"The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling"
-Naomi Shihab Nye, "Shoulders"

I'm pleased with the results of this past week. As someone fascinated with linguistics, it stands to reason that words would spur me on to create work in which I can take pride. This week was also light on schoolwork, so I felt like I had the time to breathe and sit down and really think over my poetry.

That said, the next week is set to be pretty stressful. I don't think it will be useful to push myself to write something new every day, and I probably won't get much enjoyment out of it. Instead, I'm picking one project to do for the entire week, to return to and to polish and polish again: I'm going to write a poem about my dog. 

Something that I've thought and rethought over the years is whether the subject of a poem matters. Does the relevancy of the material affect the poem's impact? One can relate to one poem more than one can another, always. But could a cat lover read a poem about a dog and be moved? When I read Neruda's "A Dog Has Died," I nearly cried. I am inclined to believe it's because of his way with words, his "my hairy dog was jumping about with all the voltage of the sea's movement." 

Another poem which actually made me sob at 3 AM--things I do with my free time--was "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. It impacted me because I thought of my own parents, of course, but why? Because it provoked empathy like I'd never felt before. 

So yes, good poetry makes you sit up and listen to a story that might otherwise bypass your ears like background noise. Not to be too ambitious, but that's my aim for this week. I'm going to write a poem about my dog that would make a cat lover smile at a puppy.

"Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you're left to your own devices..."
-Richard Siken, "Driving, Not Washing"

This week at Coffeehouse, I had a discussion about why teenagers don't default to short stories or to weepy memoirs when they are at their most vulnerable, but choose to write poetry over everything. I told him that I thought it was about escaping the confines of form, not having to follow a formula or stick to a structure. 

I think that answer may have given the impression that I think poetry is easy. Far from it--if there's anything I've learned over the past few weeks, it's that I don't understand how they do it, not at all. I want to see a journal of Neruda's discarded scraps, or where ee cummings threw up his hands and abandoned a few whimsical words, thinking them too cluttered. I know it's not realistic for me to produce quality work all the time, but I'm disappointed most in my lack of inspiration.

The assignment I gave myself this week was definitely difficult. Maybe I should think through writing poetry when I'm still bleary and my eyes ache too much to look at the screen. What is left written when I leave for school in the mornings is consistently incoherent, and I'm left a lot to try and clean up in the afternoons. Still, I suppose it's something that I managed to meet my goal of actually completing the poems. I think maybe my Tuesday one will make it into the collection, but not the others.

Coming up with inspiration on my own has clearly been difficult, so I'm going to return to mining from other sources. I love weird words and words from other languages that we don't have equivalents for in English. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to compile a long list of interesting words I've come across, then use a random generator and write a poem based on whichever word it lands on. I'll try not to keep it to any particular tone--it could be emotional, or it could be totally silly. After all, my first poetic inspiration was Shel Silverstein, and he could do both effectively.

As for my good friend Catullus (he'd probably write a revenge poem abut me for my overt familiarity, oh dear), I'm planning to translate some of his poetry about his more platonic relationships. I'm particularly inspired by one translation I've seen of a poem to his friend Licinius Calvus--it actually did the poem justice, surprise, surprise. So that will serve as my model this week.

"You, if no one else, will condemn with your tongue the erosion each disappointment brings"
-Tino Villanueva, "You, If No One Else"

This week, I accomplished one of the general milestones--I discussed translating Catullus with Dr. Patrick, my chosen mentor. I'm going to go in one morning next week to have a longer discussion with him. In addition to this, I want to check out some of the books he has in his classroom.

I've made good headway with Catullus. I've been perfecting translations of Catullus 48, 81, and 99, all centered on Iuventius. I thought I loved him before, but I appreciate his work more and more with every poem I read. However, it hasn't been easy. 

Sometimes a phrase or a line will have a certain beautiful symmetry in Latin, for example, which is impossible to replicate in English. There's a construction of "usque...usque" which can only be translating clumsily using words like "keep" and "still," clunky at best. Also, why do the Romans have so many words meaning "sweet "and so many sobriquets? Maybe because Latin is the first Romance language. English, meanwhile, is coming up short in that department. 

