The other night I watched a documentary called “Desperate Man Blues” about a man who is an avid collector of old bluegrass and blues records. By old, I mean 78s from the 20s and 30s. He had a room called the record room where these records lined the walls–25 thousand records. Most of them he got  by combing the back roads in his area of the country, driving to farms to ask people if they had any old records to sell. The man he had a great time collecting in the fifties, because every house was getting a television and they were dumping  records out with the trash. One record he found–I wish I could think of the title–had been stored for decades under an old mattress, covered with dust in a box filled with otherwise worthless records. This one though, he believes to be the only existing copy of the recording. He played it on his record player, and boy did it sound great, a voice calling to you out of time like that.

The record room, with its wood paneling and floor-to-ceiling shelves of records–indistinguishable in their smoke-stained sleeves–reminded me of Jim Whitehead’s study, where I spent many a Fayetteville afternoon attempting to redeem poems I had written. 

It also made me think of the obscure copies of lit mages that I have piled up in my office both at home and and work–most of the copies are freebies, or contributor copies. I love thinking that one day down the line somebody could read a poem of mine in a print journal, which I fear will become a thing of the past, years and years after I’m gone–maybe read it alound to themselves and being my voice back like the voices on those records.  And as much as I love the work of making poems, it’s hard to think the poems that took so much of my energy rotting in a basement somewhere, just like I won’t let myself dwell too much on the inevitable DEEP sleep. I’m young, but, on my family tree, I just passed the halfway part. And the second half always moves faster than the first.

Many thanks to T.R. Hummer for his stint last week as Unstressed’s guest editor. Terry blew past our expectations for simple blog entries, instead writing a six-part essay about how the circumstances of his childhood shaped him into a poet. In case you missed them, here are links to each installment of Terry’s “The Education of This Poet.”

1. A Primer
2. A Length of Hemp Rope
3. The Hive
4. Brain Wave and the End of Science Fiction
5. Impermanent Earth
6. Applied Platonism; or, What Work Isn’t

You can read more from Terry at his blog, his Twitter feed, or his most recent book, The Infinity Sessions.

When we’re not reading submissions or otherwise avoiding the muse, Linebreaks editors have been known to write the occassional poem. A few of our recent efforts:

My poem “Dirge” appeared in the Health & Illness issue of the Pebble Lake Review on Monday.

Ash’s poem “Albert Goldbarth’s MFA Thesis” appeared in Diagram 8.1.

Text and audio of Ashley’s poem “Coming Down” appeared in Unsplendid 2.1.

Two of Jen’s poems — “Tony” and “I Know They Say: distant, small” — appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Mannequin Envy.

Am  I the only one who relies on a nemesis to stay inspired? You know what I mean–little Mr. or Mrs perfect who seems to get all the things you want, to write the poems you want to write before you get the chance to write them. The type of poet who makes people sigh at readings.  Fess up.

Because I am chicken, and because my disdain is easily forgotten, passive aggressive, and happens from afar, I am not going to name names. I will say that there are quite a few who fit this description for me–who I use depends on what type of mood I am in, or the goal I am trying to accomplish. I am an equaly opportunity hater–no race or creed or station in life safe from the firestorm of my rage. There are even editors on my blacklist. A Colleague or two.

The bad thing, is that what’s happened is that my need for a nemesis exists outside of the poetry world–it follows me to the grocery store, on the road, to my kids sporting events, even. My daily meditations and Eckart Tolle library are not helping. Unfortunately for my children, this mean streak is hereditary. My sons have settled in on the same kid–a bully on the playround. I can’t use his real name here because his mother is a lawyer. So let’s just call him ‘Jack Daniels.’ Whenever they see Jack Daniels they huddle close to me and whisper “Nemesis on the premisis! Nemesis on the premesis!” Laughing at this is akin to laughing when a kid says a curse word–you shouldn’t, but you can barely help it. Especially since little Jack Daniels is about three feet tall with little round glasses. Kind of cute, actually.

Every morning I’m up with the alarm at five, out of bed after two punches on the snooze button. I head for my study, and thus begins my writing time.  Most of the time I have no idea what I will be working on, or what I will do with this one or two hours. What never ceases to amaze me is that something always happens.

The muse is great, but I find that most of my attention is spent on just the words themselves–switching them out, switching them back. Playing with syntax or the sound of the line. This is fun to me once I get into it–like my own private crossword puzzle. And I know there was a famous writer who said that he might spend a whole day worrying over a comma, and at the end of the ordeal put the damn thing back in where it was to begin with.

This morning I was in the final stages of a poem–the point at which I can literally remember exactly why I chose one word over another. I can even remember how the poem used to be–what came frirst, what came last, where the original impulse is and if it reains in the final drafts. I’ll even take the poem away from my desk and bring it around ith me–in my gradebook if I am teaching, in the passenger seat of the car while I wait in carpool line. I feel like I will never get tired of staring at it, comparing this word against another to see which it best.

