn't have written a poem about, but today I thought about a guy I wanted to write a poem about. I was out driving and it was fairly windy, and I ended up stopped at an intersection where three of the corners had people with signs for King's Mattresses. They were having trouble keeping their signs up in the wind and looked pretty miserable. But they reminded me of a guy I saw doing the same job over the summer. He was literally one of the happiest people I have ever seen. Just out there everyday, holding his sign, waving at people and being happy. So this poem is about that happy man.


Happy Man on the Street Corner

I've been down this way over three times
this week and he is always there,
the happy man holding a sign
telling me to buy discount mattresses.
He is happy,
happy to be himself,
smiling and waving at everyone
who drives by during their busy
unhappy lives while this man is
happy, and I don't know why.


Copyright 2007 William Curb

Another Ekphrastic Poem

Here is another poem I wrote in while I was in Kittredge gallery. This one is based off of the painting "The Heat of the Moment" done by Besty Best-Spadaro. Still needs quite a bit of work, but I like the quick revision I just did of it over the original.


The Fight!

These people are fighting
with fruit on their heads.
They won't talk to each
other any more.
They just stick their
tongues out as if
that was just what you did.
Eyes full of contempt
the apples look at
the oranges that look
back at the apples.
These people are fighting
but they don't know why.


Copyright 2007 William Curb

Ekphrastic poems

In my poetry class today we walked over to the art gallery on campus and then wrote poems from the inspiration we got from the art. I wasn't sure if I would come up with anything, but it didn't turn out so bad. I ended up five poems, only two from the art and then three that just kind of came to me. I'm going to share two of these poems, one from each pile. This first one was inspired by the painting Shark from Sharon Birzer. The original idea started out as a list poem, but it ended quite different as you will see.


Things You Find in a Shark

The fisherman pulled up a shark today,
a real whale of a beast.
It no longer looked fearsome
hanging by that hook.
It just looked sad as they
weighed it and clocked it
in at over three hundred pounds.

And then they gutted it,
right there on the dock
letting the blood drip down
into the water as the sad
creatures guts spilled forth.

People, oohed and awed as
the fisherman told the
story of fighting off the beast
and the great honor they gave
him by dragging him ashore.



This  next poem is the third I wrote while in Kittredge (the art gallery), it is a little different, but I still like it. Don't worry my brain isn't really crowded, I just liked the idea.


The Crowd

It's crowded in here,
my brain I mean,
there just isn't enough space
to stretch out and
everyone is just so noisy.

I remember a teacher of mine
who told me about a crowd
his once was in, where
the people were so tightly
packed together that he
could reach down and
pick up his feet.
He would just slowly sink down
and the reach down and
grab his feet again.

It isn't that crowded in here,
but I wonder if it ever will be or
if someday the crowd will disperse
and I'll be the only one here
picking up my feet and
slowly sinking down.


Copyright 2007 William Curb

Love Poem

I don't like love poetry, I just don't find it interesting and I find most people who write love poetry to believe the lie that their love is special. And it isn't. People like to believe that no one else has felt how they have felt, and the truth really we probably haven't (since we each interpret the world around us differently) but really it isn't that different. Everyone in love has felt relatively the same and most people who have thought that they would love someone till the end of time have realized that they'd rather love someone else to the end of time and then,of course, they realize (I'd hope) after going through the process a few times that they don't need to love someone till the end of time. That is a a lot of responsibility, loving till the end of time, especially because I don't believe they have a good idea how immensely long time is. So anyways here is my love poem about not liking love poems.

Love Poem

I don't actually like love poems.
They are boring,
melodramatic
and in many cases
verbose lies.

I don't believe in true
love, or never ending
love or any of that
nonsense.

There was a time
when I thought
if I loved hard enough
that I would die.
I tried to.

Instead I realized that
dying for love is like
fighting for peace.

So what do I believe in?
I believe in living
and of course loving,
and perhaps
loving again.

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Recycling

I wrote another bad poem today; however, I didn't do on purpose this time. Just came out that way. Anyways about a week ago I thought about writing a poem about recycling, and then in the process of writing it I thought about the idea of actually recycling a poem. So here is recycling a poem.

Recycling a Poem

Bring in your words and your sentences.
We will process them,
break them down into syllables and letters
and then dump them into the big machine
that will rebuild them into
new words, with
new meanings, making
new sentences, grouped
into stanzas, made
into a poem.


