For the love of static

I’m freshly restored from a journey to the heartland. The good life was wonderfully devoid of schedules, plans and urgent emails. Going unplugged has become so rare, and is so initially unsettling, that I think I need to do it more often.

Turns out, I’m not alone in my aversion to constant connection.

Following my ‘Goodbye Facebook’ post last month, several people responded with applause. Some had contemplated dropping out, and felt empowered to finally do so. Others admitted they had never joined the flurry and felt vindicated in their wallflower disposition.

As I discover the tech fatigue of others, I feel puffed up with a sort of self-satisfaction (that is sure to bite me back at any moment). Today, I was giddy to find a Poets & Writers interview with Howard Junker, editor of venerable literary journal ZYZZYVA. In this excerpt, the bold emphasis is all mine.

PW: [Were your] values tested when, as an editor, you had to follow the technological advances of the past decade or so?

Howard Junker: At first, tech was my friend. Desktop publishing was a godsend. E-mail was great. The Web started out great, but digital has been totally disruptive. The low-end workhorses of words on paper, like newspapers, are already destroyed. The luxury items, like lit mags, can survive as toys for the rich — Glimmer Train, Tin House, Zoetrope — or as enticements, like stadiums and museums, in universities. But the Twitter sensibility has no room for literate articulation. To read and write you have to enjoy being alone, quiet, and static. That's not what tech fosters. I like blogging as a daily yoga. I post every day, as a personal exercise, not as a marketing tool.

To see

"It is crucial that a poet see when she is not looking — just as she must write when she is not writing," writes Linda Gregg in her essay The Art of Finding. "To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing."

The sun broke through the June gloom today. As if obeying stage directions, the coastal clouds parted to shine summer solstice bright.

At Cape Perpetua, I walked from forest to sea. As a new season revealed itself, I joined in its vigor. I was bright-eyed at all I had forgotten: chest-high fern, thick skunk cabbage, and tidepools still but lively. I took photo after photo but could not capture the thin salt layer clearing my head, or the lulling traffic of wave after wave meeting rocky shore.

Though I had seen so much, I could not convey the change of season, the change in me. On this first day of summer, I'm still learning to see.

Goodbye Facebook

It was fun at first. I was found and friended. I delighted in gaining the attention of people I had forgot (old boyfriends, tenuous high school pals, the friend of a friend of a neighbor I barely knew).

But after my year-long stint, Facebook is now too much and not enough. Too much information and not enough substance.

I had to give it up: the status reports, the pithy replies, the clever repartee, the family photos, the incessant checking of other people's quizzes. I didn’t care really, but I couldn’t turn it off. Facebook became my tawdry tabloid, delivered all day, every day. I was an addicted voyeur.

I had real Facebook friends, to be sure. The same ones I telephone and email. For months, we crowded into the Facebook booth instead, sharing the high of fresh quips and bright banter. Just like in real life.

But Facebook glaringly confirmed what I already knew: I’m not a ‘social networker.’ I don’t have a 'platform.'

To be clear, I’m no Luddite. I appreciate and use modern technology. Running my own marketing communications business, I know well the value of modern media tools. In my personal life, however, I don’t wish to live the odd combination of transparent and calculated.

So, today, with reinforcement from a friend (no really, an actual, live friend whom I talk to on a regular basis and — gasp! — see in person), I quit Facebook.

With just a couple of clicks, I slipped out of the party. As with any good gathering, nobody noticed my departure. The party chatter continued as my 75 friends maintained an enviable pace of meandering amusements.

So long, my somewhat social network. It’s late. I’m tired. I’m returning to the antiquities of telephones, emails, and in-person gatherings in which real, live people share actual conversation.

Five years ago, when my husband and I were contemplating a move that would take us from urban center to remote, small town, a friend cheered us on. “Remote,” he said, “is the new luxury.”

With this recent disconnection, I’m going remote again. Accessibility has created a charade of meaningful connection. Within the one-line updates and clever banter, I’ve discovered I don’t really need to know so much about so little.

More fibs

The fibs keep coming!

The six-line, 20 syllable poem has a count of: 1/1/2/3/5/8. While the traditional fib is just six lines, many have opted to expand the form and link the stanzas.

"I promised myself to fib at least once a day," says Auburn McCanta, who regularly writes for the Huffington Post and her own blog. She shares her first fib here.


On Pie Day

Spoon

Bowl

Apples

Cinnamon

Crust with butter dots

The scent of a mother’s lined hands



Soft

Green

Apron

Wrapped like wings

Around small shoulders

Drying off a girl’s cloudy tears


--- Auburn McCanta

Summer travel produces poetry

Oh the beauty, the horror, the long whine of the family road trip. Who hasn't endured this summer nightmare? Emily Andrade beautifully distills the experience in this found poem, which originally appeared at the Found Poetry Project.

