NOT SO SILENT DISAPPOINTED BEATNIK BOOMER

Interesting experience with a poetry submission today. I sent four poems out on New Years

Here, for example was a troubled male...

Day and got them back today from Three Penny Review. Two days. Though nobody anymore comments except through form letters, I was disappointed by the brevity with which they were considered. The four poems take the point of view of very troubled males who have troubled relationships with the women in the poems. So many women these days are offended by such material that they can't recognize the quality of the poems. I will continue to send them out, hoping that someday, someone, somewhere will recognize their artistry. I have written a novel too with such a plot, and one Facebook woman said she would not read such material if she encountered it. Three of the poems were based on women I knew and the fourth was built out of the kind of loving/controlling mentality of some men who put women on pedestals only to try and control them for fear of their appeal to other men. Dostoevsky wrote a wonderful short story on just such a theme. I cannot recall its name. I will share one of the more lyric poems to get a reaction, if any is forthcoming. I was trying to employ the loving/threatening voice of a controlling male:  

A WOMAN LIKE FLOWERS

Oooh, I thinking, what would want me her

When carry I my briefcase life home to rest me?

I think me: a flower wee

To never drop her pretty petals

Even though transplanted into a watery myworld,

Crystal vase surrounding it, like …?

So pretty a world as who would complain of it?

A flower most delicate like orchids,

And always,

An opening to me face of sunflowers.

Rue, as of delicate small petals,

Trustworthy as perennials,

She to bloom under my careful tenderness

As who wouldn't?

O such a beauteous treasure

To sit so up highness on my mantelpiece

And me stare at from my flower-hungry eyes,

Secateurs held loosely in my tendering hand.

POETRY MADNESS CONTINUES BEATNIKING MY HEAD

Another poem has found a home just in time for Christmas vacation. It won't like young Mr. Scrooge be forced to stay at school over the holiday. This time a haiku that I think very highly of has found its way onto the internet pages of Haikuniverse:

quantum effects—
an electron
lost in space

After so much end of year success with poetry, what will happen to my bucket list? I don't know. Recently I recalled when a friend some long time ago told me that I was a natural poet. It's been on my mind to get busy on the rewrite of Ghoul World, but I'm having so much fun messing around with poetry.

BEATNIKING MY WAY BACK TO POETRY

I'm sorry. Twenty days plus since my last entry. Here's why. I've done little to no work towards either of the entries on my bucket list. I've been working on old poetry and a few new poems that represent my style since my lyric days are past, the poetry of my past that came alive from dreams and intuition. I plod nowadays but am rewriting and reworking old poetry. My next goal is to enter into contests a book of poetry that I wrote 25 years ago in a certain pedestrian style that was inspired by the poetry of Hanshan as translated by Gary Snyder. Here's one of them:

DREAM OF FAME

Twenty-five summers since I wrote these poems, Han-shan,

Inspired by the pedestrian style that shunned the forms and fashions

Of the Tang Dynasty you were living in, abandoned on rocks,

On cliff faces that you passed by in your wanderings. Unlike you,

I must admit that all these years I’ve craved fame and found none.

Now the lyric flights that rose from my dreams have flown away. I’m left

Barren, abandoned, old master, limping along with unanswered questions.

Did you dream of fame as I did, and why did your thoughts turn to stone?

The reference to stone comes from the fact that no one knows who Hanshan was and by the fact that "his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home." Quotation from Wikipedia.

SALINGER & HAWTHORNE: STYLISTIC TWINS?

you know who

If what I say today sounds a little blurry, it's because my eyes are dilated. At exercise today, a beautiful new inky floater bloomed in my right eyeball accompanied by a ton of tiny circular floaters. After my cataracts were removed, I was told to watch out for this phenomenon as it might be a sign of retinal detachment. Thus I hurried to a nearby optometrist and had the eyeball looked into. No detachment, but now I have a bleeder on my optic nerve, the sign of a "violent" but fairly common detachment of vitreous matter [floater] from the back of the eye that will now drift in my eye in perpetuity. 

Salinger at war. PTSD in later life?

