On Tuesday I got up at 4:00 and after yoga I only practiced two songs before jumping into the final stretch of my essay. I still hadn’t incorporated all of my hand written notes into the paper, but was starting to shape up to look more like an essay. As is usually the case, some of the best ideas popped up during those final hours. My brain batteries needed recharging by around 11:00, so I took a one hour nap and then worked steadily for the next six and a half hours. I finally got all of the relevant information from my notes into the paper and then tried to organize the thing into an essay with an introduction and a conclusion. I did all my citations, printed the essay and got ready to leave. As I was heading along College, shortly after it occurred to me that this was the first of three times in this course that I’d ridden to deliver an essay over dry land, it started to rain. Not much though. I arrived at class just as the credits were rolling for the first movie. George had shown “The Decline of the American Empire”, which is the first movie he’s brought that I’ve actually seen. I gave George my essay and commented that if I’d had less time it might have been better. He reassured me that it was probably fine and based on what he’d already read in the attachment that I’d sent him, I would probably do better than I thought.
He handed me a copy of my poem, “Killing Jar”, which I’d emailed him a few weeks before as a matter of interest because I’d thought it tied in with the “O for orature” part of a lecture that he gave on “VOICE”. I hadn’t asked him to critique the piece, but George had scattered it with checkmarks and underlining to show what he liked:
Poems are a class of writing that came before reading
on wings known as verses whose rhythmic beating
gave them flight through language on currents of singing
to fertilize minds with the pollen of meaning.
Many poems migrate over long distances
crossing borders or morphing to other languages
Poems feed on arousal, long walks on the beach, rolls in the hay,
relationship feces, desolation and decay.
Many species of poem can live for centuries on one single carcass
and the nutrients that are collected from solitude’s detritus
are frequently offered as a nuptial present to lovers
during mating, along with the poeticspermatozoa.
Poems maintain territories known as genres
and chase away others that try to cross over
Many poems use camouflage to survive
with their surface meaning being only a disguise
Before the fifteenth century all poems could fly
but they were sucked out of the musical sky
by the vacuum machine of Joe Gutenberg
and pressed flat and dead inside of the printed word
Because it’s hard to see beauty when it’s flying around
it is very important all poems be earthbound
in such a way that they can be enjoyed and read
so of course for this reason poems must be [made dead] – George wrote “Awkward”
You’ll need a spreading board of paper and pins of punctuation
and a display case called a book to show off your poem collection.
The easiest way to put poems to death
is in a killing jar also known as a manuscrypt.
Poems in their efforts to be able fly once more
batter their bodies inside a killing jar
and in this way damage their delicate verses
so it is best to stun them by removing their rhyming organ.
Poems are generally pressed and preserved on paper
with a complex medium of particulate matter,
solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, surfactants,
solubilizers and fluorescents known as ink.
Collecting poems is a fun activity for me and you,
and poem collections have artistic value!
And the poems we kill really suffer no more pain
then the bugs that we crush with our feet every day.
Collecting poems connects us not only to the poem
but to the flora and carrion it fed upon
to the context of its existence when it was alive
surrounded by language predators and parasites.
Requiring just nets, killing jars, titles and printers,
all of which can be bought for just a few dollars,
it leads to marvelous poetry collections,
that help children to revel in classification.
Nothing has ever rivalled poem collection
because putting songs in suspended animation
destroys the distractions of musicality
and turns kids into little murderers of poetry.
George mentioned that he was heading for Niagara Falls the next day, which led me to ask him something that I’d been wondering about for a while. How does he find time to write with all of his travelling around? “Do you write on the plane?” He nodded and confirmed, “I write on the plane, in my hotel room or on the train.” We both agreed that trains are good places to write.
I was disappointed to hear George mention that he had movies planned for our final class. I had suggested that we have a poetry reading. He had said he would consider it and reaffirmed that he was still considering it, but it didn’t sound like it was going to happen.
George was trying to decide whether to pack it in and go home, but he counted the papers he’d received and decided that he couldn’t leave until he’d gotten five more. The other movie he’d brought to show was “Beowulf and Grendel”, based on the Old English poem. I told him that I’d like to see a parody that combined “Bay Watch” and “Beowulf” and call it “Bay Wolf”. George declared that he would definitely like to see that. I didn’t elaborate at the time, but my idea is that the head lifeguard would turn into a surfing werewolf during the full moon and he would have to fight a humanoid sea monster that was coming in at night and slaughtering all the surfers.
"Boewulf and Grendel" had a lot of striking scenery. I didn’t even recognize that the lead actors were Gerard Butler and Sarah Polley. George and I were trying to figure out where it was shot. I was thinking Labrador while he guessed Greenland. He was closer to being right since it turned out to be Iceland. The visuals were good but the dialogue was lame and the pacing very slow, at least up till 21:00 when we stopped watching.
I stopped at Freshco on the way home, since, because I’d been busy with my essay for the last few days I was very low on supplies. I bought grapes, bread, coconut milk, canned peaches and Old Dutch potato chips. It was a relief to have my essay all done and to know that all I had left to write till the end of the term was poetry, so I stayed up till 1:00, to soak it all in.
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