What Do Poets Do In April?

For many of us around the world, April has become NaPoWriMo, National (really international) Poetry Writing Month, with the goal of writing a new poem every day.

There are daily prompts available at Poetic Asides, imaginary garden with real toads, a Dirty Thirty group on facebook, and NaPoWriMo itself. Or you can do it unprompted.

I like to play in the garden with the toads. Their prompts appeal to me more than some others (a purely subjective thing) and I like that they are a fairly small group, so the obligatory participation isn't a  chore – and in any case the poetry there is so much to my taste, it's a joy to read it all.

The poems I write are being posted on my poetry blog, Enheduanna's Daughter. You can see them all in sequence via the tag April Poetry Month 2019, with the latest appearing at the top; or you can subscribe to be blog by email (click the little block of horizontal lines to reveal the sidebar where this option is available, then scroll down) ... or you can just dip into the blog from time to time and see what you see.  Oh, and I am also linking to the poems on facebook ... if you happen to have access to my timeline there.

'Why do you need prompts?' my friend Rob Schackne once asked me, implying that there is more than enough in life and the world to inspire us anyway. But I like the fact that the prompts, by taking me in unexpected directions, can pull from my unconscious things that might not otherwise have emerged ... not in quite the same way, if at all.

Besides, it's fun!

Chromosomes, Bigotry and Science

(Re-posted from facebook, so as not to lose it.  Author unknown.)

The Passing of Time

Long ago we were friends at school. She was top of the class at just about everything. I went to her wedding. Then we both moved away and gradually lost touch, somewhere between my marriages, divorces and changes of location. 60 years or so later, she finds me on facebook. 

Her profile shows a handsome, vibrant older woman, tastefully dressed, and reveals the distinguished academic career I would have expected. It seems she is single now – whether from widowhood or divorce, I can’t tell. But there are daughters and grandchildren. 

I respond with delight. Ask what she’s been up to. Catch her up on my life. She sends a polite, brief, uninformative reply. Time passes. I go looking for her timeline. I have trouble realising that the old woman in the latest photos is her. It is, though. 

Her face is very wrinkled; her arms are wrinkly too. She has opted for comfortable clothes and no make-up. Her droopy old boobs flop on her saggy belly. Am I imagining that vacant look in her eyes? She is always photographed now with groups of women around her own age. They are on outings at the beach en masse (not dressed for swimming), deck chairs in a row. Or they are sitting around a table, making artificial flowers.

The brightest girl in school!

She is only six weeks older than me.

I wonder if one of her daughters is managing her facebook account.

I let go of the possible renewal of our old rapport.

Asking for Helpful Advice on facebook

Migrated from LiveJournal / Dreamwidth


It seems to work for satyapriya when she does it, but in my case not so. I am still reeling from the last lot I received, and would reproduce for you my cries of amazement except those that come to mind are in language unprintable publicly, even for me (and you).

As some of you know already, a young eastern water dragon (lizard) has got into the house and is mostly hiding very quietly behind the furniture; I don't know exactly where. I've seen it twice, but unlike geckoes it is much too quick to be swept or herded outside, and also too quick for Selene-cat to catch. (She doesn't seem to be a ferocious hunter; treats it like her toys when they roll under the furniture: out of sight, out of mind.)

I'm afraid it will either starve to death in this insect-less house, or that Selene will at some stage manage to kill it. I'd like to save it, but it is not at all cooperative about being saved. For one thing, I don't even know where the heck it is when it's not visible, and that's most of the time. It is very good at hiding. I peer behind furniture with a torch, and see nothing. It was a pure fluke that I ever saw it at all. I have also done some shifting of heavy furniture, with front door wide open and Selene shut out the back, and really thought it had gone – but no, there it was in the middle of the kitchen after all ... briefly, before disappearing swiftly back under the couch or the TV or wherever.

So I asked on facebook if anyone knew what I could do. Someone opined I might keep it in an aquarium. How would I get it in there, I wonder? Someone else suggested I could herd it with box lids. Well, it's not all that small, and it reacted fairly aggressively to my long-handled brush and pan. (I was glad theye WERE long-handled.)

Using the Unfriend Option

Migrated from LiveJournal

Oh, the relief! I just unfriended a facebook friend / real life acquaintance (who, fortunately, I’m unlikely to encounter again, as he doesn’t live near).  Sweet, funny guy in person, when we met; but on fb, oh what a chip on the shoulder!

Having a discussion or even a difference of opinion is one thing, but being argumentative for the sake of it — well, after five years of attempting to meet it with reason, humour and tolerance, I just got sick of it.

He didn't even argue intelligently. He leapt in to take issue so hastily that he quite often got the wrong end of the stick, arguing against things I wasn't even saying. Or he would argue FOR positions that were patently ludicrous. He would take on my friends too, in comments. He waxed quite insulting at times.

