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+---
+title: About Case Duckworth
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+Case Duckworth is the cowardly but lovable Great Dane who solves mysteries on TV.
+Maybe you've seen him while watching commercials for Pine-Sol or Orange-Glo cleaners.
+These products dress as monsters to lure only the right kind of venture capitalist, but Duckworth believes in the right of all [venture capitalists][] to invest in products they believe in.
+His mortal enemy is the evil Old Man Jenkins, who believes that the only venture capitalists that should be allowed to invests are from the Meddling Kids gang of Edo.
+
+When not being a Great Dane, Duckworth is a Christmas ham, spreading good cheer and pork products to underprivileged gangs of venture capitalists in winter.
+He keeps them warm with his questionable farming practices and threat of Trichinosis, as well as with his own brand of firestarter called Duckworth Stax.
+He usually steals his Stax from dog food factories, making him a modern Robin Hood in addition to a Great Dane and Christmas Ham.
+
+Case Duckworth truly is a jack-of-all-trades.
+The only thing missing from his repertoire is the ability to begin a word with anything but an "R" sound, although given the fact he is a dog, it's remarkable he can speak at all.
+Duckworth was voiced by [Don Messick][] until his death in 1997, when [Frank Welker][] took over, to the dismay of fans everywhere.
+
+[venture capitalists]: love-as-god.html
+[Don Messick]: http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Don-Messick/
+[Frank Welker]: http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Frank-Welker/
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+---
+title: Instrumented
+subtitle: a collage
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+[`tr`][] has been a part of the Unix toolset since the late 70s.
+Short for translate or transliterate, `tr` takes two strings as arguments, and replaces incidences of the first with the second while reading a byte stream.
+It also supports ranges of characters, in formats such as `A-Z` as well as the POSIX-compliant `[:alpha:]`.
+Although [`sed`][] has more options and features, for a quick search-and-replace, `tr` is more than sufficient.
+
+The [wind blows hard up here][]---far harder than anywhere else I've been.
+I wonder, at times, if it might [pick me up like an angel][] and carry me into the night.
+
+The secret to truly great [rolls is mayonnaise][].
+Although I have received looks of disgust at this assertion, I think the explanation is enough to expel doubt: mayonnaise includes the fat, cream and egg content rolls need to be any good, plus in mayonnaise they come premeasured and perfectly blended, which makes for incredibly easy and delicious rolls.
+After I explain myself, the looks of disgust usually remain.
+
+My mother used to make me mayonnaise rolls, and hers will always be the best.
+I had a teacher in college who explained xenophobia as "Mother's cooking is best."
+
+One of my favorite fictional theories is the [Shoe Event Horizon][], an economic truth which states that as a society progresses, shoe stores become more and more prevalent.
+The demand for shoes raises slowly, almost imperceptibly, causing shoe manufacturers to make more and cheaper shoes.
+This begins a vicious cycle during which more and more shoes are made, more and more cheaply, causing more shoes to be bought, and thus made, until finally the society reaches the Shoe Event Horizon.
+This is the point at which it becomes economically impossible for any stores but shoe stores to exist.
+After the economy collapses, the society's people invariably turn [into birds][], never to touch ground again.
+
+[`awk`][] is often used as a command-line stream-editing tool, but it is actually an entire interpreted language.
+It supports multiple variables and logical structuring, and has been the inspiration for [Perl][], which has largely replaced it.
+It was originally written in 1977, but over the years has evolved, with multiple implementations made for different uses.
+
+The best shoes I ever owned were Franco Fortinis, a brand I have yet to find anywhere else.
+Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed the shoes, like in stories where the protagonist buys a powerful object from a mysterious store and try to return it after it backfires in some tragic way, only to find the spot where the store stood is an empty lot, or worse, a [blank brick wall][].
+
+After having moved to Arizona, I fear I will forget what rain is like.
+I don't think it's sandbags falling on the body, and I believe it is cold.
+I think _Daredevil_, that piss of a film, has endeared itself to me forever with its depiction of rain.
+
+Recent studies have proven eyewitness testimony to be utterly unreliable.
+It turns out that memory is not a record set down on the tablet of the brain, but rather a series of impressions, emotions, and physical states that changes even with access.
+One of my students is having a hard time finding arguments in favor of the use of eyewitness testimony for a paper.
+This is how obvious the workings of memory are.
+
+And yet.
+[Without our memory we are nothing][].
+Memory is the tether to the floor of the ocean of our past, the ocean is our collective subconscious, which we float on, on the inner tube of individual perception, slathering on the suntan lotion of our prejudices, wearing the sunglasses of self-deception, all underneath the sun of technology.
+The seagulls of death circle slowly, calling to each other the call of their society, secret in its machinations.
+
+My father told me that once, when swimming, a rip tide pulled him far out to sea.
+He said it was impossible to tell until it was too late.
+The shore simply receded too slowly.
+He never told me how he made it back, but I imagine him, bearded, beached, coughing up saltwater: a new shipwrecked victim.
+
+[`grep`][] is a basic search tool for UNIX-based systems.
+It has a robust syntax, though I've had trouble remembering the regex nuances between it, `sed`'s, and `perl`'s.
+There is a POSIX standard, but no one follows standards.
