Oh, Ashland, I love your spirit. I love a town that embraces art so unflinchingly. We saw Family Album, written by Stew, and Heidi Rodewald, which was good, and thought-provoking, but a bit tangled up and unsure of itself. It felt like a show trying to be about everything: the interstices and intersections of art, money, capitalism, family, love, race, aging, and well, just life. It got so tangled by the end that this child-savant character had to basically tell the audience what to think, and that bugs me in a show. The performers were great, though. I don’t know, maybe it was the direction, but seemed that most thought-provoking moments of social criticism got lost in an overburdened and scattershot plot, or perhaps it was just that there were so many of them that they lost some weightiness. Overall, I enjoyed it and it made me think, so, time well-spent.
It did make me think about my own work. I publish it to hold myself accountable to doing it everyday, but recently I’ve been feeling like it is just something I have to get out of the way, instead of really thinking about how to get better. I’ve been dashing off these lumps of prosepoem because I’ve been short on time, but I haven’t really paused to reflect on them afterwards, or to think about form, or revise, or anything. Art takes time. Lesson number one from the poem year. We keep ourselves so busy, don’t we? But I’m not prepared to BoHo it and try to earn a living from art. I like my house. I want my kids to have clothes and health insurance. Ah, dilemma. I guess I just keep writing into the late hours and pretending that sleep doesn’t matter.
SO…I wrote the above hours ago. In the meantime we supervised teens making dinner, which they rocked out (so far, the girls are the leaders in the cooking competition between genders), and went to see A Wrinkle in Time, which was just plain fun. It was excellent. I loved the props, and the jokes, and they did this frame setup with all the different characters reading from the book at times, and it felt just exactly as it did when I read it when I was ten or eleven. Just awesome. Afterwards there was some good discussion amongst our students, who now feel like our grown children, about time and space and metaphysics, which I like to hear. At one point in the play Meg tells Calvin to “Go tesser yourself!”, which made me giggle. I’m pretty sure that’s not a line from the novel. I’m now doing the thing where I just type words because I don’t know what to poem. Maybe I’ll find a wrinkle in time and come back five minutes from now having gone on some grand adventure through space and time. Here’s hoping…
Parsecs and Megaparsecs
Maybe, when we wrinkle, time, at topic and subject in art, won’t feel so historic and done, because it willno longer be called time, and we will no longer be its slaves. No longer moving only forward with trudging feet, begrudging feet, rebellious feet are freed from their march in our brains, so we know, we know it is possible to slide with ease and relief, through the tesseract and via starducts of our compulsions and desires, and we won’t think of falling back in time, or ahead, because all our minutes will be parsecs, and megaparses and
over and over in this untime, I will come to you, and you will find me in the great large everything.
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I just can’t do any more. These workaction poems are going to need another look, one day. Another “Maybe” poem. Perhaps we should start a school of poetry for us, the supposers. The Supposition School. Maybe? Anyone? Anyhow. It’s late, and I have adolescents to keep up with tomorrow. Every time one of them tells me they are tired and then goes off to make a snack and loudly get the giggles, I want to tell them to “go tesser” themselves. Happy Tuesday!