“Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”
- Cyrus Farivar (I believe)

Drawing: Asher Sarlin via BoingBoing

I’m trying, I really am. But working in media, especially writing for a blog, means that you’re supposed to click around online. That is, in a totally weird turned around way, work. So when I sat down to write this column, I really meant to get right to it. But somehow I ended up posting to freecycle, reading my friend’s blog that I had lost track of, responding to a bunch of emails that I had been meaning to get to, baking some Ethiopian honey bread, shopping for coffee tables, and… you get the idea.

Recently, my level of distract-ability seems to have escalated to a whole new level. I consider myself a bookish person, but I haven’t finished a novel in months. My ability to sit down and do things that require sustained attention seems to be atrophying. And despite arguments that young people’s tendency to switch quickly between tasks is not bad, just different, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something.

Poetry is like the last thing you want to pick up if you’re feeling distractable. Poetry is what you pick up when you’ve done all your errands and it’s a Sunday afternoon, and you’re eating cherries, and you’ve basically just meditated and you need your weekly dose of profound. Rumi is the obvious choice, or Neruda.

Then again, one of my favorite things about poetry is how short it (usually is). A long poem is 10 pages. Most poems are a page or two. You can be totally spacey and still manage to digest a poem while waiting for your bus or for your Windows 2000 computer at work to boot up.

In other words, feeling distracted is not the enemy of poetry reading. I think gay poet Wayne Koestenbaum would agree. He managed to elevate his distracted-ness into a whole book of poetry. For instance, the 4th canto in his crazy, raunchy, seemingly haphazard manifesto Model Homes begins: “I wasted twenty minutes on the Net” …and goes on to talk about porn. Did I mention it’s raunchy?

The premise of the book is that he’s trying to write the poem he’s trying to write. It’s very meta (clearly), and very blunt, but at the same time formally strict (I’m such a sucker for that). I have TNG Zack’s mom to thank for pointing me to him (thanks, Mom!); it held my interest with an enthusiastic recommendation on the back from Marilyn Hacker. Sometimes I find it too head-y to follow, and sometimes too crude. But he’s oddly protected himself from criticisms that something isn’t working, because that (occasional) truth is the subject of the poem itself: constant, failed attempts to arrive at the poetic perfection he’s striving for.

These days, the wildness of his style really resonates with me. Maybe it will with you too. So if you can drag yourself away from email and your blog feeds and craigstlist and whatever other tabs are calling you, this canto— the warm up to whet your palette— will be well worth it.

Warm-Up

1.

I lack a subject. (That’s been said.) I need
A heroine—not Mom, not Jackie O.
Not Anna M. Apostrophize my seed.
Spilled building blocks eschewing embryo?
For many months I’ve foundered: Ash and Reed
(My ruined novel), Andy, Liszt, Tombeau
De Couperin (Ravel), and now this half-
Baked movement, lurching iambs on the distaff

2.

Side—inchoate chora, Kristeva’d call
My melancholic tendency to talk
Nonstop, to fill pink typing paper’s hall
Of mirrors with what garbagemen would balk
To claim from suburb curbs. I love when a call
Bounces below a cartoon’s words, like Salk
Inventing cures and then rescinding them,
Fort-da assertions of a Tantric lingam.

3.

One shouldn’t mix up poetry and essay
Unless one likes being caught in a snafu
Aesthetic: rhyming diaries, prosa-
ic. Capital offense! My errors queue:
A psychoanalytic poem’s passé:
Faux pas, to come off as a nervous Jew.
Dear reader, we are trained not to confuse
Art with analysis, or else we’ll lose

4.

The meager literary capital
We’ve saved. My longtime shrink’s away this week—
And last—and the week before: the usual
July vacation, which explains this sneak
Attempt to bolster sanity with real
Pentameter’s prosthesis, like the beak
Of a hummingbird I saw, this morning, enter
A daffodil’s null, anhedonic center,

5.

Reprising last night’s dream, when I held office
Hours, at school, in the nude! I couldn’t think
Where I’d misplaced my underpants. My sis
Has quarreled with our Mom, and on the brink
Of fistcuffs, I told the rude Lutèce
Sommalier that in my bathroom sink
(Lutèce now doubled as a motel) I’d found
Red ants. Meanwhile my mother tried to sound

6.

Me out on whether chicken fricassee
Might stop our family from going mad—
My brothers (two), my sister, me and He
Who Must Not Be Obeyed, my softie Dad
(Chauffeur, professor, dormat, refugee),
Who shared my mother’s Île Flottante, and paid.
“Paid” and “Dad”: the two don’t quite match up.
I found an earwig in my dish of ketchup.

7.

Awake, I watch that earwig reappear:
Its double, dead, lies floating in my pot
Of lukewarm citron oolong tea. A seer
Once told me, “You should think in twos: forgot-
ten magic will rain down if you can hear
Systole and diastole of pregnant thought
Breathing, like lung-joined twins, ensemble— dream bug
And real bug, bound in Life and Art’s bear hug.”