the way it is

ever read your own work and think "what a fucking psychopath"? ha! yeah... one of those days. or weeks. still, it feels good to be writing. moving the pen and hitting the keys. i was up so late last night bouncing between Word Documents, adding and subtracting sentences, sometimes spilling entire paragraphs, and i think 2 pieces might actually be the same piece... might need to be combined. i think of anais nin writing the hard stuff first, the passages that were bound to take the most out of her, and then sewing them together later. so much of writing seem to be about building bridges, about making patchworks. i've been cutting up pages and pages of printed prose lately and taping them back together in different arrangements. it's been good to work that way.

i found louise bourgeios' Destruction of the Father at the CCA library the other day and sat down in one of the big leather chairs and read for a few hours.

on page 49:

...You can stand anything if you write it down. You must do it to get hold of yourself.




yes.

this day

i woke and wrote. wrote and wrote and wrote and checked the date, checked the calender.

it is the last day of november.

some sense of fear welled up.
some sense of excitement.
this thin day- the eve of december.
cold.
bright.
a needle.

is it dipped in silver?

my hope flies up. the new year is almost here. the same hope i had this day a year ago. but our year fell to disrepair almost as quickly as the year before it. i am anxious for a good one. or anxious for my eyes to change. i want to see the good. i want to be aware. but the fear comes closer... this is how it goes.

will the silver tarnish?

my child-like hope. my wishing well. my small want for everything to be okay.

star light, star bright. you sit there in your cold orbit, little star, with your fingers jammed in your stupid fucking pointy ears. have you heard me even once? have you ever heard anyone? prayers filed away between planets, gone unheard, unnoticed, and our world is spinning, spinning, spinning.

i am doing my best to listen.

i am doing my best to dig my self out, away from this type of grim anxiety. hope and fear, back and forth, back and forth. let me stay on the good ground, planted in hope, planted in the sun. let me think of the forest. let me think of my mother and the forest behind her, behind her roses. deer-bitten. slowly frozen. the forest is not to blame. crackling. the sounds are strange. it is easy to become afraid.

i am doing my best to listen.

this day.
this thin day.
this eve.
the cold sweeps in but the sun is out, unclouded. the crow comes to squawk. the branches come down. the vines twist and grow. my feet will pound and my heart and my breath and my hope. pound, pound, pound their way toward the end of the year. the thread end. the needle cut loose. a new eye to push myself through.

i am doing my best to taste the silver below the tarnish.

i am doing my best to listen.

good morning...

biting cold bright morning and me, bundled up, safe, warm, coffee in one hand, pen in the other, and scribble scribble scribble. my mornings. my wonderful wake up. i missed this while i was gone. a person's routine takes a back seat when in someone else's home... when there's a more pressing issue. but i'm glad to come back to it. thankful. endlessly. and my mama so proud of the life i'm building. all my sweet ways of being in my day. i woke up at my early hour and made coffee. i sat out on the front stoop, freezing, and wrote in my notebook until my hands were so cold they hurt. i came inside, turned on the heater, and kept writing. 12 pages this morning all in one burst. the gates opened and the ink slid out. there is a rhythm and a soft yearning in me. there is a quiet call working in my finger tips. there is a slow race in the corners, all the hidden places of a person, of me. there are cold beads of dew on the windows. my breath is white in the air. my dog curls up, hides from this chill, and me too- bundled up in fleece footie pajamas, thermal underneath, a beanie, and heavy, crocheted socks. winter arrived whilst we were away. and the yearning goes on. forward. undaunted. feeling its' way. waking up. a rhythm. a haunt. gratitude and mist and the white sun up in the sky.

lucky documents...

i've been taking a little time out here and there to cruise through my old notebooks. there's only so much i can take at a time with those things but there is a definite benefit in returning to them, seeing who you were on a particular day a year ago, 2 years ago, longer, and what your dreams were...


this is an excerpt from a journal of mine that i wrote about 2 years ago-



sometimes
i dream about living far out in the countryside in an old, white, wooden house with a porch and a porch swing and old creaking wooden doors and an old creaking wooden floor.

the house would be at the very end of a long dirt road. the road would go through oak trees and blue belles and daffodils. the house would have an old staircase to swing from and slide down if i wanted. it would have an attic. the attic would have a window. and from way up there i would look down the long dirt road and know that i could see everything but nothing could see me.

in that old house i'd make white dresses for myself. i'd wear them every day. i'd wake up in a big white bed under a big white quilt every big white morning and i'd sip coffee off and on all day.

i'd make paintings and strange sculptures, some little, some big, to put up all around the old house and out in the yard too. i'd make myself a red quilt and lay in the yard. i'd go walking through the oaks and out in to golden wheat fields and i'd collect little scraps i'd find on the ground and pine cones and stones and flowers to press between book pages just like mama would. i'd bring an old crazy camera and i'd take pictures of irrelevant things. i'd paint in the yellow afternoon and write little poems in the evening. i'd hang them all up together in the drawing room on the old, creaking wooden walls.
i'd read and i'd draw in the drawing room and i'd crochet myself little flowers and big sweaters and i'd sew myself a basket of apples and a basket of birds to match. i'd make a book for my irrelevant photographs. i'd sing in the bright morning and hum in the yellow afternoon. i'd be happy and i'd be beautiful too.