+
+My mother loves Annie Dillard.
+She always talks about the praying mantis egg case scene: Dillard could never find a praying mantis egg case, until she finally saw one by accident.
+After that, she saw them everywhere.
+
+My mother showed me an egg case once.
+I haven't seen one since.
+
+My friend Steven has over three hundred pairs of shoes.
+He tells me his goal is eventually to obtain a calendar of shoes, and wear a different one each day of the year.
+He doesn't include the forty days of Lent, however.
+[He goes barefoot those forty days][].
+
+[`tr`]: http://man.cx/tr
+[`sed`]: http://man.cx/sed
+[wind blows hard up here]: cold-wind.html
+[pick me up like an angel]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[rolls is mayonnaise]: riptide_memory.html
+[Shoe Event Horizon]: http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2015/02/mailvox-marxism-and-shoe-event-horizon.html
+[into birds]: statements-frag.html
+[`awk`]: http://man.cx/awk
+[Perl]: http://www.perl.org/
+[blank brick wall]: building.html
+[Without our memory we are nothing]: early.html
+[`grep`]: http://man.cx/grep
+[He goes barefoot those forty days]: leg.html
@@ -0,0 +1,180 @@
+---
+title: Something
+subtitle: about my tenure as a bear
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+I turned off the TV as soon as the end credits began.
+I stretched in the La-Z-Boy™ I grew up in, pushing its back until I lay horizontal, feet slightly elevated.
+I stared at the light, at the bugs silhouetted inside it.
+I relaxed, thought about sleeping in the chair with the light on.
+I decided against it, pulled the lever to pull the chairback up and the footrest down, stood up, went around the corner, turned off the light, [stripped to my underwear][], and got [in bed][].
+I made sure my alarm was set for 8:00 and lay face-up in the dark.
+Eventually I slept.
+
+I still consider this to be the best summer I ever had, in terms of my sleep schedule.
+Every night I went to bed at midnight, after Stewart and Colbert.
+Every morning I woke up at eight, took a shower, ate my Frosted Mini-Wheats™, and brushed my teeth.
+I took my time because I didn't have to leave for work until 9:30.
+My shift at Dollywood started at 10:00.
+It was my second summer there---I worked as Larry the Cucumber™ mostly, though sometimes I would pick up the shift for one of the official Dollywood mascots when they had their day off.
+
+I went outside when the wall clock read 9:32.
+The day was already beginning to warm up.
+I walked across the road to my car, a Saturn®, my first, started it, pulled into the road, and looked up at my window, the only one on the second floor of my house.
+I said "So long" [in my head][] to my room, the house, and my two sisters still sleeping inside, and drove down the road.
+
+***
+
+My morning commute was rural, through farms, creeks, hills, and hollows; past tourist cabin resorts and used Christian bookstores; nearly getting to Pigeon Forge but stopping before any of the Strip was visible.
+Like Las Vegas, Pigeon Forge has a Strip; it was second only to Vegas in terms of marriages performed; it was first in the country including Vegas to feature two Cracker Barrels®.
+I went into Pigeon Forge only if I couldn't help it, which was rare; usually it was only if family from out-of-state were visiting, or the one time I and two friends went to the Buy-One-Pair-Get-Two-Pair-Free Boot Store and got a deal.
+
+I turned left before I got to any of Pigeon Forge, into the employee entrance of Dollywood.
+I drove down a small road: to my left a hill covered in kudzu; to my right a fence past which I could hear people riding The River Rampage™ or Rockin' Roadway™.
+I turned left again, drove past HR and the Dollywood doctor's office, and checked for parking at the bottom of the hill.
+There wasn't any, so I drove up the hill, found a parking spot, and got out of my car.
+I thought about waiting for an employee shuttle until I realized it was 9:55, so I trotted down the hill and past HR.
+I crossed the road in front of the gazebo, walked down a little path, and met Tim the security guard as I was crossing the main road.
+He asked to see my ID, which I had ready for him.
+I showed it to him, he looked me up and down (I wasn't in costume, usually a no at Dollywood, but since my costume was green, expensive, and required at least two people to put on, I didn't have to wear it onto the park), and finally let me through.
+I walked through the employee entrance and clocked in at 9:58.
+
+I had only figured out how to clock in my second summer.
+The first summer I worked at Dollywood was also the first summer I worked a job, and due to the placement of the Atmosphere Characters in the hierarchy of Park management we got paid by the day.
+This confused me into thinking that I didn't need to clock in and out, especially since I still got paid.
+My confusion deepened when I walked onto Park one day with Chance, who also worked Veggie Tales™, and he clocked in, but this was midway through the summer and I was too nervous to ask anyone about what I should do.
+I was worried that if I started clocking in it would cause suspicion, and I was terrified that my not clocking in would be caught and punished somehow.
+For about a month I lived in mild terror each morning and afternoon, avoiding my coworkers as they entered or left so they wouldn't see me walk past the red time clocks, each day wondering if the hammer would fall.
+I found out later that my manager Charlie had been paying me based on the days he'd scheduled me, clocking me in and out himself from his computer.
+He said it wasn't a big deal but to clock in next summer, this summer.
+So I clocked in and out every day, and these short sessions with the red time clock became favorite moments.
