six am

sunshine swooning
eyes interred
grandmother night
day infant
dawn’s taste

copper flower
rising red rising
eastern mealody
marching westward
unexpected morning

[Process:

Just for fun, here’s some notes about the creation of this poem.

I started with the title “sun at six thirty am”. Then I didn’t like sun in the title and sunshine in the first line, and felt “sun at” could go. I feel like “sunshine swooning” is both the weakest line in the poem, and also the whole reason I wrote the poem, and therefore uncutable.

I tried to play with line breaks that change the meaning of the phrases depending on whether the lines are read together or as single entities. I changed “infant day” to “day infant” for that reason. I also tried to have each line stand on it’s own. I think an alternate way to read (and/or break) the poem would be:

sunshine
swooning eyes
interred grandmother
night day

infant dawn’s
taste copper
flower rising
red rising eastern
mealody marching
westward unexpected
morning

The last line is probably the line that “says” what the poem means or is about the clearest. I almost cut it for that reason but decided it was ok at the end of the poem.

I added the line “grandmother night” when I thought about how “day infant” sounded a bit too much like just waking up.

The last line written was “marching westward”, and as much as I think it flows well from “eastern mealody”, I deliberated for a long time on “westward” before finally deciding that I liked it.]

bruce sterling quotes

He is a walking sound byte. Here are my favorite quotes:

“Think about honking if you like conceptual art.” -this may be an actual bumper sticker

“Entropy requires no maintenance.”

“There is a lot of fertility in broken down structures.”

“Jaded is the sound of wonder turning to ashes in your mouth.”

[Update: To give some context to this, I saw Bruce Sterling and Rirkrit Tiravanija have a public conversation tonight at the walker.]

blogs are so web 1.0

I figured it’s been a month since i wrote in here, so i’d better write something. Let’s see.. what have I been up to?

I finally got a design from my brother for his website, (actually from someone he enlisted to help him,) and built it out. I had the idea of letting him update it via flickr, since most of the content will involve images of some kind, and he already updates his flickr account. His links page is just a delicious linkroll. I have to do some work to get some of the pages to look more like a gallery rather than just the latest photo, but that should be easy. It was amazingly simple once i figured out i should use phpFlickr.

Mondo also happened since I’ve last written, and I never even mentioned my trip to San Francisco to visit kristin and yami. (I had a great time both weekends.) Even though I was only in San Francisco for a weekend, I really felt like I got a sense of the city, which i’d never been to before. I took some great pictures, and it was really good to see people.

I have also been sick twice in the last month. I think I’m getting over the second illness now. (I hope I am anyway, it has thus far been a thankfully brief 48 hour thing.) The first was one of the worst sinus infections i’ve ever had. I didn’t even realize it was a sinus infection until i rolled over one morning and felt the pain blissfully fade as snot drained out of a deep crevice in the back of my sinuses.

I also started a writer’s group. We have met twice so far, and the last time even spent a couple of hours critiquing each other’s poetry. We decided that two or three poems each is too much for us, and will be sticking to one poem each from here on in… But i think it went really well, and am excited to do more workshopping. I haven’t had an excuse to print out my poems in a while, and it’s always interesting how I see more things I want to change every time I look critically at one of my poems.