Assignment 5

Hey you guys!
Phew. It's Thursday and it's closing in on midnight and I'm finally getting on here to post. It's been an absolutely grueling week.
So I've been keeping my ears open and have heard some truly beautiful things.
One
Listening a few days ago to a recently purchased album of simple, rusty tunes some this-piped yokel squeaks out on his banjo and slightly mistuned guitar, I hear a lyric that has stuck with me and I've repeated to three people since. It was just a sentence: "I'm a slave to no one but my vision." When this is true, genuinely true, it is both freeing and frustrating. To be fully driven by something you desire, your only limitations being the parameters of your art, is to be empowered, self-realizing, and both self-full and self-less. I've lost this at several points in my life but always strive to maintain it. It's tough. Especially with a high-pressure job in a corporate environment.

Two
I heard Sam Beam talk of his inspiration behind writing a song, "Sunset Soon Forgotten," and it stuck with me. [Hey! I'm listening to Pandora internet radio right now and the "slave to no one but my vision" song is on! It's The Palace Brothers' "I Was Drunk at the Pulpit."] So Sam Beam said that he was sitting on his back porch and was watching his children play in the yard. He looked around and noticed - paid real attention to - the afternoon turning into evening, and saw the sun setting - no particularly great sunset - and thought of how it's moments like these that we forget. Yet it's moments like these that fill our lives. It got me thinking; so much of the brilliance of his writing is about the negative space. The space around what we pay attention to. It's the minutiae: that in being there and framing the world at that point, these pieces help define the moment the way the silouhette of the lamppost is defined by the emptiness around it. It's a way of approaching drawing, too: you avoid symbols (visual cliche in this case) by not drawing the outlines of the object itself, but by focusing on where the object isn't. Suddenly you don't see a nose, but rather lines and shapes, and you don't draw what your mind thinks the nose should look like, but rather what is actually there. This has so much to do with how I've been trying to approach subjects in my own poetry; do not tell how you feel, show it. Do not emote, but describe and observe. Anyone can say "I love you" by saying "I love you"; The task of the poet is to find a better way to say it, a truer way. Good writers don't use cliches, they write them. Do not use abstracts, stay concrete. Define unconventionally. Fundamentally, use the negative space.

So that's where my week has taken me. Now for a silly winding down.

Three
Cool words.
catachresis - intentional misnaming for the sake of metaphor. Example: "Far off from here the slender/ Flocks of the mountain forest/ Move among stems like towers/ Of the old redwoods to the stream". The use of "Flocks" here is, like, totally, um, catachrestic.
verbicide - if you drastically fuck up catachresis, it can result in verbicide. No joke, it's the "killing" of a word through abysmal misuse. This also, according to Mr. Merriam-Webster, can be intentional. But really, with the exception of sarcasm and ridicule, who kills a word intentionally? English majors do hard time for this shit. I know, I've been there.

So, albeit long-winded and perhaps verbicidic, there's my post for the week. Phew.

Goodnight all.
Charlie