Another Year, Another Journal, and a Dream Poem

The year contained in this journal has been like last of a long struggle. I have finally reached surface from the dark, chill of abyssal depths. I am still adjusting to the light and air, but things are coming into focus. I have a new job that allows me to be an effective educator which reduces my stress and lets me be more positive and balanced in my creative moments. I am, as usual and forever, battling my negative moods, but I have relieved at least one source of distraction. As I start a new journal I feel it will be filled with less with stress, and more with wonder and possibilities.

From an observation of my work as a teacher of dreamtime children.

“Field Concerns for Medical Gladiolas.”

Her voice followed

the  butterflies of her hands

dancing  up the curve of her

experience

and away into the future

“That’s what my teacher called it.”

The distant butterflies transformed

bright leaves drifting back

loosely settling

in her lap.

It’s been a while!

My life has been experiencing some glitches and internal rewiring due to some very positive changes. I am now one month into my new position as a coop preschool teacher of the paperwork free variety. I document by photos and conversations, and I am in charge of the program, but not the administration. All I have to do is develop relationships with children and parents and provide a safe stimulating environment that responds to their needs as individuals and encourages social interactions. I am very good at these things. Parents who put their children in this program are aware of our policy of child centered, play oriented learning so I don’t have to sell them on my philosophy and style. And best of all I do not have to do social service work and spend half of my time writing down what happens every day. We just do things. Mostly I inspire, observe, set limits and provide caring and conversations.

Now that I have transitioned into my new schedule and dealt with all of the feelings that come with the change of community. I did not move, but I left some friends and comrades in arms at my Head Start job and some families that I had grown close to. Whenever I make these transitions I go through a period in which my priorities fly up in the air, and I am not very good at juggling. I tend to be a one task at a time person. So writing remained up in the air for a while. Now I am feeling the rhythm and have started to catch all of my flying priorities. I even wrote a poem though I am not sure why it has such a strangely fatalistic tone. I am feeling very positive about most of my life even though things get a little overwhelming at times. But hey when a poem comes in from wherever they come from, I just write whatever comes through.

One More Day

Another chance to move

about in this small space,

Sweep a corner clear,

Chalk an outline of where

I will fall

With small

Adjustments that amount

to millions of still frames,

most of which I will

forget,

keeping only the ones that

mean the least,

flat, transparent images

unable to hold feeling,

as if they belong to someone else,

who is like me,

but seen from a distance,

flickered movements strobed

onto my mind screen,

an eyeball, a razor, a black-bearded man in a

tutu endlessly repeated,

infinitely varied,

until all possibilities are

exhausted.

Yellow Glass Shadows

Shadows on a Summer Wall

Why I Write Poetry/Getting Inside Another Cocoon

“I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I haven’t.

“I don’t think of fame or posterity (as Keats so grandly and genuinely did), nor do I care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally) anyone’s state or social relation, nor am I for any particular technical development in the American language simply because I find it necessary. What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to others, and vice versa. My formal ‘stance’ is found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred. I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry—all of the past you read is usually quite great—but it is a useful thorn to have in one’s side.

“It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.” —Frank O’Hara

I found this here, and thought it was pretty close to the way I feel about poetry, only I am not as driven to it as Frank O’Hara, and I find more good in contemporary poetry (Though much of it alludes me) and the past is alright some of it inspirational, but much of it a little too dramatic and not enough momentary for my taste.

I feel like poetry should represent a way of feeling and perceiving in a moment as we all live life moment to moment each in our own little cocoon of senses and thoughts. Poems are an attempt to reach out like a little tube that can slide into other cocoons and communicate on more intimate level. Anyway parts of  O’Hara’s reasons for writing and the reasons he disavows line up with my reasoning pretty well. I am not out to make a grand statement or be famous, and I think that any poet who is is really searching too hard for disappointment. There are many easier and quicker ways to fame and glory. Poetry to me is one moment explained well from my point of view in a way that might connect to someone else enough to continue a real conversation. When I read poetry I find that much of it does not speak to me, but when I find a poet that speaks to me, it is like that person is speaking to the inside of me, breaking into my cocoon and whispering to my deepest self.