re-enter

April 3, 2015April 2, 2015 / Melissa Allen / 4 Comments

today the clouds are a Google doodle. I think a few pixels are burned out in the sky. there are tendrils of ivy curling out of my wifi modem. a songbird with a hyperlink caught in its throat perches on my clothesline, where I’ve hung my URLs out to dry. from the pine across the way, a crow croaks cunningly at me to re-enter my password. I almost fall for this trick, but then I drop my phone in the violets and it becomes a violet, a large and shimmering one, and I pick it and eat it and begin to ring.

far shore
I swim
through radio waves

office. poetry.

March 14, 2015 / Melissa Allen / 10 Comments

People don’t often write poems about offices, places of white-collar business and the ordinary business activities that take place in them. Just as one example, I don’t think Wallace Stevens wrote a single poem about the insurance industry, in which he made all the money that enabled him to be a poet (please correct me if I’m wrong because I’d love to read that poem), but he wrote plenty of poems about blackbirds and rabbits and harmoniums and snowmen and the glass knobs on deal dressers. They were ridiculously good poems too, but, I query skeptically, was there not a single word that could be said poetically in the Stevensian manner about underwriters or risk adjustment? Hmmm, I answer myself, and how about you, do you write poems about the medical software industry, the sector of the economy that is supporting your poetic habit (admittedly on a far less grand scale than Stevens’s)? I do not, I admit to myself. But don’t think I haven’t tried.

In theory nothing should lie outside the purview of poetry but in practice, instructions for the proper configuration of the software your doctor uses to record your cholesterol levels and take notes on your gall bladder attacks seem to be pretty unpoetizable. (That’s a word now.) Frankly I find this state of affairs frustrating and embarrassing. Real poets, I think, should be able to make a poem of a conference room full of earnest young software company employees discussing the new install methodology. Real poets are apparently not me, Wallace Stevens, or any other poet I’ve ever heard of.*

There are certainly plenty of blue-collar poets, like the late great Philip Levine of the late great Detroit, and maybe this is because blue-collar work is concrete and describable in a way that white-collar work is not–you can write about blue-collar work using words like rust and grease and steel and dirt and bulldozer and incinerator and all kinds of other vivid, solid, vigorous English words, the kind that poems need to breathe freely. White-collar work, especially these days, takes place physically in clean, smooth, antiseptic offices, and mentally largely inside the tidily closed metal boxes in which we organize, express, and communicate our thoughts. There’s hardly even any paper left, as there would have been in Stevens’s day, meaning no concrete things like ledger books, no inkwells, no blotters, no letter openers because no letters. I have no problem keeping my desk at work tidy and rust-, grease-, and dirt-free because the only thing on it is a computer. And two giant monitors, though I often wish I had three, so I could see more of what I was thinking at one time. And also a telephone, but I don’t use it very often. It’s easier to send email.

So the physical environment of office workers is somewhat impoverished, for poetic purposes. Still I think it’s a failure of our imagination, not to be able to write poems about it. Is it just because it’s all so new and we have no models for it that it’s so difficult to figure out how to write poems about sitting in a climate-controlled box in front of a computer thinking and writing about things that happen inside other computers? Or is there something inherently unpoetic about doing these things? And if we don’t write those poems, do we risk giving the impression that there’s something wrong with what we’re doing, or that it isn’t an important part of our lives? I don’t think either of those things is true but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the fact that it’s so hard to write poetry about means that there’s something wrong with it or that it isn’t an important part of my life, not at the deepest level of me. Or maybe I should just give up and write prose if I need to convey some information about what’s going on at the office these days.

nightfall
I’m still staring
at the error message

*In case I was just ignorant of a vast trove of stellar office poetry I did a little search over at the Poetry Foundation for poems containing the word “office” and after sifting through the results for a while came up with a couple that could arguably be considered white-collar poetry, although they’re older poems and neither of them reflect the kind of highly computerized office environment I work in. But they’re pretty great. Enjoy.

To My Father’s Business, by Kenneth Koch
My Office, by Lorenzo Thomas

long…

March 12, 2014April 5, 2014 / Melissa Allen / 6 Comments

long winter night
the crackling
of text messages

lingering cold
my breath clouds
the phone screen

melting snow
I change my ring tone
to something faster

These days this blog is basically my playground. I think I used to have much more of a sense of trying to impress people or please them when I wrote here. Or maybe I didn’t? I don’t really remember anymore. But I know that lately this idea of the blog as my playground has been very strong in my mind. For a while it felt like a burden, like a chore I had to do. Maybe it just got to be that way after a while. Now it’s like, oh, I get to write some stuff! I get to write whatever I want! Whatever crazy thing comes into my head! And it really doesn’t matter if anyone likes it! Because blogs are free and no one has to read anything they don’t want to and even if no one reads it at all, I’m having a great time!