I'm hesitant to hit up the thesaurus. I think the best thing to do is have Dr. Patrick take a look at my translations and give me some tips, because there's a point at which you hit a roadblock with honing something, and I've hit mine with Catullus 48, at least.

The Shakespearean sonnet is finished and could use some editing, but I'm quite proud of it. The Neruda sonnet is more difficult. The more deeply I feel something, the more difficult it is to excavate it, and when I do, it's all but impossible to buff it to a clean shine. My emotions feel rough-hewed around the edges, but not with the raw appeal of Neruda. That's what makes him Neruda and me an amateur, I suppose. I haven't given up on it yet, though.

Coffeehouse is coming up on Tuesday. As an NEHS member, I'm required to bring something to share. I do truly want to read out "bring me back in your bucket of sand." I've been steeling myself for this for weeks. That won't stop me from being a nervous wreck when I get up on that stool, but I think writing this down will force me to be accountable to it. I was so confident in it before, though, and now I just keep going over it again and again, changing "fat" to "voluminous," "scrap" to "fragment," then fretting over whether I've ruined the tone.

I get up at around 5:30 every morning. This week, rather than try for one of the tough themed poems, I'm going to set myself a challenge of another kind (in addition to climbing the mountain of my fear of public performance at Coffeehouse). Every morning this week, from Monday to Friday, I will write one poem. Every afternoon, I will edit that poem. My biggest problem with this project has been pushing myself to produce content without second-guessing myself, and this will compel me into it if nothing else. 

We'll see how well this goes. Fingers crossed that I'm not so much of a zombie when I first wake up this week that everything is just an ode to brains.

"If fear was plucky, and globes were square"
- e e cummings, "If"

Last week I cruised along smoothly, but this one was a little rougher. I don't want to pin all the blame on a busy weekend and a rough week, but it has been that. I'm determined that nothing will slow me down next week, though.

What I did accomplish this week was a more thorough exploration of Catullus. I love his poetry dearly, all of it, but it's so hard to find something that's suitable to share with an audience. He can be very colorful in his language and never really holds back what he feels. Entertaining to read, but hardly appropriate to translate. I had to back off of three poems of his after catching what he was really saying. 

That being said, I've decided that my first goal for translation will be to tackle his poems addressing his lover Iuventius. The first of these was in fact what spurred me to choose this for part of my project (it is a lovely poem with terrible, awkward translations). Funnily enough, only two of them were apparently written while he was in his favor. The other four are indignant tirades against (alternatively) Catullus's ex and the other men he dared to date. Catullus is the man. I mean, really. This will involve a lot of squinting and trying to find new syllables for "sweet." Honeyed vocabulary is somewhere Latin has us English-speakers beat, I'm afraid.

Speaking of the sorrows and struggles of speaking English, my other goal for the past week hasn't quite set. Writing sonnets is slow-going, and I've never been the most graceful at following rhyme schemes. As such, I haven't actually finished my Shakespearean sonnet on my frustrations with English as a language I am obliged to use. I really do plan to have it finished by tomorrow, though.

This project really is wonderfully enabling. I managed to scribble out another one of those just-feel-it-out poems, and while it doesn't slot in with my goals, I think it merits a mention.

I've been obsessing over Neruda enough that my goal for next week will have to be related to him somehow. I have a friend about whom I have been intending to pen a poem for months now and I think a serenade in his style would be suitable. Even if this friend never, ever, ever sees this. Whoops. 

So to recap: my Catullus translations will continue with me wrangling Catullus 48, 81, and 99, with possible polishing-up of 24 just for some harmony. It would be nice to get two of the three going by next Friday, but I'll also have my Neruda sonnet to piece together. We'll see how that goes. I also need to reorganize my Google Drive folder for this project, as it's getting annoyingly crowded, and ensure I have typed up every scrap I've written lest I lose it or (as I nearly did last week) write some other random stuff on the back of the paper.