+
+I walked onto the park, past Jukebox Junction™, over the bridge, under the rope that disallowed guests to visit the area until the Park opened at 10:00, down Showstreet, and into the back of Showstreet Palace Theater, where we characters shared a dressing room with the Veggie Tales™ actors.
+Our "dressing-room" was a part of backstage partitioned off by curtains, where the empty shells of Bob the Tomato™ and Larry the Cucumber™ lay, inside-out so the sweat inside could evaporate, between shifts.
+I grabbed my off-brand UnderArmour™ "slicks" from the laundry basket and went to the bathroom to change.
+
+After I changed I came out of the bathroom and knocked on the women's dressing room door, to see if Nina or Stacy were in yet.
+Nina opened the door.
+"Hey Case," she said.  "How's it going?"
+"I'm good.  Am I Larry today?"
+I had been off the day before, so I wasn't sure of the rotation.
+"Yeah I think so," said Stacy, putting on makeup in the mirror.
+So she was handling with Chance, while Nina and I were the vegetables.
+I liked this arrangement; I preferred to be Larry™ because I didn't have to talk to anyone, and I could make faces in the costume while families took pictures.
+Nina preferred the same thing, although she was slightly too tall to fit comfortably inside Bob™.
+Stacy actually preferred to handle; her personality was bubbly and talkative; I don't think Chance liked any part of the job, really, and handling was less hot than being in the suit.
+
+"When's our first run?" I asked.
+"Well, the first show is at 10:20, so we were thinking about 11?"
+I nodded.
+"Where's Chance?"
+"I think he went out back to smoke," Nina said.
+"I'll go with you."
+The actors for the Veggie Tales show were coming in to use their dressing room, so we left Stacy with them.
+We walked through backstage, behind all the curtains, and through the side door into a sort of garage with ratty couches, a refrigerator, and an old TV mounted high up on the wall.
+Chance was sitting, smoking, and watching Jeopardy while thumbing through a magazine.
+"Hi Chance," I said.
+"Hey guys!" he flicked his smile, always somewhere between genuine and mocking, at us.
+
+"Think it'll rain today?"
+he asked, indicating the direction of the sky.
+It wasn't really visible from within the garage, due to the high fence keeping the guests on the path toward Timber Tower™ and Mystery Mine™, and the tree just outside the garage.
+"I don't think there's a cloud in the sky," I said, but walked out of the garage and looked up to be sure.
+There were wisps of cirrus like stray brush strokes on a blue canvas, but that was all.
+"I think we'll have to do all of our runs today."
+"Damn," said Chance, and stubbed out his cigarette.
+We watched Jeopardy in silence for a few minutes.
+Chance checked his watch.
+"It's 10:19," he said, "we should get inside before the show starts."
+
+We went back to the dressing room, behind the curtains backstage, past the skins of Larry™ and Bob™, their feet, and their battery packs, past the water fountain where I drank, and into the women's dressing room.
+Stacy had finished applying her makeup and was already in overalls, flannel, boots and cowboy hat.
+Seeing her, Chance said, "I'd better go put my outfit on."
+He left and came back, costumed.
+We killed time.
+Nina turned her wrist and looked at her watch.
+"It's 10:50," she said, looking at me and jerking her head toward the door.
+"Let's get ready."
+
+We went out and down the hall.
+The Veggie Tales were singing about Mr. Nezzer™ loving the bunny.
+Nina went to Bob™, and I to Larry™.
+We set to work pulling them right-side-out.
+When this was done we put on the backpacks that served as interior shells for the characters and held the battery packs.
+As Nina pulled on Bob™'s legs, I pulled on Larry™'s.
+I put my shoes in Larry™'s feet---a concession made to the forms of us humans inside the suits (Bob™ and Larry™ on the show had no arms or legs).
+We clipped each other's batteries into the packs.
+We put our hands through the vegetables' arms.
+At this point, the vegetables' faces were sagging from our waists, like deflated balloons.
+We waddled over to the hallway outside the dressing rooms.
+Chance helped me put Larry's hands on, which were three-fingered like a cartoon, although in the cartoon the Veggie Tales characters don't have hands.
+He snapped them onto the arm.
+He helped me pull the head up and over my pack, and clipped the battery to the fan inside the suit.
+He zipped the back zipper, and the suit started to inflate---Bob™ and Larry™ were inflatable to cut down on their weight.
+Stacy had done the same with Nina and Bob™.
+She asked, "Ready?"
+We said, "Ready."
+Chance got ahead of us, opening the door.
+I had to push my hands into my chest to deflate the suit so it could fit through the door.
+We stepped into the dappled sunlight of Dollywood.
+
+***
+
+The first few minutes of the run were fairly peaceful.
+A few families walking by saw us and walk over, forming a small line for their children to say hello, get a hug and a picture.
+One of the kids, about three, got about five feet from me, pass some sort of magic barrier, and suddenly become terrified.
+She screamed and run back to her parents.
+I tried to get eye-contact (it was hard to tell exactly where Larry™ was looking, since his eyes were about a foot above my head and were fixed forward), get small, and hold out my hand, but she had seen quite enough.
+She shook her head and hid behind her mother's leg.
+I waved with my fingers and stepped back to receive the next child.
