Alaska Day! Yoga! A few sentences eked out! NPM Day 9!

I'd like to wish everyone a happy "Anniversery of the Purchase of Alaska" Day! The day that we decided that there was gold to be got in that great frozen gorgeous land and promptly purchased it from the Russians.

It is also "Corinne jumps full on back into yoga day", and I keep wobbling and tripping into people's way, because I feel like jelly all over! Man, all of that driving back and forth between Santa Fe and Austin and the Grand Canyon and West Texas and whowhatsit to wheredoneit, plus some other life factors, has really janked my body up all weird. So today I got up after a whopping five hours of restless sleep and went to heated power yoga...not the easiest reentry point to the practise, but boy did it feel wonderfully intense! In a few hours I'm off to a meditation and breathing workshop for a little more centreing, then it's music with two of my favourite lovely ladies out at the farm. Gonna play the cello for the donkeys. Afterwards I will stumble, delirious in the bliss of it all, to an Irish session at my friend's home. What a lovely way to end a day chock full of all the things my soul and my body love!

But in this hour pause before any of that stuff, I am attempting to put in my writing time for the day. Poems about shyness and measuring people by brightness, and a few sentences added to tht torturous conversation between Adam and Simon. This is going to take a little slogging through, this scene. But onward and upward! The family dinner with Jocelyn, Beatrice, Simon, and Adam continues! Just to toss out a little more information for the sake of context, Jocelyn=one of the protagonists, and is Adam's sister. Beatrice is Adam and Jocelyn's mother, and Simon the father. Zoom in on typical Victorian family dinner setting, brace of pheasant and all, spiced up with a not-so-typical conversation involving alchemy, the clergy, the East India Company, and some dubious magicians.

Buddha's Birthday!

Happy eighth day of national poetry month, and Buddha's birthday (in Japan)!

I was listening to an episode of Radiolab this morning about scientific discoveries. What caught me particularly about this episode (though most of them bring me close to tears), was the discussion involving globular clusters, the formation of stars, and the period table. This took me back to a month ago, when I drove from Santa Fe to the McDonald Observatory in the Davis mountains of west Texas. I was attending a star party that evening, and popped into one of the various lectures that was going on, just in time to catch a few pieces of information which almost knocked me over. It is this information which the Radiolab episode brought to mind, and which I am now stirring and stewing into a poem. First, that our atoms are born of supernovas, which are where the densest elements like iron and calcium come from. Imagine, we have starstuff in our bones.
Second, that there is no shape to the universe.
And then there was a random assortment of words and phrases so beautiful that I can't stop shaping them with my mouth, tasting them, typing them on the page to admire their form: paralex, angular shift, ressession velocity.
All galaxies are moving away from us,
and,
distances are measured by brightness.

So I haven't worked on the novel today, but their are plenty of words in my thoughts.
Hopefully a poem will climb out of them soon.

Writing, procrastinating

Well, after a year, here I am again. It's national poetry month, and the month when I was birthed, so I have an idea.
It goes something like this-

Since I'm struggling with the challenge of writing a poem every day this month, I'm going to aim for just writing something. Even if it's a meaningless blog entry. At least my brain will have gotten a little word exercise. Is this productive, or procrastinating? Let's enjoy the mystery.

It's April 7th, good old World Health Day (I ate some arugula and am now sipping on a glass of plum wine- well, I was sipping on it, but now that the wine's gone I've deteriorated into gnawing on the alcoholic plum- so, fruits and veggie), anyway, April 7th, and I've written two poems and edited one. I'm a little behind the "poem a day" goal.

If only a paragraph added to the novel counted as a poem... and you know what, from now on it does. So I'm sitting with sticky plummy fingers in the orange Texas sunset, looking out the windows of my parents' house, and stuck on the same damn sentence of the novel that I've been stuck on for days.

It seems (and this is news to me, since this is my first novel) that there are some places in the story- innocent, innocuous seeming places- which present you with a turning point for a character or sequence of events. Or both. Or one that causes the other inadvertently. Anyway, I've been at such a point for the past couple days. The question is- does Simon approve, vaguely, of his son joining the East India Company? Or does he mistrust them at this point, and disapprove? All he has to do is answer his son's question "Do you think that a worthwile use of one's time?". And yet, with the response to this question he will either become a vague, scholarly father with only enough attention to the position of the East India Co. to know that the magicians involved in it (yes, magicians- the book is sent in an alternate 1840's England, full of fun things like alchemists) are quite skilled and knowledgeable, or- and this is a big "or"- is he quite quick witted and aware under all his vague exterior, and does he sense already that something isn't quite right with the EIC, be it their colonialisation policies or their shady magicians? Does he in some way approve of his son joining the EIC as a soldier, or does he think his son naive, and a fool? Does his son then join the Company as an act of rebellion to his father, or because he thinks to finally win his father's approval?

I wish Simon would just answer the damn question, so that I'd know.

Will hopefully have some movement in this scene by tomorrow, which is finally, blissfully, Friday.

World Festival of Puppet Art, Prague- Day 1

Well, it's currently day two of the festival (there's a few hours before the next show, so I'm taking some glorious alone time in the hotel to charge my phone and do some writing), so I will review the trip up to this morning. I arrived, after a ridiculous roundabout day of travel(Edinburgh to Glasgow, Glasgow to Manchester, train to Manchester airport, flight to Prague- and yes, I do know there are straight flights from Edinburgh, so don't ask) into Prague airport a little before midnight. I was swept up by a lovely Czech girl with a lime green "Puppet Festival" sign and very little English otherwise. I was then informed that we were also picking up some other people, who turned out to be the Korean puppet group whose flight had been delayed three hours. We were piled into a van and headed for the town centre, where I was dropped at a tiny hotel before the driver whisked away the puppeteers to their accommodations. I grabbed a key and a map from reception and went looking for the room that I shared with my friend, who is also a previous professor of mine. I finally got my stuff organized, pyjamas on, and crawled into bed when the humongous cup of coffee I drank in the Manchester airport (4 hours earlier) kicked in- needless to say, I got very little sleep that night and when the alarm went off at 7 the next morning, was not feeling particularly capable of a day chock full of shows and socialising.