Copyright 2007 William Curb

Bad Poetry

My girlfriend is an editor (or reviewer, I'm not sure what the title really is) for our school literary magazine, Crosscurrents, and so yesterday we got in a discussion about what people value in poetry and how they judge it. And there are a lot of things that people don't like in poems. Lack of punctuation, not spell checking, to many images, too few images, images that don't make sense, images that aren't deep enough, semicolons, capitals in weird places, periods in weird places (sorry cummings), and I could go on and on. So I wrote a bad poem. An interesting thing about attempting to write bad poetry is that if you succeed you've done your job, and if you fail, well then you have written a good poem. Win, win really. I don't know why but it what I felt I should write. It isn't that clever and it is really messy and ugly. I kind of like it. The last lines tickle me because those wavy red lines they put under misspelled words now just seem so angry looking, and the idea came to me while purposely misspelling a word and having my editor (I use OpenOffice cause I am cheap) continuously auto correct my spelling. I could turn off auto correct, but I have chosen to live in ignorance of how to really use my programs. So basically it was a self inspiring poem as well as a poem inspired by a fellow class mate who loathed (I can think of the word they used, but it was much better than loathe) for poetry that is so casual that it addresses the reader and the fact that it acknowledges that it is a poem, which I must agree is fairly obnoxious.

Also I am displeased somewhat with Blogger, it has given one of my lines a restriction in length, "to discover..." "...looked at" is supposed be one long 28 syllable line. So I am looking at ways to redesign my blogs look and feel(do blogs feel?) so that I can accommodate some of my longer lines. I played around with the HTML for about an hour today before giving up. There was a time in my life where this task would have been fairly easy, but alas I have given up coding and scripting for poetry and prose.

 
bad Poem

I am here writing this poet, and you
already hate it I am addressing
the reader. And I am going to screw
even trying to write a good poem.
I will break da rules dat tell me what I
ned to do But I am no master at
this game I am simply along for the
prolixity from my verbosity
my Everest never ending along these
slope I am climbing I ce AX in han.d
becuse I am at my wits end trying
to discover why a work of so call art is judged by such arbitrary terms that is isn't really looked at.
And so I break rules unknownly, and I
I ceep my mis-ellings God knows my text
editors hates them more than you ever
could;

Copyright 2007 William Curb

Grandparents

This is my first post of November which means I haven't put anything up in 6 days. That is okay, I've been writing in my notebook and just haven't put anything up yet. In my notebook I've been experimenting with longer poetry. I went to see Tess Gallagher speak a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how long some of her poetry is. I suppose I most read shorter stuff for my classes because when we workshop a fellow classmate's poem we have a length restriction, and in my other classes we can only read poetry that can easily be analyzed in fifty minutes or so. So I've been trying my hand at writing some longer poetry. This poem is about my grandparents house. My grandparents have passed on and the family had to go through an immense amount of stuff in their house. It was truly staggering to see the amount of stuff that my grandparents owned. Anyways, this poem is about going through the stuff, remembering my grandparents, and briefly touches on how I regret not getting to know them better before they passed on (it was hard living in Hawaii and having them live in Iowa).


Old House

Over the summer,
I went to Iowa.
I drove.
I don't know why.
I went to my grandparents house,
but they didn't live there anymore,
they died the year before.
I didn't attend a funeral,
or tell them good bye,
it was too far away,
but now I am driving to Iowa
to go through their things.
I was told to ask for anything I wanted,
there was plenty to go around.
Told to ask for something to remind me of
people I did not really know.
I did miss them,
they were always kind to me
always loving.
But I had only seen them a handful of times
in the older years of my life.
Now I was asked to take something
to remind me, from a house
overflowing with meaning.
There is twenty years of wrapping paper in one drawer,
and alcohol that expired twelve years ago in the basement,
did you know alcohol can expire,
I didn't.
Over a hundred decks of playing cards,
and all those little soaps
taken from hotel bathrooms.
What do you do with that stuff?
But it isn't all worthless,
far from it.
Fur coats made from foxes,
(you can tell because they still have
their little feet and faces)
and a crystal dining room set,
it will go nicely with my bowels
from Ikea.
Souvenirs from Nazi Germany
and apartheid Africa
and Alaska
Sweden
Ireland
Hawaii
and the passports proving
their worldliness.
And there are books,
walls lined with books,
and I love books,
so I ask for those books.
And the hats.
The hats are really special.
Inside one of the hats there is
a business card my grandfather used
years earlier. It is not just
worn yellow paper that reads
chairman. And I like having it,
I still keep it in the hat
so I can reach up and be
reminded of grandparents
I had the privilege of meeting.

Copyright 2007 William Curb