+
+Sometimes, doing this job, I felt like a priest giving some sort of communion.
+Sometimes I felt like a celebrity, especially when children asked for an autograph (this happened fairly often, and Chance had to guide my hand with the Sharpie™ in it).
+Sometimes I felt like Santa Claus, or some other mythical creature come to Earth.
+Mostly, I felt a little hot and slightly bored.
+The boredom crystallized into stress when the Veggie Tales show let out.
+
+Showstreet Palace held something like four hundred people, and for a show like Veggie Tales, around half were children.
+For this run our post was around the side of the theater, so we didn't get the full press of the crowd, but there were quite a few people streaming out of the side door, fresh from seeing Larry™, Bob™ and friends performing in a show.
+Of course they were excited to see them giving out hugs in the street.
+Chance and Stacy became busy trying to form the crowd into some semblance of a line while I and Nina were hugging children, trying to take our time with each but painfully aware of the next in line.
+This was the worst part of the job---I felt like I was on a factory line gluing widgets onto a product all day.
+I was always looking ahead, always at the next kid, barely noticing what the ones old enough to talk were saying to me, trying to show me.
+I felt callous and aloof from humanity, and a deep unease passed over me.
+
+With all of this on my mind, of course I didn't see the teenager running toward me from my left.
+Chance and Stacy can't be blamed; they were busy with crowd control.
+I don't know what happened to the kid afterward.
+All I know is what happened to me: suddenly a great weight on my left side, the hiss of air being forced out of Larry™, me almost falling over.
+The weight fell off.
+I turned around, too stunned to yell, though Chance had caught it out of the corner of his eye.
+"Hey!  Don't do that!" he said, his eyes on the fallen teenager.
+The kid was maybe fifteen, tall, with a white T-shirt and dark hair.
+He had an indescribable look on his face---surprise, satisfaction, and something else I couldn't identify.
+Before Chance could reach him he ran off.
+
+"You okay?"
+he turned to me and asked.
+I said in a low voice, "Yeah I'm fine."
+"We're going in," he said to Stacy.
+She checked her watch, said, "Yeah, it's been twenty minutes."
+To the crowd: "We have time for just two more pictures!"
+A wave of disappointment went through the people there.
+Most stayed, hoping for an extension of the rule, but we took two more pictures, turned around, and began walking inside.
+Some family tried to follow us in; Chance hollered over his shoulder, "I'm sorry folks, we have to go in.
+Bob™ and Larry™ need a break."
+The father asked, "When will you be back out?"
+"After the next show," Chance said as Stacy opened the door.
+
+I deflated Larry™'s face again, to get in the door, and was safe in the darkness of the hallway.
+Chance unzipped me, allowing real, cool air to wash over my body.
+Nina and I waddled down the hallway to peel the vegetables off ourselves, and to repeat the process of waiting, dressing, and standing again.
+
+[stripped to my underwear]: underwear.html
+[in bed]: in-bed.html
+[in my head]: hymnal.html
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+---
+title: I want to say
+genre: verse
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+I want to say I take it all back \
+I want \
+I want to take it back I want it none of it \
+to be ever have happened not \
+when I saw you step over the rope \
+when we went to New York for a week \
+but stayed upstate when you punched me \
+hard in the solar plexus in Prague \
+when I looked in your face and [saw myself][] \
+looking back smiling when we went on another trip \
+and another all the trips I want to have \
+stayed home I want to have seen the clouds \
+drifting past [my car window][] to have listened \
+to that sound the bridge makes driving over it \
+without thinking of you always it was you
+
+I want
+
+I [want to be fresh][] I want to roll out of bed \
+as though it were my [first morning in a new state][] \
+I want nothing more than absolution of sins \
+[a negation but there is no way to subtract here][] \
+I cannot remove this growth that appeared  \
+seemingly overnight I cannot [cut you away from myself][] \
+I cannot forget what has already and will always have been \
+I cannot get out of a [new bed][] ever \
+New York will always be as it was when I saw it first \
+with you my breathing will always be labored outside \
+of the cafe I will always see you when [I look in a mirror][] \
+of someone's face the reflection of missed thoughts missed \
+[words will cease to give meaning][] the center will come out \
+of me I will make a new center yes I will drag what is \
+your center around with me and [repeat and repeat][] again \
+I cannot want cannot want want not
+
+[new bed]: in-bed.html
+[saw myself]: deathstrumpet.html
+[my car window]: boy_bus.html
+[want to be fresh]: plant.html
+[first morning in a new state]: collage-instrument.html
+[a negation but there is no way to subtract here]: no-nothing.html
+[cut you away from myself]: elegyforanalternateself.html
+[I look in a mirror]: lovesong.html
+[words will cease to give meaning]: words-meaning.html
+[repeat and repeat]: question.html
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+---
+title: Manifesto of poetics
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Stark raving
+    css: stark
+...
+
+What is a poem?
+I think it was Yeats that called a poem "the best words in the best order," and that isn't an inaccurate description, but I don't think it captures all of what a poem is.
+[Let me start][] with communication.
+
+Communication is a transaction, an exchange between two people or entities, in which one (the Speaker/Writer/Communicator) gives the other (the Reader/Listener/Consumer) a \
+set of ideas / \
+a wireframe organization of a concept / \
+a set of reasons/instructions for action.