Why did I put up with him so long? I can recognise an inferiority complex when I see one, and felt compassion. I still do, but I also see that being nice to him and/or putting up with him didn't help. He just kept right on being an aggressive dickhead. If anything, he got worse over the years.

As the grown-ups used to say when I was a kid — good riddance to bad rubbish.


Comments left on LJ:

bttrflyscar

you were smart to do that. I dated a guy like that once. for way too long.

snakypoet 

As they say, better late than never. But we make allowances, don't we? We try to see the best, and do the right thing. Gut instinct would be a better guide!

Although this fb friendship lasted five years, there were often long gaps between his comments. It's just that when they happened they were ALWAYS as I describe above, and now I can't believe I put up with it so long.

Never mind, I'm sure we have both learned our lessons, even if it did take us a while.

metahara.

Ah the modern world. Yes, life is too short and wide to sit close to stinky rubbish.

Un-Retreating

Hard to stay in retreat mode with the Sydney siege happening.

Ignorant of anything that might be going on in the world, I turned on the TV late yesterday morning to watch an innocuous half-hour program that wouldn't have interfered, only to be confronted by breaking news — which had evidently first broken a couple of hours earlier.

You can't detach from something like that! Although, half way through the afternoon, when nothing was changing and the journos were reiterating the same information, I did turn off the TV. Turning off the mind from such a thing was, however, too difficult.

I'd already started the day by watching online a live telecast: the funeral of a young man, some of whose family are like my family. He was taken suddenly in a car accident. The picture disintegrated just as his wife broke down in tears while trying to read her tribute to him. Distressing in various ways! I gave up. When I tried to access the archived footage a little later, I couldn't. 'Too soon,' I thought, and turned on the telly while waiting — straight into the siege.

No, not a day for staying cocooned.

Nor can I stay that way today, having woken up to discover the sad ending to the siege, with loss of life and injuries.

I had already realised that it wasn't going to be practical to stay on retreat as xmas got closer. I'd have to cut it short. Following these recent events, I'm cutting it shorter still — reluctantly, but I came too far back into the world while all that was happening; I may as well stay.

I've already said what I could to the family of the young man. And the whole world is still saying all sorts of things about the siege. I can add nothing more.

About the retreat, I can say it was illuminating and that I enjoyed it. How to integrate the results into everyday life is now the question.

I imagine few of us could live in contemplative detachment for long periods; instead I intend to incorporate some practices into my life in shorter, more frequent increments. The possibility of going about my daily life with some different underlying attitudes is also something to explore.

Who's listening?

In passing, I'm astonished that — although I posted a facebook status update to say I would be absent from there during December, and also advised close real-life friends by email that if they needed to get in touch urgently they should text — many on fb, even in the second category, went on blithely messaging, tagging me, and posting to my wall.  Many seemed to assume I was still there, others to be taken aback on getting an inkling that maybe I wasn't. Very strange!

If one of my fb friends doesn't respond to communications for a while, I go looking to see if their timeline sheds some light on this. It seems a simple and obvious enough thing to do! Apparently not.

I suppose it sometimes appeared that I was there. Birthday notifications come into my email, which I did check occasionally. I could and did send greetings direct from there. My blog posts have links by which I can share them to facebook, Google+ and twitter without actually going to those places. I did that too, as I was still writing things during the retreat. 

This doesn't mean I got to see anything else on fb. I deliberately refrained from investigating any 'notification' pings on my iPad. Surely the point of a retreat is to retreat!

I'm seriously thinking that if I do this again, I might de-activate the account next time. (After all, it is so easy to re-activate.) 

Is it me or is it her?

A new friend on facebook just started a chat with me to invite me to a Scandinavian festival in a city two hours from where I live. I was surprised because she lives in Denmark, so I asked if she was visiting here. No, but she knew people who were going and would love to go herself.

She knows my husband died only five days ago and thinks it would cheer me up.

What??? Driving two hours to a city I tend to steer clear of, to mix with a whole lot of strangers from Scandinavia? My only link to Scandinavia is that Princess Mary of Denmark and I were born on the same island ... at different ends of it and many decades apart. But Scandinavia's not the point. The idea that I'd want to seek out strangers from anywhere at this time, and join them in festivities, is what rocks me.

She says her husband died in 2003 so she 'knows'. I really don't think she does. She's a much younger woman than me, so presumably her husband was too. I don't know how he died, but can imagine she might well have been in intense grief and needed conviviality to take her mind off it. Me, I've never been a party girl at the best of times.

It's nice to be comforted by old and dear friends; it's also nice to spend some time alone with me. I am certainly not hankering for the kind of cheering up she had in mind.