No, I’m not trying to say these haiku are especially crazy. They’re pretty conventional. They’re a little dull, to me. They’re what I felt like writing tonight.

I think tomorrow I’ll feel like writing something completely different.

Addendum, 4/5/14: Okay, I just discovered this. I really have to read my blog more often. Apparently I don’t have an original thought in my head.

.
.

Across the Haikuverse, No. 20: Summer Solstice Edition

June 22, 2011June 22, 2011 / Melissa Allen / 13 Comments

The first day of summer, and already I’m wondering where the summer went. It was a day that skittered between sunshine and rain, not fulfilling any promises. In the evening the sky turned green for a while and we kept an ear out for the tornado siren. Some lazy thunder rumbled by. I remembered later that I’d forgotten to eat for most of the day. It hadn’t seemed necessary, the way it never seems necessary in dreams. Around bedtime I finally got around to asking my husband where the rosebush that had suddenly appeared on our doorstep a couple days earlier had come from.

that shade of pink
I wonder if I’m
blushing too

____________________________________________________________

Haikai That Caught My Eye

Wow, people were writing haiku on a wide variety of subjects the last couple of weeks. Underwear and the universe and tomatoes and dinosaurs…maybe I am dreaming after all.

I am alone
for week-long Spring rains
singing loudly to
the computer screen just how much
you are my sunshine

— Donna Fleischer, word pond

housework
an old song in my head
over and over

— Catherine J.S. Lee, Mann Library Daily Haiku

森のごときをんなが眠る夏電車　　平井照敏
mori no gotoki on’na ga nemuru natsu-densha

a woman looking like
a forest sleeps
summer train

— Shobin Hirai, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.

universe
a collection of numbers
that rhyme

— Rick Daddario, 19 Planets (this is a great haiga, go take a look)

the waning moon-

a hole

in my underwear

— Aditya Bahl, dipping butterflies
.

tomato—
sometimes even stars are not
enough

— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.

temporary relief –
while the pears ripen
I’m stuck on Earth

midlertidig lettelse .
mens pærerne modnes
sidder jeg fast på Jorden

— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.

January thaw—
the garden exposed
to my dreaming

— Adelaide B. Shaw, DailyHaiku

what they tell us
about the war
ornamental poppies

— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

step back into the fragrance our histories mingling

— Susan Diridoni, Issa’s Untidy Hut, Wednesday Haiku
.

not awake enough
to turn the swifts’ chitterings
into a haiku

— Patti Niehoff, a night kitchen

incessant rain
falling on ferns and dinosaurs and
on my eyelids

— Taro Kunugi, quoted on Donna Fleischer’s word pond

cicada song
the cat stalks
fat robins

— Angie Werren, feathers

The epigram to this haiku: ““There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

This is part of Angie’s unbelievably cool project this month to combine NaHaiWriMo prompts with random Shakespeare quotations…what? How does she think of these things? Who cares — just go check it out, it will blow your mind.

________________________________________________________________

Journaled

A bunch of journals came out this week that I hadn’t seen before and was mightily impressed with, like for instance…

Lishanu: an interlingual haiku journal

Online journal, full of, oh joy, oh bliss, haiku in multiple languages, all translated into English. Or vice versa. You know what I mean.

ripe moon –
my pale hands
in the berry bushes

зрела месечина –
моите бледи дланки
во малините

— Elena Naskova, English/Macedonian

.

lumière d’aube –
rien d’autre
dans la toile d’araignée

dawn light –
nothing else
in the spider’s web

— Damien Gabriels, French/English

American Tanka

Another online journal. Very minimalist, but very high quality. Twenty tanka, one to a page, click on through and enjoy yourself.

years of buttons
in a glass Ball jar
the blue one on the top
so far from the blue one
on the bottom

— Constance Brewer

Eucalypt

This also counts as Dead Tree News, because it’s a print journal only. And a really nicely done one — glossy covers and paper, and lovely ink illustrations. More journals should have illustrations. In my humble opinion. Someone get on that.

(Oh, it’s all tanka, did I mention? And Australian. But you probably could have guessed that from the name.)