+In many kinds of communication, for example speeches, reports, or advertisements, the kind of ideas transacted are generally factual/logical/brain-based in nature.
+In art, these ideas are emotional/heart-based.
+In short, Art is to Emotion as an [Article][] is to Information.
+I think art should strive to transmit the emotion the author feels as efficiently as possible to the reader of that art.
+
+In order to do this, multiple notation systems have been devised.
+Music is the most notable example that comes to mind, as it has the most rigid style, but grammar, as used self-consciously in writing, would be another example.
+Poetry has only a very loose set of rules and assumptions that allow it a sort of notational language, and this is complicated by the fact that when writing poetry, the author writes for a different medium: poetry is meant to be performed aloud.
+This makes the notation system even more important, but again, it's hard to come up with a system that will be read mostly the same by most people.
+
+What I've been trying to do since I began writing is develop a personal notation system, or what I think most would refer to as my "voice" as a poet/writer (I personally don't like the word "poet," as it sounds pretentious to me; I'm aware I should get over this).
+
+However, there were some places that still needed improving from my draft manuscript: most notably, my prose in "Rip Tide of Memory" (now only "Rip Tide") and "AMBER Alert."
+I rewrote each to tighten their syntactic and idea rhythm, to make them move more lightly and gracefully.
+
+The most notable difference in my series is the reordering of poems within it.
+I think that in my first draft, I spent so much time on getting my individual poems tight and polished that I threw them together somewhat haphazardly, using a loose thematic correspondence with the fake "Table of contents."
+With the new order, I hope this has been fixed: the piece consists of six sections, each with three poems (A new one, "Everything stays the same," makes the totals correct).
+Each section has a thematic/emotional/personal element that ties the sections together.
+They are ordered by the order in which I wrote the sestinas at the beginning of each section, which works out to make the series move from identity to memory to a feeling of universal justice, and from there to a discussion of death and (something like) love that culminates in an exploration of the nature of time and cosmology.
+The piece is bookended by the fake "Table of contents" (provided at the end as an ironic commentary on the rest of the text) and an "About the author" section.
+I think it works better this way, and I think the "About the author" at the beginning serves as a fair prelude poem to the piece.
+
+I'm excited to be a writer like I haven't been before.
+
+[Let me start]: prelude.html
+[Article]: README.html#fn1
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+---
+title: On genre and the dimensionality of poetry
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+How does one describe a poem?
+
+A genre is a set of creative outputs that fit a given set of criteria.
+Genres are useful as a sort of shorthand when describing a thing of art: instead of noting, for example, all of the objects depicted in a still-life that aren't people or land-features, we call it a still-life and get on to describing how the objects interrelate to each other on the canvas.
+If you ask me what kind of painting I'm working on, and I say, "a still-life," you have an expectation of certain elements the painting will contain.
+If you happen to be an agent and try to sell the painting later, you'll say to your prospective buyers, "It's a still-life," and whether the buyer is over the phone or standing in the gallery, they'll know whether they'll like it or not based on whether they like still-lifes.
+In the same way, they can call you up and ask if you have any still-lifes for sale right now, and get a simple yes-or-no answer for it.
+This is the first kind of genre, and it applies well within separate types of fundamentally-different media, such as painting, sculpture, film, or the written word.
+
+A poem, obviously, is in this last category, and for some reason its designation is hairier than others'.
+People refer to all sorts of art, or even dispassionate events, as poetry; dancing is called "poetry in motion," for example.
+I think the confusion is caused in part by the nature of writing as a medium, namely in that it captures thoughts more clearly and communicably than other art forms.
+While a picture can be "worth a thousand words," as the old cliché goes, when those words are actually written out they can contain shades of meaning impossible to capture in the picture itself, at least as quickly as they can be absorbed in writing.
+It seems as though writing is akin to the fundamental nature of thought, or at least of spoken language, which our thought is steeped in.
+
+So we know what _writing_ is.
+What is a _poem_?
+Especially in a world with such forms as prose poetry, flash fiction, short-shorts, lyrical essays, [lyrical _ballads_][], et cetera, what makes a poem a poem?
+
+I read an essay once that lamented the unidimensionality of writing.
+It posited that prose is really just a long, wrapped line of text that's bound by time---when you read a novel, for example, you really must start at the beginning and read through to the end, in order.
+Some newer forms of fiction are changing this, such as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre in the 1970s and 80s, or hyperfiction found online, which raises the question for me if these newer forms could be considered on some level to be poetry.
+
+This is because poetry has more than one dimension, due to its linear nature---those line breaks are intentional, and the poem can't just fit into any-sized book or web page.
+If prose is a liquid, filling any container it's placed in with a constant volume, poetry is more like a crystallized form of prose, or to put it another way, poetry has between [one and two dimensions][].
+I wouldn't say that poetry has fully two dimensions, except for some of the more conceptually visual stuff that I'd call a word-picture anyway, because from line to line that unidimensionality of prose remains.
+Poetry has a higher dimensionality than prose, though, because it's crystallized there on the page; this fractal-dimensionality of poetry has interesting side effects on the genre itself.
+
+For one thing, poetry isn't as bound by time as prose is.