All this is remarkably like painting a room. I have lived in a new house for nearly two years now, and many walls are primed and ready for paint colors that I have yet to decide on. I feel like I should have some grand vision for the whole whouse before I take even a single step. I want everything to go well together, for the colors of each room to ‘flow’–I don’t even have a vocabu;ary for the way I want the paint in the house to look. I forced myself though, this week, to take a step–I would paint my sons’ bathroom white.

Have you ever been to a paint store? The walls are lined with bookmark-sized strips of colors with wonderful names–Concord Gray, Pensacola Mist, etc. For a while I used only paint colors that had an author’s name worked into the color–Hawthorne Red, for example, was an accent wall in a bedroom of long ago. The other half of the wall space is devoted to the whites–linen white, blue white, creame, parchment–pink, brown, beige versions of white. It is really impossible to make an informed choice. If I were a decorator I would buy samples and paint the wall many different whites, stare at the swatches at different hours of the day to get just the right look.

For a poem, I am willing to make that sort of sacrifice. Didn’t Bishop wait sixteen years for just the right word before she would declare her great poem “The Moose” completed?  For a bathroom, not so much. I chose Decorator’s White. I finished in one day, the brushes are soaking in the sink. For the next room, if I feel bold, I may choose beige.

18th Century Gulliver

[It has been a pleasure blogging for Linebreak; the journal is excellent, and I thank the editors for the opportunity.

I'm closing my week as guest blogger with a piece I recently wrote for my own blog, Mindbook (www.mindbook1.blogspot.com); I reproduce it here because it is not only the necessary but the only possible ending for this sequence on my strange education.]

I had been before to Warehouse 9. Situated on a cul-de-sac near the margin of the Army Corps of Engineers facility where I was then working, it was a large but unprepossessing building: sheet metal quonset-hut style, like an airplane hanger–probably it was in fact a recycled or otherwise diverted airplane hanger–large enough to contain, perhaps, a football field.

When I had looked inside Warehouse 9 before, it was empty except for a large expanse of dust-filtered sun angling down from skylights. This day, therefore, I walked up a short flight of wooden stairs onto a loading dock and opened a door, expecting nothing. What I saw instead was an ocean.

To be more precise, what I saw was a model ocean, a working replica of an ocean. But when I opened the door, I did not yet know that. All I knew was that the place was full of water, to a depth just below the level of the loading dock where I was standing, a sheet of water that extended virtually the length and breadth of the building. I stood for a moment bewildered; there was something here, I had been told, that I was supposed to see, but beyond the water, it was hard to tell what that might be or what I was to do.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I noticed a narrow platform in front of me, that led to a narrow walkway built of planks that led to the wall and then down the length of the building. I followed it, not knowing what else to do, and then saw that at the far end of the warehouse there was — what? something, and a couple of people moving in the dusky light.

*

It was many years ago, in a universe far away. I had a job.

1972, a year when people were still considering dropping out as a viable lifestyle: always behind the curve, I was dropping in. I was 22. I had completed a Masters degree in literature and creative writing all except the thesis; struggling to finish the thesis, I convinced myself that the whole academic enterprise was a mistake for me. (more…)

Hello, readers. Let me be up front–I am a little nervous about this! I am way more accustomed to being under the radar, or, now that I have a vegetable garden for the first time ever, I like to joke and say ‘off the grid.’

Down yonder in the Gulf Coast–Louisiana to be specific–June first marks the first day of hurricane season. It’s a long season–from June 1 through November 30–with most of the heaviest worrying in August and Spetember. By June 1, you are supposed to have your emergency supplies in order–an evacuation plan, food and water to last for a few days, emergency first aid, extra dog food, cat food, water supply, gas. Important documents go in a waterproof spot. The year after Katrina I was, in light of our experience the year before,  frantic about this day–I had a shed filled with drinking water and canned goods, an abundance of gasoline. All of my photographs were in plastic bins which I then double bagged in contractor garbage bags and duct taped. (In fact–most of my photographs have remained in those very bins–untouched for three years.) I had back up prescriptions for the kids. Valium for myself. My mother-in-law made candles and poured them in old baby food jars. We had every type of battery and light. The packing, repacking, and checking of these items was my whole summer occupation. If the wind blew, I was ready to put the kids in the car and leave.

Well, things have changed. I’ve relaxed a bit every year, and this year it took about three minutes to prepare the kit. Perhaps it’s our recent move to a (mostly) pine-free house ten miles north of Lake Pontchartrain that has made me so bold. This year, I have on hand two flashlights, a crank radio, half a box of bandaids, the gas in the lawnmower, two cans of spaghettios, a lighter, and a Lady of Guadalupe Hurricane candle.

This week’s Unstressed guest blogger is Alison Pelegrin. Pelegrin’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.  She is the author of  The Zydeco Tablets, Squeezers, Voodoo Lips, and Dancing with the One-Armed Man.  Her book, Big Muddy River of Stars, won the 2007 Akron Poetry Prize.  A broadside of her poem “In Livingston Parish, Dreaming of Li Po” is being released this week from Broadsided Press.  A recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, she currently teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University and lives in Covington, Louisiana, with her husband and two sons.

Read her poem, “The Last Holdout,” here.