Wordnik: Giving good wordgasms since… idk when.

This is an awesome site a friend found that I must post here, for you, my small and sporadic number of readers! And my parents…

War is Coming… Nothing to Report.

So I guess that blogging about my experience in the Creative Writing Track hasn’t been much fun because well… The Creative Writing Track hasn’t been much fun.

I feel like an idiot everytime I go into my Poetry seminar. I have a good memory, but we read so many poems a week I get them all jumbled together in my head, so my test and quiz scores are dismal.

I also feel antiquated. Everything I like and DO as a poet is not in vogue at the moment. My more emotional and visceral take on the poems we read is met with strange looks and hyperbolic non-commitedisms. Confessional poets are met with skepticism and I guess as a 21 year old undergrad no one feels I have anything to confess.

So all is calm on the Eastern front, and the West is going down in flames. Nothing to see, please move along.

Coldplay and several other problems with Life in general.

Hipsters.

A plague on society, or malice driven, apathetic, social suckers, bent on destroying the ‘uncreative’ who are destined to make it farther than a cashier at bookstore.

 

The latter… obviously.

 

Despite several attempts to integrate into, what I am now beginning to think is an alien society.  I discover myself still absent from the Iowa City literary scene.  I spend some of my time in class feeling, uninformed and uninvolved in what is obviously a colorful social life centering on words.

Why am I not a part of this?

The answer is hipsters.

Despite my busy schedule (two part-time jobs, 5 classes, cooking, cleaning, trying to maintain actual interpersonal relationships with my friends and family, shopping) last week I attempted to take the time to attend two readings.  Missing the first was entirely my own fault (or was it?)  After leaving work and getting ready to go to Alexander Maksik’s reading of You Deserve Nothing, I was generally not feeling well.  So I went home.

Wednesday I went to Prairie Lights and wandered around their hysterically overpriced bookstore waiting for 8 o’ clock when Ilya Kaminsky was supposed to read.  I asked the wormy, underfed, lank haired hipster at the counter how to get to the reading and he told me it was almost over.  That the reading started at 7.

So, sad and defeated, once again excluded from Iowa Literary life I went home.

 

Only to find out the next day he DID read at 8.  There was a double reading the hipster at the counter just failed to mention.

Knowing what I know now, it is also obvious that one of his comrades purposefully got me sick in order to keep me out of their precious little bookstore.

 

Well… I have a poetry reading to attend on Thursday, one where I will be reading and listening.  And since my teacher is taking us, unless a hipster tries to hit me with a flaming knitted hat, or stab me with a pair of useless vintage glasses he doesn’t need to wear… there’s no stopping me.

Needed: Vacation. When exactly am I supposed to read this?

So it’s been a couple of days, but there really hasn’t been a lot to say so far.

I didn’t get into the Undergraduate Fiction Workshop, which is so depressing because I really need it to graduate, but oh well… I’m going to try and find out if there is a way to find out exactly what they’re looking for so next semester I have a better shot of getting in.

And since I didn’t get in, I missed my first Fiction Writing class of the year for no reason.  More yay… >.<

 

I did however have my first Poetry Seminar in the Creative Writing Track last night…

This:

Readings and Assignments for Sept. 1 

Links:

“America” by Allen Ginsberg

“A Litany” by Gregory Orr

“Two or three posies” by John Keats

“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” by Wallace Stevens

“Cruelty and Conquest” by Kristin Prevallet

“The Stagnation” by James Galvin

“Sea Surface Full of Clouds” by Wallace Stevens

Norton:

selections from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, p. 1708

“The Raven” by E.A. Poe, p. 977

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” by Walt Whitman, p. 1073

“Counting the Mad” by Donald Justice, p. 1684

“Wine Bowl” by H.D., p. 1333

Sonnet 43 by E.B. Browning, p. 947

“You Begin” by Margaret Atwood, p. 1896

“Of this cloth doll which…” by Michael Palmer, p. 1936

“The Argument of his Book” by Robert Herrick, p. 354

“Examination at the Womb-Door” by Ted Hughes, p. 1813

“Chicago” by Carl Sandburg, p. 1252

“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, p. 1588

Toward the Open Field:

“Theory and Function of the Duende” by F.G. Lorca, p. 197

Legitimate Dangers:

“Boot Theory,” (p. 339) and “Saying Your Names,” (p. 342) by Richard Siken

“Our Man” by Ben Doyle (now Doller), p. 101

“The United States of America” by Lisa Jarnot, p. 185

“The Vandals” by Alan Michael Parker, p. 282

“O Canada!” by G.C. Waldrep, p. 405

“Canada” by Matthew Zapruder, p. 453

“Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled,” (p. 80) and “The Unbosoming,” (p. 85) by O.K. Davis

“Dead House Sonnet” by Brian Teare, p. 376

“At Shedd Aquarium” by Robyn Schiff, p. 322

 

is my reading list for next week.