this passage made me smile and want to cry and slap myself in the face. my life today is very close to what is written there. very close. i don't have an attic and so no attic window. i live in a cottage not a house but the size of my dwelling has not stopped me from carrying out the lifestyle expressed in that passage. i do wake up in a big white bed under a big white quilt. i do sip coffee off and on all day. i jog through the most gorgeous vineyard there is every morning and i find things on the ground sometimes that i feel certain i should give a home to. i don't take many pictures but i buy the discarded, forgotten, lost ones. i have crocheted myself flowers. an entire wall of them, actually. i haven't made myself a white dress yet but i made myself a plum colored one and i plan to make a white dress in spring.

maybe this is the winter where i'll make the big red quilt?

all this to say is i wanted to slap myself in the face because i'd forgotten all about this particular dream and then found myself living it and being completely oblivious to it... even unappreciative of it at times... and that made me feel hugely ridiculous. enormously so.

and right now, right outside my big window, the light on the necks of the trees is bright yellow. they glow.

they are glowing.


good morning. :)

relieved...

off and on, i toy with the idea of publication. but then i realize how new i am at this whole poetry thing. though i've been writing my entire life, it hasn't really been all that long that i've been serious about it in the "professional" sense. and so i've decided that the question of publication isn't a good one right now. it puts too much pressure on the work. far too much and it damages what i'm trying to get after- it clouds the road. it mucks everything up. besides, here in my own place i feel much safer releasing my little blurbs out in to the world. here, it's understood that perfection isn't really the point. it's more about exposure than it is refinement. and since i've decided that publication in its traditional form isn't really the way i want to go right now and that it's something to look forward to in the future, i've been writing like crazy and exploring different modes and not feeling any pressure whatsoever to make a poem be this or that or fit in with the rest. it is freeing and i feel pleased with the work and that's exactly what i'm after- a release.

there is FAR too much to catch you up on and finding the starting place in the blurr of the past week is a tall order but the ball must be got rolling

so we will start with ART!

between last night and this morning, this is the poem i wrote.
a new voice-



act of waking





she is a difficult harbour
with the most wonderful compartments;
attractive lakes
and rivers that should be loved.
travelling over-night
to her mouth, that North,
her home waters, the still.
parallel to a pill-box.

she had been painted-
hard against yesterday.
a fissure in the mast.
the ice is never ordinary;
expectation read
in the briefest of nods.
her home waters
parallel. a pill-box.






angela simione, 2009

page by page...

in progress...
a new process...
teaching myself about poetry one slow, painted page at a time.






angela simione, 2009

the words are the white of the paper. it is patient work. it isn't perfect but the method makes me consider each line, each word on its own... it makes me dig in and sniff around and pay close attention to how words want to move...

words want to move like pages, like wings, like a burn.

just the way it goes...

first thing in the inbox today- rejection letter. yep. not an exactly fun way to begin the day but at this stage in the game i've learned how to let that sort of thing bounce right off. i had sent 3 poems i've been working on for the past god knows how long to a publisher i've worked with before and i was actually shocked that they weren't accepted. i mean shocked. i'm not trying to toot my own horn here but the fact of the matter is that the work i sent is good. i always send my best work and present myself professionally and i don't (generally) submit stuff on a whim. i think long and hard about it and try to be as objective as possible, do my research and then think about it some more. the rejection didn't make me angry or sad or even confused... i think that maybe my work has merely gone in a direction that no longer fits into the over-riding aesthetic of the magazine. no big deal. that's the way this stuff goes. besides, you never know what kind of day the man with the gavel in his hand has had. never. and just because one person didn't want it doesn't mean someone else won't. besides, i'm pretty new to the whole poetry thing in terms of sticking it out in public. i'm definitely learning the ropes here and i expect i'll have to take my lumps like everyone else.

writing is hard. especially writing poetry. it's super duper hard... to write something "good" anyway. those few lines on the page are agonized over. and, in more ways than one, poetry is more about what isn't said than what is. in that respect, it's just like the paintings i've been making. what's withheld is what the work is really all about. i've always thought that painting and poetry are sisters. but i definitely don't have nearly the committed and dedicated writing practice as i do with painting. not nearly. i write every day but i don't write poems every day and i definitely don't edit and revise and critique every day like i do with the paintings. i'm still discovering my process with this stuff. and i don't really have anyone to share the poems with right now either. my sweetheart enjoys it when i read one to him but he's not exactly a poetry buff. he prefers the paintings for sure... as i'm sure most people who know me do. poetry has a pretty screwy reputation. most people think it's dumb and that it sucks and that anyone can do it. well, not quite. nothing could be further from the truth. poetry is hard and beautiful and important and it's an ever-changing, morphing thing that's hard to pin down. but it isn't hard to find. it's everywhere. i know that sounds like a horrible cliche but it's true. it's hiding in all those over-looked, common corners of a life. it's there waiting to be coaxed out... and i guess i'm trying to figure out how to do that. i will keep after it until i do.

one more cat to let out of my dingy little bag...

the trial run is over and now it's official and letting the secret out here will ensure my continued diligence- i am now one amongst the 5 lovely and inspiring contributors over at ANTLER magazine's blog. yay! and as you may have already guessed, my focus is art. :)

Antler is a new magazine dedicated to curating a life full of art, music, culture, and of course, beauty. the next issue isn't due to be released until september but the blog is updated daily and has already become a great resource for seeing who's up to what in this great big ol' world of ours. take a peak and leave comments everywhere and let me know what you think.

p.s. that's me in the middle. :)

today there is...

no television. no television but plenty of words. today is rottweiler black.

black ink, black dresses, black hair.
drawing faceless little girls while i wait on the laundry,
two pots of coffee,
a grapefruit and an orange.
Bauhaus in bed.

today i think of my brother, alone
in the South. my sister getting another new tattoo-
roses for the grimaced,
reminding us of our mother.

we all have the same eyes.


-angela simione, 2009