+It can, as Marianne Boruch writes, resist "narrative sequence," or "the forward press of _time_ itself," due to its repetitions and diversions, which are in turn made possible or more apparent by its line breaks.
+It's able to meditate on a subject, or expand on it lyrically, exploring the emotions connected with the images in the poem, or the connections between images.
+Through repitition of sounds, the poem builds meaning through resonance and rhyming, something that's harder to do in prose.
+Take, for example, the first lines of "[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock][]:"
+
+> LET us go then, you and I, \
+> When the evening is spread out against the sky \
+> Like a patient etherized upon a table; \
+> Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, \
+> The muttering retreats \
+> Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels \
+> And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: \
+> Streets that follow like a tedious argument \
+> Of insidious intent \
+> To lead you to an overwhelming question.... \
+> Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" \
+> Let us go and make our visit.
+
+And here it is again, without line breaks:
+
+> LET us go then, you and I,
+> when the evening is spread out against the sky
+> like a patient etherized upon a table;
+> let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
+> the muttering retreats
+> of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
+> and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
+> streets that follow like a tedious argument
+> of insidious intent
+> to lead you to an overwhelming question....
+> Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
+> Let us go and make our visit.
+
+The end-rhymes that do so much for the sound of the poem are gone, and so part of the meaning of the poem---its obsessive self-consciousness, its paranoia---are gone as well.
+Additionally, line breaks act as punctuation in the entirety of this [fragment][]; without them, the meaning becomes obscured in the long first sentence of the poem.
+
+Perhaps due to this dwelling on scene, or on all aspects of a single scene at one time, poetry tends to be heavy on images, or lyrical.
+I think this is what's generally meant when someone describes a dance as "poetic," or a story or anything else: I think they really mean "lyrical," or maybe "beautiful." The images form sort of a narrative as the reader moves through them, as Cesare Pavese says, that's nevertheless [different than a traditional narrative][]: this "image narrative" jumps from image to image not by a logical progression but by the resonances between the images that run underneath them, on almost a subliminal plane.
+Almost without noticing, the reader of a poem is taken on an emotional journey that's not necessarily connected to the images of the poem, themselves.
+
+Poetry is a manipulation of emotion, or a communication of it.
+Prose has the space, the time to describe what's going on, even if the author stands by the old adage of "show, don't tell."
+_Showing_ in prose inherently involves more telling than poetry does, as poetry communicates a feeling itself.
+This definition may be broad enough to include certain dance performances or paintings, but that's okay.
+I'm of the opinion that the more useful genre distinctions are those which describe the thing technically: _verse_, for example, or _lyrical_.
+_Poetry_ is almost a value judgement, and that makes me a little uncomfortable.
+
+[lyrical _ballads_]: http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html
+[one and two dimensions]: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/cogsci/chaos/workshop/Fractals.html
+[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
+[fragment]: statements-frag.html
+[different than a traditional narrative]: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/03/07/translation-adaptation-and-transformation-the-poet-as-translator-an-essay-by-richard-jackson/
@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+---
+title: Peaches
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+"My anger is like a peach," he said.
+He was trying to show how metaphors could be anything.
+I thought it worked.
+I wrote it down in my red notebook.
+
+In my other class, there was a long discussion about the difference between metaphor and simile as they relate to [Prufrock][].
+I could only think about his peaches.
+I wonder if he dared.
+
+A few years ago my friend dressed up as J. Alfred Prufrock for Halloween.
+Her costume consisted of rolled khaki trousers and a peach.
+(I wonder where she found that in [October][].)
+She was annoyed that she had to tell everyone who she was---"At a writers' party!"
+I don't remember if she ate that peach.
+I do remember the main meal was spaghetti.
+
+That party was held in a house in Chattanooga, in the basement.
+There was a big back yard where people drank and talked and sat in the darkness.
+Somewhere someone was smoking weed with a visiting writer.
+
+Earlier that day, [the writer had read a poem about his car accident][sebastian] a year ago, in Georgia, on the interstate.
+It had broken him pretty badly, and his wife, but somehow their child was unharmed.
+He said something about the peach pit being the one place Georgia held sacred.
+He said it was the place where all new things grow.
+
+I can see how anger could be like a peach: its juice runs out of the mouth and down the chin, dropping onto the pants and staining them.
+In the same way, I can see how [anger is like sex][]: they are both heightened states of emotional observation.
+
+In Atlanta, there are something like five or ten [Peachtree Streets][].
+I'm not sure if they all connect at some point, but from what I could see, they would have to do some contorting to get to the same point.
+I like to think a giant peach tree grows there, like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
+
+I was walking down one of Atlanta's Peachtrees with my girlfriend when a man in tight pants, a runner, jogged past us.
+We both agreed he had a marvelous ass.
+I was annoyed, however, when she confessed that she wished I had one like his.
+Later, we ate at a taqueria with peach-habanero salsa.
+
+[My mother][] would read to us as children.
+The first real books I remember, the first novels, are Island of the Blue Dolphins and James and the Giant Peach.
+I don't remember Island of the Blue Dolphins as well, probably because no movie was made of it.
+
+There's an independent video rental store where I grew up called [Popcorn Video][], one of the only stores I went to in my hometown that wasn't a chain.
+Every time we went, my sister would rent two movies: _James and the Giant Peach_ and _Home Alone 3_.