That’s on top of needing to read Neuromancer by William Gibson, Hrfankel’s Saga, “Venus and Adonis,” and several essays all by Monday.

Granted, I eat books like other people chew bubble gum but seriously, when am I supposed to get this done?  I have two highly demanding jobs and no money for books.

 

That’s what they make the internet and Coca Cola for I guess.

More tomorrow.

T-Minus 3 Days… and Waiting

So my story for my application to the Undergrad Writer’s Workshop was deposited in the Dey House today.  Yay!

Now I just get to sit through 72 hours of minor anxiety attacks as I know that someone is reading my baby.  Maybe a dingo read my baby.

I actually let my mother read my story too, which was nice for her.  And, again, panic striking for me.  I’m ready to throw myself headlong into this writing thing though.  I’ve started working on my online Novel Writing course, and it is FUN!  It’s self paced so I’m going to try to get a lot done fast before I get bogged down with work and school.

It’s completely exhilarating and terrifying and I can’t wait for all of this to start.

Full Fathom Five Thy Sanity Lies…

When’s the last time I had a Wordgasm?

 

Well, last night actually.  And it was fantastic.

One of my very good friends is pregnant and she shared with me a poem about motherhood.  Which immediately made me think of Galway  Kinnell’s “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps.”  I shared that poem with her, and like every time I read Kinnell’s poetry; I got goose bumps.  “this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,”

O

M

G

I just love those moments where words or phrases hit you, and stay with you forever; crawling under your skin to burrow in the very fabric of your sense of self.  I would not be who I am without Othello or Romeo and Juliet.  Since when I’m tired and modern colloquialisms fail me I fall back on Shakespearean insults.  My alarm clock has probably heard “a plague o’ both your houses,” more than any other insult.  Though I’m sure it comes out more like “a plugh uh buth yuh huhuh.”

It’s really important to me to keep those phrases or words close, constantly using them.  I cannot hear the words: “The time has come,” without responding, “the Walrus said.”  It’s an impossibility.  I use music as just a further extension of language also.  I love A Perfect Circle for their creepy, beautiful sound and even more for their lyrics.  “Call an optimist, she’s turning blue.”  I WISH I could have thought of that.

I find that in the Creative Writing Track my teachers really understand about those turns of phrase that bury themselves into you, but I don’t always get that feeling from my peers.  And I’m wondering if I’m just too open about having a wordgasm in public…

When’s the last time you had a Wordgasm, and what caused it?  I’d love to know.  I have to stop here though, I’m getting hot just thinking about it. 😀

Not to complain, but… an Official Complaint.

I’d like to start out making the distinction that this is not going to be a blog about critiquing the Creative Writing Track at U of I, or even any institutionalized writing program.  I think that writing in social or public settings has a real place of value and I have learned so much more from my workshops than I thought possible.  Indeed, when I took my first Fiction Writing course at the U with Alexander Maksik (who just fyi has a novel coming out at the end of the month; You Deserve Nothing, which everyone should read) just his lecture taught me how to finally write dialogue, my most strident of adversaries.

 

However.

 

I do have a bone to pick with the Undergraduate Writer’s Workshop course, which I NEED to take in order to graduate on time within the Creative Writing Track.

You know, that thing that I made desperate applications for and worried over for months, and was FINALLY chosen to be admitted to?

 

Yeah?  Well I have to do it all over again… just to get into a CLASS.  Roo.  I just find it increasingly difficult to feel encouraged when I have to apply for a class.  Who decides if I get in?  The teacher?  A committee?  The shadow government my uncle has warned me of my whole life?

I have to worry that the teacher might be biased against my weird, macabre stories; or I’ll be 5 minutes late to turning in my application (like the first time I tried to apply to the Track.)

 

Why do they have to make it so difficult!?  What I really want is just to write, and read others writing and to have a free exchange of ideas and have it all count towards my degree.

 

Is that too much to ask?

T-Minus 6 days… and Daunting

Welcome to Wordgasm! The dumping ground for all of my thoughts about writing, reading, and (as the tagline says) my journey through academia.

I decided to start this blog as a way to reach out to the other aspiring writers. Monday, I start in my final year as an undergrad at the University of Iowa… and my first day as a member of their prestigious Creative Writing Track. Terrifying.

The thing is, despite being a part of this legacy at University, and grouped together with the same people, fighting for the same parts, in the same classes everyday; I feel completely separate. I want to stand on rooftops and scream to the heavens:

“Doesn’t anybody love language like me?”

I decided if I couldn’t find it, I’d do it myself. So here it is, my journey, one year in the Creative Writing Track. 8 semester hours of writing courses, 9 of English. I’ll be sending out query letters and buying publications and struggling just to get my foot in the door.

If you love words like I do, or are in school like I am, or are struggling to get published, I hope you’ll join me on this journey.