As to literature, the supposed purpose of this writer's blog. I'm giving up at the halfway point on reading House of the Seven Gables by Mr. Hawthorne. When I was working on my Masters, I was drawn to his writing, but no longer, it appears. His rhetorical flourishes are too much for me. However I was surprised when, as an antidote, I picked up Ten Stories by J.D. Salinger and realized that Salinger's method of writing can be traced back to Hawthorne — the p.o.v. of their narrators', the rhetorical flourishes and asides they employ, the way both take the reader into their cubbyholes, so to speak, to talk to them about their subjects and subject matter. If ever there were a scholarly article, there is one to pursue, i.e. similarities in technique and p.o.v. between Salinger and Hawthorne. I did a quick Google and found none. For reading, I've got Durrell's Judith and, somewhere in the limbo of inter-library loan, Ron Padgett's poetry is plodding its way toward my home. 

Durrell

It's obvious to me now that I can no longer write lyric poetry. My lines no longer sing, but Padgett's poetry may be my out. I've now written 6 or 7 poems in the style I imagined I saw in the Jarmusch movie, Patterson. So I continue to rewrite some of my 8 line poetry in the mode of Han-shan's poetry with an eye to creating a chapbook length work for submission to contests, etcetera, while also trying to create a few original poems. Still in the tube, the rewrite of my science fiction novel Ghoul World to remove some of the cleverness I thought was just too precious for words. And another movie???

A NEW POETIC LICENSE FOR SILENT BEAT BOOMER

blowing his own horn

Thank you to the 81 people who looked in today. I guess I must accept I'm a poet first and foremost. Look at the record. In April this year, my poem "Legacy" was accepted by Washington State poet laureate Tod Marshall for the anthology WA129. In September two of my poems were accepted for publication in Aberration Labyrinth. In October another poem was accepted for inclusion in Portland's Work Literary Magazine, and the Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal is still holding another poem for a "possible" future issue. All this while I'm waiting for someone to accept one of my novels for publication. Today, inspired by the movie Paterson and the poetry of Ron Padgett included in the movie to try a completely new approach to writing poetry, I tore off rough drafts for a couple of new poems. I feel rejuvenated to write poetry in a new way for me. We'll see if inspiration continues. By the way, if you're a poet at heart, watch that movie. It's a paean to poetry by Jim Jarmusch.

BEATNIK BOOMER STRIKES AGAIN

a catheter at close range

I've reduced most days to only three catheterizations: bedtime, morning (as late as possible) and in the afternoon. I've discovered that I can urinate normally for several hours before my bladder gets so extended that the urge to go becomes uncomfortable and it's time to insert the old catheter once again. This urinary practice extends the time between catheterizations. It is one of the benefits of not drinking 64 fluid ounces a day. I've had to learn all these things by myself. No one in the medical profession seems to be expert on the actual trials and tribulations of using a catheter.  

Now some happy literary news. I've had a poem accepted at Work Literary Magazine. Julie Madsen who edits it put out a call on Facebook. She hadn't received enough submissions to fill her online magazine. She's been doing the editing for ages. The poem combines a moment in Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer when two turds appear and my job cleaning toilets as a janitor in the very college I received my undergraduate degree from. I was janitoring at the University of Dayton after I had earned my BA in English. The labor was during my drinking and falling apart days when I was cruising the bottom of my capacities, but for all that, the poem is quite interesting, and it's about time someone gave it a home. You can find it online after October 30th.

BEATNIK BOOMER FINISHES A CREATIVE TASK

This afternoon I found the energy to do a final rewrite of the screenplay, Distant Enemies. It wasn't much of a chore. I was just tidying up a few errors Mertie found while doing a final read through of my script looking for typos, lapses of logic and et cetera. Still, I feel hopeful about returning energy. The senior exercise class I attend at Firstenburg Community Center is paying off.

I have learned another useful health fact. If your bladder is not working properly, do not follow the suggestion to drink at least 64 ounces of fluids a day if you have spent your entire life training your body to function while drinking much less than that. I'm certain that my recent attempts over the past six months to follow that 64 ounce recommendation gave me hours of unnecessary excruciating pain and discomfort. Still catheterizing, but I'm doing just fine on a much smaller intake of fluids, and I'm getting longer periods between. My doctor told me that the 64 fluid ounce requirement is just a recommendation and that the figure was for all intents and purposes "made up". His words exactly. The fluid intake falsehood might be another of the many fallacies brought to us by the medicine distrusting and vaccination avoiding Boomers who have made up health directions and diet recommendations from whole cloth. Most of them in order to create health and diet businesses for themselves.