And I'm nearly 73, and Andrew was 83. I miss him for sure — but not so often as you might think, because he is so present anyway. My grieving is mostly in remembering how difficult and limited life had become for him in recent months. In truth I am incredibly glad that he is now free.

I don't think he's at peace; he was that in the days before he went, I'm glad to say. I think he is having a ball now, flying free with renewed vitality, able to go wherever he likes. People all over the place are reporting seeing, feeling or hearing him.

But this facebook friend.... She is a very new one. She put in a request, and sent me a message saying how nice it was for her, as a writer, to meet me who published a magazine. I don't. I replied to say she was mistaken.

I didn't accept the request because I have a ridiculous number of fb friends already and feel I neglect many of them. I seldom accept new requests from people I don't know. A couple of days later I got a long, hurt message about the fact that I clearly didn't want her frendship, saying I was obviously not like other Aussies she knew who were so welcoming and positive. I replied, apologising for hurting her feelings and explaining my position, also that I was very occupied with my husband's ill-health at the time. She wrote back apologising in turn, and telling me a bit about herself, and on impulse I said that after so much communication, we'd better be friends after all, if she could put up with some neglect. And there it rested until this bizarre suggestion today.

I'm sure she's a nice person with kind intentions, but we don't seem to be on the same wavelength. The trouble is, she's in a writers' group I'm also in on fb, so I don't want to unfriend her now. I've turned off chat instead.

Facebook Reconsidered

I have to admit I'm having a very different Facebook experience the second time around. This is largely because lots of my old poet friends from Melbourne days are there now. There's been some kind of explosion while I've been away!

I say Melbourne days because that's where I lived during the heady days of the Poets Union (when it WAS a Union rather than a society) and the Street Poets. The poets I knew then didn't necessarily live in Melbourne themselves, though plenty did, and they don't all live there now. We got around in those days, and poets from all over the country frequently attended events in any of the capital cities and even country centres. Indeed this still happens, only I myself don't travel as much as I used to.

Anyway it's good to reconnect with my old cronies on Facebook, including some I never actually lost touch with.

Some close family members and friends are there now, too, and pounced on me the minute I reactivated my account. It's fun to be able to read their status updates, look at their latest photos and see from the quizzes how much alike we are or aren't on various matters.

I don't go there all that often, so I manage to avoid lots of people sending me silly things and expecting a response.

What I can do now is let people connect to my blogs – yes, these ones – via Facebook, an innovation since my last sojourn there.

And I can play my favourite words games — finding to my chagrin that while there's nothing wrong with my vocab, my speed is woefully slow compared with some of my friends. Ah well, hopefully it will improve with practice.

Above all I like being able to join groups of writers and poets.

MySpace is still by far my favourite social network and probably always will be, but Facebook no longer annoys the hell out of me. I actually like it now!

Loving MySpace

'MySpace is crap,' says my 38-year-old son, who is staying with me just now. 'Facebook is crap.' He had a quick look at both to see if they had any relevance to his business interests. I wasn't enamoured of Facebook either, after giving it a try for a few months, but I LOVE MySpace, where I have virtually (!) been living for the past 18 months or so and have three flourishing blogs with hundreds of viewers and dozens of subscribers. 

Out here in the wider world, I'm grateful for rssHugger, the proposed Directory of Australian women bloggers, and StumbleUpon. On MySpace I don't need to register on a special site to let people with like interests know I exist – the whole community is set up to function that way.

Why is it that this feels like being out in the world, and MySpace feels like a village? It's a pretty big village! Indeed, I sometimes think the whole world is on MySpace. Only this morning I added the Dalai Lama to my group of friends. And there are musicians like Tim Finn, Fiona Horne and Lisa Marie Presley, who actually write their own blogs and respond to their fans' comments and messages – although there are also plenty of others who only want to build up the numbers, and I don't bother with them. (Unless I REALLY like their stuff, e.g. Ute Lemper and Wendy Rule.) I didn't mind building up the numbers for our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and the head of the Greens Party, Senator Bob Brown! There are fake sites for famous people, and other sites which are essentially fan clubs, but I make sure to connect with the official ones.

But I'm not there in order to collect famous strangers as 'friends'. I was first enticed there because that way I could listen to new work by a muso I actually know, a personal friend in real life, the lovely Clive Price. I soon found other friends there, old and new. Above all I love the terrific poets I've come across, whom I would never have known otherwise. To mention only my top favourites: George Wallace, Geraldine Green, Ed Churchouse, and a woman I know only as 'dawn', a nature-lover who paints wonderful pictures and writes non-literary poetry which has the power to move people profoundly. (4/3/08: I just deleted the wonderful Lori Williams from this list, as she has left MySpace. *Sob!*)

I have met passionate political activists – usually older women like myself, interestingly enough – warm-hearted witches who treat me as a mentor, young people who honour me by talking to me freely and frankly, and a whole mob of haiku poets who post new verses every week on my Haiku on Friday page.

