collection agency

A few hours of restorative DAOTC* has left me in better shape to comment on my current shmintellectual pursuits.

I’m working on something which I have irreverently titled The Dara Anthology of Contemporary Poetry in preparation for my MFA program. I am making a list of all the poems that are most important to me: both those other people have written, and those I have written myself. When I get a printer, I’m going to print them out and put them all in a binder, in chronological order, so I can refer to it easily. Credit for this idea goes to LaCona, who once told me to make a list of everything I had done. Ten years later, I’m doing it.

One of the things I need to remember but have often forgotten is that when I was a freshman, having a lonely fall semester, I wrote a 365-page, 365-poem document, tied together through the loose narrative of a plucky but misguided antiheroine. I showed it to one person, an unfortunate Stanford professor, who never commented on it, and then I lost both the original and the computer on which it was stored. This is probably a good thing.

364 out of the 365 poems in this document were TRASH of the TRASHIEST variety, but there are one or two that I think are worth remembering. One, in particular, contained this one line that I thought was really good. It was a semi-sonnet. It used a limited sound palette. It was the first thing I’d written in some time that could be descrbed with the word “restraint” as opposed to “excess.” It was derivative of Sara Teasdale, but it was still, to my mind, the best poem – and the best line – I had ever written.

I still kind of like it, honestly. But remembering how I thought it was, like, THE GREATEST LINE OF POETRY ANYONE HAD EVER WRITTEN BEFORE OR SINCE gives me humility. You never know what is good when you are working on it. It takes forever to get perspective.

About eight years later, I rewrote that poem. I didn’t choose to rewrite that particular poem, but I wrote another little semi-sonnet about failure and wanting to be alone which had a very similar tinge. Except this one didn’t suck as bad.

So perhaps, in another sixteen years, I will rewrite this same poem, and it will be good enough to be something. But by collecting the things I have written which remain important to me, I can see what my subjects are. (One of them is the word “rot.”) And I can get a sense of where I am going by surveying where I’ve been.

This poem to which I have been referring is not good, or even interesting, to anyone but me. But to see it, and know that at one point, it was the best thing I had written, gives me a lot of perspective. So it’s going in the Anthology. As is a lot of stuff that just makes me laugh now.

* dicking around on the computer

Oh, there ain’t no rest for the wicked…

…Money don’t grow on trees.
I got bills to pay,
I got mouths to feed,
There ain’t nothing in this world for free.
I know I can’t slow down,
I can’t hold back,
Though you know, I wish I could.
No there ain’t no rest for the wicked,
Until we close our eyes for good.

- “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked,” Cage the Elephant from their self-titled CD

good morning, baltimore

I am blogging from the second-floor bedroom-with-balcony of this three-story house where I get to coast for the month of July. It’s walking distance to Hopkins. I am house-sitting for a friend from Poland, his self-maintaining cat, and his wife’s beautiful community garden. I get to eat all the green beans I want.

Having spent 24 hours on the train from Chi-town to B-more leaves me in little shape to be pithy. I just wanted to point out that I’m here, and I will be here for two years. What a relief, to know that something has been decided.

I am unable to stop categorizing posts.

my taxi driver says

that as long as you want to keep traveling, it’s no use trying to stop.

it’s great to stay up late

I am sleeping at such weird hours. Still jet-lagged. I took the Western bus from Montrose to Division this morning at 6 AM. This morning, like yesterday, was marked by more interactions with the sentient beings we classify as pests.

Scene One:
Guy at Bus Stop: Have you EVER seen a cockroach that big?
Dara: (investigating) Actually, I’ve seen many larger cockroaches. In LA.
Guy at Bus Stop: Well, yeah, me too, in Atlanta – but never here.
Dara: I guess it’s a pretty big cockroach for Chicago.
Guy at Bus Stop: I haven’t seen a cockroach that big since I was like ten, twelve years old.
Dara: Really?
Guy at Bus Stop: And that was a LONG time ago.

Scene Two:
Dara: Hi.
Bus Driver: You have such nice eyes.
Dara: Uh, thanks. Is it still $2.25?
Bus Driver: Yeah.

It’s nice to see you, too, Chicago. But not for long. I can’t wait to go. Although I have nothing but good feelings about this city, nothing in living here has become me, or it, like leaving. What I’ve tried to do here is done, and the rest will happen better somewhere else, with less pollen .