+
+I wasn't allowed to stay home alone, or I don't remember it, until I was fifteen.
+I built a potato cannon out of PVC pipe and a barbecue lighter.
+I would load a potato, spray hairspray into the barrel, and light it.
+Once, the cannon wouldn't light.
+I looked down the barrel and pushed the trigger button to see if I could see a light.
+I forgot that I had already primed the barrel with hairspray.
+I singed my eyebrows and bangs.
+
+In peach season, my father would bring home a bag of the freestones every week or so.
+He always got the cheap ones, so they were usually dry and pithy, with a stone that fell apart and nearly broke my tooth.
+I don't eat them anymore when I go home.
+
+My mother would always eat canned peaches with cottage cheese.
+For some reason I didn't think this was common knowledge.
+I showed people how good it was when we went to a buffet: they said "I know."
+
+To be honest, I'm not even sure what a peach tree looks like.
+I do know what an orange tree looks like, from a backyard in Phoenix, and a fig tree, from a back yard in Chattanooga.
+I also know what a cherry tree looks like, or at least a type of them, from my own backyard at home, as well as mulberry and apple.
+If, for some reason, I find myself lost in a sinister Garden of Eden, I'll at least know a few of the trees I can eat from.
+
+I always heard growing up that the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an apple.
+Maybe I'll luck out: maybe it'll be a peach.
+
+[Prufrock]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
+[October]: axe.html
+[sebastian]: http://www.32poems.com/blog/5158/weekly-prose-feature-an-interview-with-sebastian-matthews-by-justin-bigos
+[anger is like sex]: statements-frag.html
+[Peachtree Streets]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Peachtree+Rd+NE,+Atlanta,+GA/@33.7779425,-84.3843615
+[My mother]: riptide_memory.html
+[Popcorn Video]: http://popcornvideo.net/
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+---
+title: Walking in the rain
+genre: verse
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+I can walk through the rain, [that rare occurrence][] \
+and never be hit by a drop.  There is a space around me \
+that refuses to be [penetrated][] by weather of any kind \
+be it rain or snow or sunshine.  [Is it cold I hear you][] \
+asking in your voice soft as a breeze.  No it is not \
+[particularly cold][].  If I were to describe it as warm \
+[I would be lying as well][].  If I were to pretend I heard \
+you, far-off, mirage, breeze on the horizon, [no truth][] \
+would ever be said to have come from [my frozen lips][].
+
+[that rare occurrence]: collage-instrument.html
+[Is it cold I hear you]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
+[particularly cold]: cold-wind.html
+[I would be lying as well]: todaniel.html
+[no truth]: no-nothing.html
+[my frozen lips]: swansong-alt.html
+[penetrated]: lovesong.html
@@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
+---
+title: What we are made of
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+There is a cave just outside of Flagstaff made from ancient lava flows.
+We went inside it to where the darkness was a presence, it walked with us like a Christ, our footsteps fell dead on its walls.
+We learned what space felt like, and drowning, and being crushed, and going blind and deaf.
+We made up words to push the feeling away, to goad it like mockingbirds fighting hawks.
+We called it creepy to its face.
+It stared back dispassionate.
+
+In a bathroom I know there is a low thrumming that comes from the air ducts in the ceiling.
+It comforts me in the same way the smell of toilet-water calms my stomach, it is a sound so close to quiet, so close to the porcelain whiteness of the toilet, it pushes all other noise away.
+It is deafening quiet in its most real form, its most realizable form.
+
+The eggs on the floor, broken.
+Not the eggs in their journey to the floor or from the farm or from the hen on the farm, in the cage, glowing under fluorescent lights, its neighbors pressed to its body, rotten-smelling, grotesque.
+Not the fateful meeting with the floor.
+Not the long wait in darkness for the fluorescent dawn, cacophonous with pain and smell.
+None of this: the sunlight on the kitchen tile, the refrigerator softly humming, the eggs on the floor.
+The yolks glistening.
+
+I compose with music best.
+Under its meaninglessness [I am able to hear the silence][], a different meaninglessness, a somehow-deeper meaninglessness, the inverse of repeating a word until it is only sound.
+I can hear the taboo, the never-spoken, unacknowledged.
+I write to drown its sound, with the scratching of my pen.
+
+Silence lies underneath us all in the same way \
+the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large \
+(though this is an urban legend, apparently) \
+
+I threw a party in my dream and went to the bathroom, down a long dark hallway.
+I began to leave and noticed the bathtub full of stuffed animals in a heap.
+I examined them each in turn: an elephant, a tiger, each backgrounded by white tile.
+A warthog sat at the top of the heap.
+It caught my eye, I stared, it slowly winked, sneering.
+I reached out my finger and poked it, like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
+It responded in kind, chuckling.
+I woke with a start, terrified.
+It had made no sound.
+
+There are at least two kinds of silence, in the same way that there are at least two kinds of sadness.
+There is the silence of after, the staring, open-mouthed silence, the what-do-we-do-now silence.
+There is the silence of before, the still before rainfall, the just-woken-up.
