itesser ink: progress, uncensored

Pre-post shout-out to Katie Cook. It's her birthday! Besides being an amazing artist, she's a wonderfully sweet and nerdy gal.

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After an early morning scare of "can he go tomorrow?"*, I spent the day blissfully escaping into tv, drawing, and Bradbury's quirky prose.

(*the answer was "no, there are still obligations to be concluded)

Yes, I'm 24, a fan of sci-fi and literature, and I've never read Fahrenheit 451 before. If it's any defense, I have read Something Wicked This Way Comes.

As I was taking care of some chores downstairs I was bemoaning (to myself) the fact that I don't have as much time to devote to poetry as I would like. After reading a few of the entries in the Daily Routines blog, I fussed about being keen to master both writing and art, but whenever I devote hours to the former, the back of my mind tells me I could be spending them on the latter. I was specifically thinking about poetry, and how it's been quite a while since I've been inspired enough to have a new poem flow out of me.

Then I made sandwiches, tidied up the kitchen, then came upstairs and fluidly wrote a couple dozen lines. Oh, the gifts of irony.

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Obligatory paragraph pondering my social relationships. Today is one of the days I feel like an alien when thinking about my friends.

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For some odd reason I really like the idea of titling poems with days of the week, months of the year, and times of day. Maybe it ties into my tendency to use poetry as a form of diary, but with mood, emotion, events, and details, I like placing them in a chronological context, even if it doesn't tie into an ongoing timeline.

I think it might be similar to this phenomenon: Recently I read or heard someone talking about going to visit a foreign country. (It kills me that I can't remember the source of this anecdote.) Upon their return, friends asked "What is Country X like?" and the traveler would reply "I don't know", as he could only speak to his own experiences in the country, which could not offer a reliable picture of what Country X is like.

The connection is that by titling a poem "Early November" when nothing in the poem explicitly implies early November, I'm casting the contents of the poem in an early-November sort of light. I'm not saying what "early November" is, just my experiences there. Then.

Even though I don't have a deeply personal relationship with seasons, or week-patterns, or even day-patterns, I like using those markers. Mentally, I'm perhaps one step and one leap from developing a concise plan and description for a (chapbook?) project using only hours, days, and months for tiles.

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I am enamored with the lines inside my tea mug. While they do indicate that it's time for my ceramic chalice to be washed, they're also clues to my drinking habits: evenly spaced rings marking the resting water level between each round of sips. The stains are darker near the top; more heat and resting time when the tea-level is high. When I'm down to the last third, sometimes the tea isn't even lukewarm, and I lose interest.

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Dammit. Long post. I guess I'm back to normal? Unfortunately the net is not being normal. *is afraid to attempt posting*

Daily poem and art to come in a separate post so I can close firefox to play with digital paints.

Labels: bonus post, details, memo, poetry