I’m going to have brunch with relatives this AM, then go to see the run-through of Robert’s show, an adaptation of Macbeth called “What the Weird Sisters Saw.” It’s from the POV of the witches. He’s playing M himself.

instead

of eating pancakes, we are going to kill a mouse. (By “we,” I mean Robert.) Happy 4th.

tendency see note. See note? Oh. See…note!

I figured something out on my flight from Warsaw to Chicago, reading footnotes. I’ve been figuring a lot of things out lately.

I have felt weird for a long time about the number of multiple notebooks I keep – one more personal, one fit for public viewing, and so on. And I have to carry all of them around with me. It feels disjointed. I’ve always wanted to just have one brilliantly written universal notebook, like Da Vinci or Boswell or Wittgenstein or something…Of course, not writing as well as any of them makes this difficult.

But I have decided it’s okay, and have devised a system of footnoting between them. I also have started carrying a third blank one to draw in. And this is all fine.

When I’m not writing about you, I’m writing about me. And since I am doing that, I need to have all these different places for the writing. It just helps me keep my head straight between what is true and what is not, what is public and what is private. I have never been able to just have one notebook, and I’m never going to.

There’s nothing wrong with that. And more separation between the different parts of my life is probably a healthy thing: otherwise I start to feel like I could write anything into anyone. Or, any one.

In slight rebellion, however, I’m going to stop categorizing posts. I never use that feature. there’s no point.

notes from overground

Ketchup:

I spent my last day in Poland, after packing and moving my suitcase to Rachel’s apartment, at Mlezcarnia and Sarah’s with R, N, G&O&B, and our new friend J, a Canadian import who also happens to work with Song of the Goat.

Meeting another member of that company on the night before I was going to leave the country was a little on-the-nose. The part I especially didn’t need was this line: “You’re leaving tomorrow??”

Flight from Wroclaw to Warsaw at 7 AM. An eight-hour layover in Warsaw, during which I read more of the GROTOWSKI SOURCEBOOK and spent about half an hour crying by a window, for good measure – about the work ahead or the work behind me, I don’t know, but it was clearly something I needed to do. There is nothing like crying in an airport. You’re not alone, and yet people are afraid to speak to you.

I slept on a row of empty chairs – my first time sleeping in an airport.

Flight from Warsaw to Chicago at 5 PM, during which I sat next to a former Texan who engineers oil rigs in the Ukraine. I asked him what my problem was – this is something I like to ask strangers on planes. He told me what it was, but I’m going to keep it to myself for the moment.

Favorite line from plane: as we flew over Iceland, the woman behind me: “That’s not Chicago!”

And, as noted, met Caitlin at O’Hare.

My roommates B and K from the US Artists initiative have made it safely back to the US, although K was delayed a day by a bomb threat on her Wroclaw-Warsaw puddle-jumper. Very glad that didn’t happen to me.

We are going out to find enormous American pancakes now and get fat. I dreamed this morning of the (name of that movie about Roman food orgies-esque)* brunch X and I ate at that cake-colored Vegas hotel. When in Rome, &c.

* I seem to have left all the words in Poland. I am getting as bad as the guy from Indy who couldn’t remember the word “editor.” I made fun of him at the time, but it’s coming back to haunt me.

who wants to be an american?

Caitlin picked me up at the airport Thursday night, despite my having left several messages to the effect that she shouldn’t because my flight was delayed. She showed up anyway, because no one passed on the messages. I was very happy to see her, but I thought, in my tiredness, that she must have showed up to pick up someone else. But no. Me.

I haven’t left Ravenswood except to do laundry. Yesterday Robert’s dad BBQed for us and we swam in the pool. Swimsuits, ground beef, lawn care, hair care, corn-on-the-cob: welcome back to the US, where everything seems slightly too large and too extravagant. Freeways! Salt silos! SUVs! Flats of poppies!

Despite telling R&C hours of Tales of Poland, I still feel I am not conveying the essential feeling of what it was like to spend three weeks in an environment where theater is respected. I must (verb) this. Is that what I mean? Like when something not evaporates but the reverse. A powder. In chemistry. Arrgh.

We are going to go find more food and drugs and set stuff on fire.

back

in the U S of A.