I've had my work published in the online literary magazines rorschach failure and Unquiet Desperation (the latter also publishes a print edition), I've helped distribute free booklets of "poetry found", and The Smoking Poet reviewed my latest book of poetry, Secret Leopard along with my husband Andrew's environmental fairy story, Jorell. All these contacts were made on MySpace.

It's also a great place to keep in touch with people I know in real life, including friends overseas, and even those only a couple of hours away. My 16-year-old god-daughter Mikaela lives in another State, and I've seen little of her since she was small. She joined MySpace just because I said I enjoyed it, and we now know each other much better through our communications there. My relationship with her has become one of the great treasures of my life! I've also grown closer to my 40-year-old stepson Adam since he joined; we've had discussions that go much deeper than our conversations at family gatherings. In the context of MySpace we relate without our preconceived opinions and past history. And there he's made the acquaintance of one of my real-life best friends and now they're pals too. On my visit to Texas last year I formed warm friendships with poets and witches I met, then came back home with no certainty that we'd ever see each other again. Thanks to MySpace, we've at least been able to remain in close contact and many of those friendships have deepened.

Why wouldn't I love MySpace?

Writing for Facebook

A friend emailed me this information:

Facebook gets literary
Arts Hub, Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Only on the web can you start a new literary review and have over 2,000 people sign up within a month. In fact, the early popularity of The Facebook Review rebukes any charge that web-denizens don't care much for textuality beyond the hyper.

The review, a first for Facebook, already has over 2,000 subscribers, and is growing daily.

The global experiment in literature and social networking was launched this month, and the first virtual edition features 14 writers from across the globe, including emerging and established writers from Canada, the U.S. and the UK.

What makes this online literary magazine unique is its interactivity and the fact it only exists within Facebook, the huglely popular social networking website (boasting more than 49 million users worldwide).

By using Facebook as a publishing tool and accepting contributions from Facebook members, review founder, poet Jacob McArthur Mooney, hopes to harness the reach and momentum of social networking to provide a new platform for writers - with in-built instant feedback, as other members to comment on and share the work.

Mooney, a 24-year-old Canadian, says: "Facebook is such an immense environment I assumed that something like The Facebook Review had to already exist somewhere. As it turns out, Facebook is vast but also surprisingly empty. I wanted to challenge the idea that Facebook can only reflect the culture happening beyond it."

Issues will be edited by the contributors to the previous issue, producing an inclusive rolling editorial team.

"I think that the casual atmosphere on Facebook can get people talking to each other in ways they'd never do in 'the real world'," says Mooney. "Facebook is a meeting ground for writers at all levels; from kids posting their first poems for friends to read to established authors using it as a marketing vehicle."

UK author Mark Brown, featured in the first issue, agrees: "The Facebook Review is a fun idea that points the way toward new ways of publishing and reading literature. I'm really excited to be a part of it."

Anyone who is a member of Facebook can join The Facebook Review by visiting www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18436918096 or by searching for The Facebook Review group. All details and submission guidelines can be found at The Facebook Review page inside Facebook

Well, I can't stand Facebook after trying it for a few months. Or was it weeks that only seemed like months? I really did try. I joined in sending people virtual drinks and gifts and hugs, I wrote things on their walls, I answered their questions. I did draw the line at exchanging vampire bites or sending a beach ball around the world. And I was amused when, in a fit of silliness late one night, I offered to marry half my Facebook friends and scared the s**t outa some of them! (I thought I had omitted all who might take me seriously but apparently not.)

I thought it was the most boring and time-wasting thing I'd ever come across! As far as I'm concerned, the kids can have it. I'll just find other ways to support the Burmese dissidents and record my personal history as raw material for memoir – the two reasons I stayed as long as I did.

The literary review tempted me only briefly. After all, though feedback on one's work can be useful – from 2,000 people??? It seems a mite excessive. Have I got time to sort through the uninformed, tasteless and half-baked opinions that would inevitably be included, to find the gems? If I wanted my poetry to appeal to the masses, I'd be writing greeting cards. (No, I would LOVE it to appeal to the masses – but not at the expense of poetics, you see.)

Glad to find out my instincts are sound. My friend The Cerebral Mum has looked into the matter more than I did, and points out the following:

I had a look at that Review Thingy. I know it has lots of members, but I wonder how many actually read it? And The material is only covered by Facebook Terms which says that you “grant to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise.” I’m all for open source, and Creative Commons, but I’m pretty sure that particular agreement is not one your agent would recommend signing when it comes to your artistic work. It’s one of the things that makes me distrust them so much.

Yes, that's a pretty horrifying agreement to make about one's writing!