This is coming late! I had meant to write a few blog posts on my progress throughout this past week; unfortunately, whenever I’m not teaching or performing teacherly duties outside of class, I’m reading/writing/planning for the next semester (and grading, sigh…). This is the same time management trap most of us face, struggling to find time to write, stay true to the path. Fortunately, I had planned many of the poems published on Tupelo’s 30/30 blog in advance. You can see the last five here. Poem 11 is coming up shortly so stay tuned. And as always, please consider donating to the press. Your donations keep it running, and keep me writing!
Now for a few lines on each of the poems mentioned above!
Improvised Explosive Device
The image of a dahlia sprung to mind when I pondered what an IED looks like. I’ve never witnessed or experienced an IED, but I have friends who have. One old friend of mine (we were two years apart in high school, in the same ROTC program) stepped on an IED when on his second deployment in Afghanistan shortly after the birth of his son. The explosion left him disabled; he lost his arm and leg. When I heard the news from some high school friends of mine, I was devastated. I haven’t seen him since he was just a skinny teen; but we reconnected on FB, and I follow his progress. He’s an unbelievably strong person, with a loving family.
The image of the dahlia, the Mexican star, comes whenever I visualize that IED that transformed my old friend; it’s an image one steeped in dark red, like a “burnt cosmos”. The poem flowed in a free-association exercise, and I’ve since modified it into its lyrically condensed form.
Below the Bighorns
I lived in Wyoming in 2013, Summer to Winter. Another friend of mine, to whom the poem is dedicated, once asked me over coffee what Wyoming looks like. I lived in the north, amid steep broad hills and flat grasslands and fields. There’s an overwhelming solitude, and a beauty so immense it breaks your heart. I remember feeling sensory overload, surrounded by such distance, so many hills, such sparseness of forms, vegetation, and animals. The mist in the early morning; the punishing afternoon. I wanted to capture how each thing “expands in thingness” growing in its singularity, “each / black leaf & riverstone, each wire strand / & larkspur’s blade is immensely distinct.” The problem with this poem is that it falls short, being too explicative and obtuse in the final line. Perhaps it should be rewritten as prose.
Acknowledgment
This one is something I’m a bit proud, if I do say so myself. My cousin once told me how she danced to Michael Jackson for 90 minutes, trying to get her fussy five-month old to sleep. The purpose is evident in the title, “Acknowledgment.” I wanted to express such an acknowledgment of her patience, all mothers’ patience, really. In a way, frame her domestic heroism, unwitnessed only by the world in the poem: babe (“ball of pink / mushroom fists & moon eyes”), the dogs, the kitchen
nerdyboipoet 