Denise Low Postings: Jonathan Mayhew Wheelbarrow Poem

Denise Low Postings: Jonathan Mayhew Wheelbarrow Poem

Poetry

I am taking the rest of the month off from writing, so the poetry has come back. When I write poetry, it comes effortlessly, or not at all. I often write in sequences of short poems, and then revise by taking out the parts that didn't work.

Wheelbarrrow [popular songs]

Wheelbarrow

20,000 wheelbarrows would fit inside your poem
20,000 red wheelbarrows, blue wheelbarrows, green wheelbarrows

But would your poem fit in a wheelbarrow?
How many of them would fit inside one green wheelbarrow?

University

Surrounding the university is a town
In the town, down the hill from the university
Is the woman I love
[repeat]

Poetry & Music

Poetry and music. Music and poetry.
Poetry music. Music poetry.
And art.
Lipstick, lipstick, and poetry, poetry.
Like you like it.
And lipstick art. Visual art, just for you.
For you, poetry art. Music art. And poetry (of course).
Punctuation art. Punctuation poetry. Punctuation lipstick.
(Just for you, needless to say.)
Art music. (You thought I’d forget that!
Visual music, for you, without lipstick or poetry,
With or without punctuation.
As you please. Punctuated as you like it.
Poetry, did I mention that? Poetry and music? Yes.
[repeat, improvising freely]



Mississippi

one mississippi
two mississippi
we counted the seconds
playing football
in the street
not to rush the passer
too soon
one mississippi
two mississipi
a car would come through
we’d disperse
then re-gather
one mississippi
two mississippi



Garbage Bag / Box

In the box of plastic garbage bags, are forty bags.
Take out one garbage bag, forty boxes of bags would fit in it.
Which fits more? The bag or the box?
[repeat]


Beckett Lorca

Yerma is expecting a son, Godot.
[repeat, or not]

Town

A flat town in a mountainous state
A hilly town in a flat, land-bound state
[repeat]



The Woman I Love

The woman I love wears no red wheelbarrow lipstick,
no poetry lipstick, no music lipstick

The woman I love
wears no punctuation on her lips

no university lipstick, no town lipstick,
no hill lipstick. The woman I love

without art, without music,
without

Finished!

I finished an article that I only knew I was going to write in late April. Of course, upon finishing it I now have lost the feeling of elation that I had when writing it. I still think it's ok, and have the thrill of finishing, but also an uneasiness.

Writing and Research

It takes me about as long to write something as to finish the footnotes and references. What I usually have to do is go and make a systematic list of every reference that is missing or incomplete, and then go back and fill those in one by one. I might need a book at the library, or an internet reference. This is very hard, tedious work to do, though not intellectually challenging. Precisely because it isn't intellectually engaging, it is tedious. It can be satisfying in the sense that it provides the sensation of completion. The article is not complete until every reference is correctly cited.

Why don't I do it as I go along? Because I am working very fast and intensely on the intellectual part of it. I might know that so-and-so talks about this in such a work, but I don't want to have to interrupt my writing, go to the library, get the book, and put down the page number. That would be very inefficient. I have finished most of the article I'm writing now, and which I started at the end of the semester. It has been laborious by highly pleasing.

I cannot start the phase of checking every reference until I have every sentence more or less written of the body of the text. Then I make a list. One trick I found is to go through the article and write the words "missing reference" every time there is one. Then I can search the document for those words and clean them up one by one.

Dreams

I deliberately didn't work at all on Saturday, and won't today either, but I had a very intense dream about working out some problems in my article / chapter. There was another American Lorxa play with a very strange title in two parts, that I can't remember anymore. After I woke up, I continued to lie there and work out actual problems on the chapter in my head, leaving behind the dream chapter. As I got into the shower I came up with the idea of Lorca as "patron saint of American theatrical postmodernism" or something like that.

***

I was in a car with a woman. We were making various stops in order to accomplish errands. She kept trying to start arguments with me but I refused, saying, "We are not a couple. You are trying to fight with me as though we were involved, but we aren't." It was odd, as though she were trying to establish a relationship in purely negative terms, asserting bickering rights that only come with a close emotional connection. (The woman in my dream was not even a real person that I can identify in real life.) Even in an actual relationship, I feel, some partners want to place negatives in the forefront at all time, keeping the involvement mostly at the level of problems. But you only want to work on problems if the relationship itself is something real and valuable.

New Plan

Completion Plan for What Lorca Knew

February, 2014:

Send query to Chicago
Preface
1. Introduction
2. What Lorca Knew
5. Anatomy of Influence
6. New York Variations

March:

3. Thirteen Ways (writing complete)
4. Grain of the Voice (complete the writing of).
7. Queering Lorca (get up to 6,000 words).

April:

Take month off.

May:

Work on theater article.

June:

7. “A Poet’s Theater”—finish 1st draft of article with all “body of the text” complete.

July:

Finish Theater article: all references complete.
4. Grain of the Voice (translations and footnotes).

August:

7. Expand theater article into chapter: all references complete.
8. Queering Lorca (finish writing; translations and footnotes).

September:

Epilogue: “Elegy for Lorca Studies.”
Write talk version of “Elegy for Lorca Studies.”
Query publishers

October:

Travel. Take time off from writing.

November:

3. Thirteen Ways (translations and footnotes).

December:

Extra time.
Submit Manuscript.

My Most Brilliant Article

I really think what I'm writing now is my most brilliant article ever. I'm not saying that to brag (actually yes I am, but that's not the point), but to point out that you should always feel that way, about the article you are now writing, if you are doing it right. This won't always happen, but if this never happens you need to shake things up a a bit.

I began by thinking it would be a kind of descriptive one, a kind of traditional influence study, but it is turning out to be much better than that. I am really surprising myself here.


*It is funny.
*It is one of my first and only articles not on poetry per se. I can only think of one more off the top of my head.
*Thus it draws on things I never thought I would use in an academic article. For example, Breaking Bad. Now all my hours of watching that are not in vain. They have become tax deductible.
*I can now envision myself as a theater scholar. I now realize that I can use certain of my writerly talents to talk about things specific to the theater, in ways that I couldn't with lyric poetry.
*It disproves an implicit assumption I had in Apocryphal Lorca. So I have the pleasure of proving myself wrong.
*Often, you can be brilliant in parts of a research project that seem more routine or mundane. I wish I could teach other people that.
*It has the wonderful feedback loop of being able to comment on a work written by someone who read my own previous scholarship.
*It has Billy fucking Strayhorn in it!
*It has a kind of density of reference and insight, where I can cram a lot into every page.