We were running late that morning, so I grabbed a banana and a roll (and thought wistfully of last night's coffee) and headed with my friend to the other hotel, where we would be meeting the rest of the jury and the festival organizers. There are only four jury members (which unfortunately presents the opportunity for a split vote) who attend all of the shows and award the prizes at the end of the festival. My job was to assist my boss, who was one of the jury, in reviewing the shows, and to take my own notes and photos on everything. Upon arrival to the hotel, I learned that we would be taking the subway to the first show, because it was a ways out of the town centre. I also found that we had extra time to grab coffee and breakfast at the hotel before leaving. I was introduced to a few folks, some of whom already knew my professor, and some of the people from the puppet companies. After some disorganized attempts to head off, we finally left for the train station, and then to the theatre where the first performance had just started. The theatre was completely unmarked- there was no way to tell it was even a theatre, and I was grateful to be with a large group of people, some of whom seemed to know what they were doing.

The first show was put on by the Polish company "Tecza", and was a combination of traditional puppetry and modern movement. The puppets were beautiful, detailed wooden puppets, which looked very traditional in style, but the puppeteers were dressed in costume and often came out from behind the puppet stage and influenced the characters. The story was an old fairy tale called "Fern Flower", and had some wonderfully creepy moments, such as a scene where the protagonist is walking through a haunted forest and these scary looking puppets descend on him, stomping against the wood in rhythm with the music as he tries to outrun them. The set was designed so that the wooden planks that were the ground could be raised and rattled, and even flipped to show creepy looking brambles rising from the ground in the forest scene. The play was entirely in Polish, so some of the Czech kids had a few giggles at the Polish words which apparently mean dirty things in Czech.

The second show was the Dwish Theatre company, from Belgium. It was basically one woman who used an amazing set an finger and hand puppets, along with sounds and whistles, to narrate the passage of seasons, time, and life. The show was geared mainly towards kids, but was pretty much a universally magical performance. The stage itself transformed in various ways through the seasons, the squirrels and birds had babies, and the bees pollinated flowers and helped turn them to apples. Absolute magic. I loved this show! (Though I've loved all of them so far!)

The final show of the evening was a three person company from Czech, called Cirkus Zebrik. They performed a series of stories revolving around a town called Beroun, using different styles, props, and characters. They all played musical instruments, acted, jumped on top of things, mingled the occasional English phrase or explanation with the Czech, and coerced participation and even a bit of money from the audience. The stories were full of dark humour, humourous ghosts, death, drowing, and lots of bursting into song. They were so much fun!

jumbled colours

Well, I obviously am hopeless at keeping a regular schedule of updates. I also haven't much to say, because I haven't been writing that much over the last few weeks. Probably the result of multiple external and internal influences, but my creativity in regards to words has really been on the ebb recently. Also, it was my birthday (I'm a Bealtaine baby!) and massive drinking seems to have an adverse effect on my creative flow. But, I feel a stirring of images in the back of my head, so poems will surely follow (in multitudes, I'm hoping, since I'm supposed to be compiling my dissertation). So I will make another update very soon with some new words, once they begin to take a recognisable form.

The odd nursery rhyme never hurt anybody

Maybe a poem a week was a better goal. Here is a draft of this week's, in all its cheesy glory:

70

I stay up late, by candlelight
at the drafting window
I go more miles than I’m supposed to
and come back through night.

As long as the wax is warm
and pools in my palm I move
nimble-toed and taciturn.

In the sunlight mornings
with your warm apple skin
covering my hands, we suss all we can
of the sun, far into westering

sky, until there is nothing for it
except to lay, spent
and cold in the dirt.

You are caked with mud
and mast and all manner
of junk; l take you down to the river
wipe away the twigs and blood

from when I bit your lip,
tasted sugar, and couldn’t stop
until the salt dripped down my chin.

A passerby sees innocents, vexing nature
with our play-dams of twigs and spit
and I am thinking only of
taking myself a tall, cool drink of water.

Comb the winter from my hair
and put it away somewhere; I have
enough candle to get us back a time or two.

I’ll darn your dresses by candlelight
you hem my shirts far from the window-
draft; the distance is dour and slow going
when we're damning ourselves, to outrun the night.

April Resolutions, in high and low

In honor of National Poetry Month, I will... write some poetry. And put it here. I was all geared up to make this resolution about writing a poem a day all month, or something like that, but knowing how I work, that would probably kill any inkling to write for the rest of the month. So I will post a few poems a week, at least, because it's amazing that we have a month dedicated to poetry, and it is also the month of my birth, and of digging in dirt and watching little green lifes begin.
So here is a translation of Miyazawa Kenji's "Village Girl" to kick off with:

村娘 　　
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
畑を過ぎる鳥の影
青々ひかる山の稜

雪菜の薹を手にくだき
ひばりと川を聴きながら
うつつにひととものがたる


Village Girl

Birds shadow over fields,
the tips of mountains glimmer green—

immersed in spring-lark and river sounds
I crush the faded snow-mustard stem in my fingers,
talking of lucid and transparent things.