New Poems #2
Diary of a Doorknob / October 13
New Poems is a series of poems written or revised in the past five years. For me, that qualifies as “new.” Poems in this series have not been published in journals or even submitted to journals. It’s unclear where they stand on the continuum from first draft to finished. All I can attest is that they exist as files on a computer.
Diary of a Doorknob / October 13 You feel bored. That’s disturbing. Your whole life you prided yourself on never being bored. Per se. I mean, when you were a kid, you remember often having—quote/unquote—“nothing to do”; but that did not feel like boredom. It felt more like energy looking for work, hunger for a mountain to climb. Other times you would march around the house saying, “I need, I want, I need, I want, I need, I want,” which was much the same feeling. Sometimes you would intone, I want to create!—a child Frankenstein looking for a corpse to animate. Once you discovered house plants at 10, you were never without some horticultural task—labeling, cataloguing, watering, pruning, transplanting, propagating. Once you had your own bedroom to paint and decorate, you were never without some project—making candles, doing decoupage, baking bread, culturing yogurt! Tropical fish. Postage stamps. You were a boy of a thousand hobbies. And books to read! No, you were rarely, if ever, bored. How scary to think you were better at life when you were 12 than you are now.
Craft Notes
First, a note about the series title. You may have received an earlier version of this post in an email, with the series title “Days of 2020” followed by a date. That was a nod to Constantine Cavafy, who wrote a number of poems entitled “Days of” plus a year. They were generally poems about a homoerotic male object. There’s a bit of irony, perhaps, in the fact that these are mostly “out of love” poems. In any case, I decided that “Days of 2020” was kind of boring and generic for these poems, so I’ve changed the series title to the more provocative and evocative “Diary of a Doorknob.”
Why prose? Rhythm is very important to my writing process. Lineation often feels at odds with my rhythmic sense—like dealing with rhythm and lineation at the same time is more than I can handle. Most or my first drafts are lineated, but that initial lineation is highly provisional. Early in my revision process I often take out all the line breaks and “just make it prose.” That allows me to hear the rhythm better. Sometimes the prose interlude yields to a lineation that makes me happy. Other times, the poem likes its new life in prose, and decides to stay that way. These Days of 2020 poems still have their prose training wheels on. That may change—but not for a while.
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