+
+There is, now I'm thinking about it, the silence of between:
+the waiting room after the heart attack,
+after the phone call,
+after the hurried drive,
+the fast walking down hospital hallways,
+the finding the room,
+my family,
+their faces the silence of after,
+the TV quietly playing _Maurie_,
+the silence underneath that; the waiting room _before_ the doctor comes in,
+tells us what happened,
+the chances,
+before my parents drive down,
+their three long hours in the car,
+before we become the Hospital People for five days,
+camped-out,
+loud,
+cackling,
+crying,
+doing crosswords,
+watching her die.
+
+The silence of wondering whether we could've known each other better.
+
+The silence of the long trip we prefer to believe she's gone on, which is really the silence of her absence.
+
+The eggs on the floor, broken.
+
+In other dreams, all I've watched all of my family dying.
+My father I remember best: he was on the wicker rocking chair on the porch, staring at the back yard, the evergreen trees in a magic triangle, their branches intertwined.
+We were all on the porch, and I heard like a far-away bell the moment of his death.
+I woke up crying, my throat closed with grief.
+
+Leaving after the goodbye at the hotel, [realizing I won't be home][] until Christmas, that I'm on my own long trip, someone on the radio station I'm listening to in the car screws up transferring tapes, broadcasts dead air.
+The silence yawns like a chasm, lasting for years.
+[The wind picks me up and carries me away][], I see everything from a great height, I see the future.
+I'm waiting.
+
+[I am able to hear the silence]: music-433.html
+[realizing I won't be home]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[The wind picks me up and carries me away]: riptide_memory.html
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: Words and their irritable reaching
+genre: prose
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    css: autocento
+...
+
+Somewhere I remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone, at least that in the early stages.
+The author argued that it took all of the power out of the idea, like a pressure-release valve, before any of that creative power got to be applied to the page.
+It made me think of "[Meditation at Legunitas][]," when Hass writes "that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea."
+As a self-confessed General Idea person, I identify with the remark: it does seem as though, no matter how lofty the idea I originally have for a poem, once I sit down to write the thing I quickly get bogged down in the details, the particulars.
+I guess the writer of that lost article must work the same way, leading to their advice: if the "luminous clarity of a general idea" is so fragile that just beginning to write it down ruins it somehow, _telling_ people about it is even worse.
+
+But back to that Robert Hass poem: while he does say that thing about the "luminous clarity of a general idea," and he adds to it that "[a word is elegy][] to what it signifies," his tone is lightly chiding this philosophy.
+He opens his poem with "All the new thinking is about loss.  / In this it resembles all the old thinking," which to my mind lampoons both the new and the old thinking for not having anything new, ultimately, to say.
+He attributes these thoughts to a friend, whose voice carried "a thin wire of grief, a tone / almost querulous" about that loss of luminous clarity.
+The speaker of Hass's poem remembers a woman he made love to, once, and this image takes over the poem in all its specificity, from "her small shoulders" to his "childhood river / with its island willows," to "the way her hands dismantled bread."
+
+Even in disproving his friend's remarks through his imagery, the speaker of "Meditation at Legunitas" admits that "It hardly had to do with her"---and here is the heart of what Hass is saying about poetry.
+A poem hardly has to do with what it's written about, on the surface level; as Richard Hugo says it in [a famous essay][], a poem has a "triggering subject" and it has a "real or generated subject," which for Hugo in "Meditation at Legunitas" is something about the way that not only general ideas, but particulars, such as the body or hands or "the thing her father said that hurt her," which is such a beautiful generality that is somehow also a particular truth, are luminous to poetry and to life-as-lived.
+The philosophers can say what they want, but we experience the world bodily and particularly to ourselves.
+
+There's still a problem with language, however, to which Hass speaks by the end of his poem, with those repetitions of "blackberry, blackberry, blackberry," in that, as Jack Gilbert says in his poem "[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart][]," "How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / but frightening that it does not quite."
+There is still that "[irritable reaching][] after fact & reason" that language, as communication, requires---I think Keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only Shakespeare and maybe Coleridge and a few others could achieve, this "Negative Capability."
+Gilbert furthers Keats in asserting that no matter what we write, "the words / Get it wrong," that utterance is itself that irritable reaching.
+
+In Gilbert's poem, though, he does reach after something.
+In the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the "mysterious Sumerian tablets" could be as poetry, instead of just "business records:"
+
+> [...] My joy is the same as twelve
+> Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light.
+> O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
+> as grand as ripe barley under the wind's labor.
+> Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
+> of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.  My love is a hundred
+> pitchers of honey.  Shiploads of thuya are what
+> my body wants to say to your body.  Giraffes are this
+> desire in the dark.
+
+This is my favorite part of the poem, and I think it's because Gilbert, like Hass, reaches for the specific in the general; he brings huge ideas like the Lord or Love or Joy into the specific images of salt, copper, or honey, or like he says at the end of his poem: "What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds."
+This, ultimately, is what Keats was getting at, and Hugo, too: that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem, but that rather a poem speaks around its subject.
+To be honest, all [art][] may do this.
+What sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact.
+
+[Meditation at Legunitas]: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014
+[a word is elegy]: words-meaning.html
+[a famous essay]: http://ualr.edu/rmburns/RB/hugosubj.html
+[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart]: http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/theforgottendialect.html
+[irritable reaching]: http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html
+[art]: art.html