Tonight, I went and had sushi for dinner, even though I know that tomorrow, I will be having yet more sushi. It's crazy. I personally like the California roll, as unoriginal as that may be, as well as the cucumber roll and mushroom roll. And, ooh, the Alaska roll.

Yeah, school is over, and this is what I'm left to write about. Sushi. Riveting, isn't it?

I looked through some of my old poetry last night. I was looking for an epic poem I wrote with Charlotte, called "I Don't Wanna Die in San Francisco." It was the only time I visited the city before moving here. It was a long time ago--1993 or something-- and we wrote this epic poem over the course of the weekend, to memorialize it.

So I found an old binder, which I kept meticulously updated with my poems. And I started flipping through the binder, and ended up convulsed with laughter. I was thinking of the juvenilia of some famous poets as I was reading it, and just cringing at the idea of someday being a famous poet, and having some publisher throw this crap in a book.

Me at twenty six: San Francisco bohemian hipster poet. Me at eighteen: the worst poet ever in the history of the planet. Even worse than William the Bloody Awful. Many of the poems are about death, in the most melodramatic and trite sense. O, the agony of death. O, the pain and the tears and the torment of death. O, the incorrect grammar. Let me give you an example.

(Shit, this is embarrassing.)

Showers

The tomb where we layed our dead
in the grave
with dead flowers
we go on
our life goes on
and they lay there, oblivious
to the showers

The weeds caress the stone that marks
when they lived and died
as if it doesn't matter that they
are gone
endless infinite hours
and the grave, once wet by tears
is wet by showers

The worst part is, I thought this was a good poem. I thought I was hot shit. I thought I had talent. I used to write lines like, "And the dead sleep rottingly on" and think they were fan-freaking-tastic. This is what gave me the confidence to make poetry my life's work.

Now that, guys and dolls, is scary.

I don't mean to be too hard on myself. There are quite a few poems with promise-- some great lines and images buried in the suckage. And in fact, I wish I could be as experimental now as I was then. For instance, now, I doubt that I'd ever write something as risky (sucky, but risky) as "dOug's SuShi MoteL":

they hand it to you
at the front desk
b  r  a  s  s
c    o    p    p    e    r   
g    o    l    d
(      p      l      a      s      t      i      c      )
sushimotelroom key.

I mean what the hell was I talking about, but I sure wasn't afraid to craft whatever it was that was in my head into poetry. The poet I am today is in there somewhere. It makes me want to experiment more, push myself harder, be a little crazier. It makes me want to transform back into that renegade teenager who thought that her crappy poetry was good and didn't follow anybody's rules. Who worked a little less on intellect and a little more on instinct.

It's interesting to see the moment when it clicked over, too. At some point, while I was studying Eliot and Yeats and the rest of the Modernists, and while I was in Wanda Coleman's poetry workshop, my poetry started to come out legitimate and interesting. It was half crap, and half real poetry. In fact, I remember Wanda telling me, "You remind me of me. When you're good, you're really, really good. And when you're bad, you're awful."

Lately, my writing has fallen into one distinct vein-- the examination of the moment. I haven't concerned myself much with language or rhythm; I've been trying to create vivid moments. The collection that I'm putting together into a chapbook (smokes, coming soon to a mailbox near you) is this kind of poetry. The concept being: each poem captures a moment in time that takes place in the amount of time that it takes to smoke a cigarette.

I'm having a good time with this type of poetry, and I guess I should keep working at it as long as my creativity is flowing in that direction. Plus, I still have an underlying awareness of things like rhythm and diction; they haven't been abandoned. But still and all, I want to write totally random stuff like the sushi motel poem. I want to write ethereal language poetry, like some of the stuff my classmates write.

I guess this isn't really a problem. I'm not creatively blocked or anything, and I do feel like I'm expanding in new directions. I mean hell, "Joey Ramone" is something a little experimental in and of itself, and I'm working on other stuff...

Just thinking out loud, I guess.

This summer, I have a few poetry projects going on. Now that I think of it, quite a few poetry projects.

First of all, I am working on my chapbook. It's a cool conflation of my experiences in grad school so far. Huck is going to draw the cover. Then I'll buy some nice paper and have it photocopied. Franka has a saddle stapler I can use. Mickey said I could use a line from one of his poems as the epigram. A lot of these poems were workshopped with Laurie and Joey. Half the poems in there came out of class assignments. I think that's totally cool.

Also, Probst and I are working on our own little 'zine. He's drawn the cover already: it's a drawing of Cassie and Pigwidgeon, except they're dressed as tiny mariachis. That basically encapsulates the theme of our magazine, as well as our personalities: hilarious in a totally random way.

I am still working on my reading project, trying to plow through the poetry books on my shelf. Right now, I'm doing less plowing, and more ignoring. But I am sure the plowing will commence any second now.

The girls and I are going to continue our weekly workshops. All three of us are going out of town periodically over the summer, so we won't be consistent by any means, but we'll try our best. We're meeting tomorrow, in fact.

Also, some of my classmates and I are going to do an electronic workshop, writing on a different theme every week. This is Probst's project, and he collected themes from our classmates (such as architecture, African wildlife and vomit) that we'll be writing on. Some people are talking about meeting in person as well, and I hope we're able to do that, at least some of us, at least once in a while.

Most importantly, of course, I have to create a syllabus for my class. It's kind of odd, because there's still a chance I won't be teaching it. I'm concerned about pouring a whole lot of work into it and then not getting the payoff. But what's life for, if not to take a few risks, right?

Break out the pens and the soy sauce! Let the summer of poetry begin!

"Our ghetto-mobile took us to a ghetto hotel: Circus Circus. By the end of Friday night, I was attempting to convince everyone that the hotel’s name really was 'Circus Circus Circus Circus.' In other words, I was hammered."