The Ten Commandments (of traveling with my parents)

1. Don’t snap your gum.
2. Don’t ever drive that close to a semi again.
3. Follow that car!
4. Don’t put your fingers on the window.
5. Watch out for elk.
6. Tell me where we are.
7. Be ready with the money before we reach the toll.
8. Don’t eat mother’s tuna sandwich.
9. Please, don’t kill us.
10. Pass me that lotion.

Written by Joseph and Sharon Andrade
Minivan trip to San Bernardino, CA, from Indianapolis, IN, Spring 2005
Found by Emily Andrade

Emily explains her found poem: “Original quotes from Joseph and Sharon Andrade during a minivan trip to San Bernardino from Indianapolis, Indiana for my Uncle Ruben’s funeral in the spring of 2005. Formed into poems by Emily Andrade, who was taking notes and a strict diary of the trip. Joseph and Sharon did not know they were being recorded and Emily did not know she had poems until the end of the trip. (A special thanks to the Andrade parents, who made these poems possible.)”

Fibbing along

Recently enamored with the short form poem, last week I shared my love of the fib. Named after the mathematical Fibonacci sequence, the fib is a six-line, 20 syllable poem with a count of: 1/1/2/3/5/8.

Jill Reedy Groseclose took a try and produced a modified fib.

“[It’s] one syllable short,” she says of her first fib. “Kind of a theme in my life...”

In this poem, Jill, who is my cousin, fills family references into just a few lines, giving a nod to our mothers (both voracious readers), to our grandmother (a master crossword-er), and to our recent reconnection.

An
Instant,
Serendipitous,
To find you so in love
With words, Their shape and sound

I
Love
Them too!
Malleable and enduring
Are the words our inheritance?


The poem is a loose interpretation of a traditional fib. But I like that the piece bends the rules to represent its “fibness.” Isn't a fib, after all, just a soft fabrication of malleable facts?

Thank you, Jill.

Keep those fibs coming!

Art is a lie

. . . that helps us feel in control. It helps us create an order and a harmony we can only rarely create in our own existence. Art helps us establish a sense that we, and the events of our lives, matter, that they have meaning and weight and beauty."

— Kathleen Rooney
from Live Nude Girl: my life as an object

Fibbing

I’m no good at math but I do appreciate structure and brevity. So, when writer/photographer Jack Cantey posted his fib experiments, I was immediately intrigued.

The fib (named after the mathematical Fibonacci sequence) is a six-line, 20 syllable poem with a count of: 1/1/2/3/5/8.

I’m drawn to the fib for the same reasons I like the tanka and the lune: controlled beauty and distilled language. But with the fib, there is also the beauty of typography. The lines undulate on the page, creating gentle waves of white space, that, in turn, make the spare lines even more powerful.

In sleep

last
night
angry
rain pelted
windows, battered doors
by morning the sky turned amber

a
still
voice said:
forget the
storm in your head, clear
every dream, dark, coiled and mean

- Drew Myron


I encourage you to try a fib. It’s a fun and attractive poetic form that can produce unexpected results. Start fibbing now! Send your fib experiments and I'll post them here.

Bloat be gone!

I’m drawn lately to the short forms: tanka, lune, fib, scratch-outs and more. Poems that are lean and fit, that reach and leap.

This turn to form, to rules and constraints, is a new fascination for me. In recent months, I’ve become fatigued with the confessional quality of everyday life, the bloated exposure of saying too much, too clearly. Rather than the tell-all, I want to parse and peel, and make words work in the rearrangement.

My poetic efforts are not profound. These word games are often academic but they work because the process requires attention and focus to language and choices. And the form gives shape to emotions I’m not ready to access — or share — directly.

In the next few weeks, I’ll share some of my favorite short forms, starting with the lune.

Lune
3 lines, 11 words
3/5/3

I love this form, especially since it spiraled into a successful mistake. The lune (pronounced loon) was invented in the 1960s by poet Robert Kelly, who was not satisfied with the Western use of haiku. Kelly, according to the Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, recreated the traditional haiku into a thirteen-syllable form of 5/3/5.

Later, poet Jack Collom was working with schoolchildren when he mistakenly remembered the form as a count of 3/5/3 words, not syllables. The result is a more flexible form of haiku that is easy to teach and create.

With an emphasis on word count, rather than syllables, the new lune is less mechanical and more accessible. In the following poem, I’ve linked three lunes together to expand on a theme.


Yes. No. Almost
(a linked lune)

Spring sneers, pauses
shifts wind, turns hope sour,
says not yet

I swallow the
gravel of these moody May
days, and wait

In the seam
of inbetween the sun frays,
boldly breaks free

— Drew Myron


Now it’s your turn. Have you tried a lune? Send me your work. I’ll post them here, and we’ll celebrate the satisfaction of the short form.