aly

Your Non-Prescription Glasses

dealbreaker:

At least these are aiding someone’s vision: mine.  I can see that you are a douche.

me: hey what are you watching?

my sister: aqua teen hunger force. these fruit used to party but then they found jesus. maybe you should watch this.

a wordly goal for 2010!

I used to write poetry often.  when I was a teenager, I would write short stories, but that sort of trickled off and dried up along with my constant ideas for novels.  I generally think that creative writing workshops cause more harm than good, because they are full of assholes, and because you can’t teach good style.  I’ve done better with a few writerly mentors and friends who humour me long enough to read drafts and point out inconsistencies, plus a voracious reading appetite which has allowed me to learn over time what is really good writing and what is shit writing.  everything else is practice.

I think poetry is the opposite, at least for me.  I enrolled in a poetry workshop in my second year of university, which was the best thing I could have done for myself, although I didn’t know it then.  it was challenging and illuminating.  my prof was a curmudgeonly aboriginal Canadian poet by the name of Armand Garnet Ruffo.  he wasn’t quite “with it” (he kept getting really confused about slang and saying things like meterosexual) but he asked some questions of my poetry that I still ask myself when I write.  such as “why are you writing this?  what’s the point of this poem?”  “why does this word matter?”  and “wtf does this even MEAN?”

they sound lulzy, but they are good questions.

making me really THINK about what I am writing, and why, has made poetry excruciating.  I am sort of a perfectionist, and I feel like if I can’t do something right the first time I might as well not do it at all.  that is why I don’t play sports or do a lot of other things requiring honed skill.  the honing is what fucks me.  I get so bored, and frustrated, and then I give up.  so once poetry became more of a mental puzzle than a way to express emotion, it became one of those things I give up on.  but it also became really fucking good, so on those rare occasions when I create a finished poem, it usually goes quite well.

thankfully, Geocities has gone tits up, along with my poetry website from high school on which I had showcased all my emo poems.  I have them all recorded in a real-life book, with real paper and shit.  ghetto, I know.  even though they suck, I think they are important and I am glad I have a copy stashed away.  it’s more like a diary than anything, since each poem was an attempt to deal with some emotion I was experiencing.  those poems were fun experiments in creativity as well as being therapeutic.  now, I don’t feel like I have that freedom since Ruffo took my poetry cherry away.  I am no longer so naive to think that the rest of the world will like my work merely because it means something to me.  however, I feel like my poems have a substantial weight to them now.  in the words of Marilyn Rose, one of my profs at Brock, my writing has the potential to “take the top of your head off”.

one example is a poem I wrote called Rape in the Pitcairn Banana Grove, which was a finalist for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year contest in 2006.  even I liked that poem, and I don’t like anything I do; normally I can’t even look at my own work, creative or otherwise, after I write because I loathe it so.  but this was good.  it was good because of Ruffo and his insistence on concrete images and his fixation on words, which stuck with me.  where the paragraph is a unit in a book, so the word is a unit in a poem, and each word has to be exactly perfect and necessary.  that is one of the things I learned from him.

I am going to try to enter the contest again this year.  I want to write for a reason again.  I would like to win money and an actual prize this time, instead of merely being a finalist.  I am actually striving for second place, as bizarre as that may sound.  the second-place poems from those contests are consistently incredible and I would be honoured to be placed among them.  for example, 2005’s second-place winner, Open My Drawers, is one of the cleverest poems about sex I have ever read.  it is playful and fresh and funny while still making me tingle in my pants.  2003’s second-place winner The Raven Tango Poems is the piece that inspired me to enter this contest in the first place.  in 2006, the second-place poem was Castor Gulo (poem of a beaver becoming a wolf).  I thought my submission for the contest that year was pretty good, like I said above.  but for all my pride at having written something worthwhile, “Rape in the Pitcairn Banana Grove” was a lame speck of nothingness next to my competition.  that poem, “Castor Gulo”, really did take off the top of my head.

I want to do that.  I want to slice up your cranium with my word skills.  I know they’re there!  but that requires honing.  sharpening, if you will.  I have a few poems that might do, but I need something worthy of second place, something new for my own sake.  so I need to get over my vague self loathing and my frustration and my laziness and my tendency to get distracted and forget that there’s a contest going on.  I need to do this shit, to write something interesting, and edit it to awesomeness before February’s deadline.  I’m doing it because I like external validation, and because I like money.  but I must admit a little part of me wants to make Ruffo proud.  that’s the same little part of me that wishes I had a pair of Chuck Taylors so I too can squat pensively next to a tree and ruminate on my writing career.