Serving With Schrodinger's Cat

I've been both not working on the other poem that came out of Love and War and stuck on what I have been working on. Sitting down and writing has to be the last step for me; I have to figure out a lot of things in my head before I can even get a version on paper and then i have to work and rework it on paper as well. I've become determined i am going to take a sabbatical and just go write somewhere and try to have a regimented writing program- sit down at the same time every day and write. Mostly i am interested in seeing whether this will work for me. So much of what I write gets processed in my head for so long, I am curious whether the "same time everyday" approach that so many people advocate will make me a better writer, worse writer, or just annoy me.

Anyway, Schrodinger's cat- this poem started life about a soldier who had to give DNA to see whether a body found on a military academy was his relative. I then wanted to have a poem from the dead soldier and a poem from the dead soldier's slave. Now I have completely cut out the lost relative and am focusing on the sniper pair and the multiplicity and uncertainty at the heart of the cat exercise. Below is the only part I have that i like right now-

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat

Johnson understood
what Parham meant
when he talked
about Schrodinger's cat.

It was the third day
of sniper duty.
Until they were retrieved
three days from now,
Parham would talk and talk.

Stick a cat in a box with an unstable WMD.
You can't see in the box.
Until you lift the top to check
that fucker is both alive and dead.

No one existed until they appeared in the scope.
When he gave Parham the order to shoot
he saw a target living and dying at once.

I have another verse I am working on about MRE's and how they contain all possible extras until opened. I'm not sure if it's stupid, if it belabors the point, or whether it works nicely. Back in the head until I decide.

what the dancer thinks while dancing

so this is the poem i wrote in response to working with choreo. like i said below, i wanted to explore the way dancers used language when discussing dance. i had the title from the start, although i had "a dancer" for awhile. "the" came in later, a choice i liked because of the glide of the "th" and the generality.

i also had the opening line and the next to the last line (penultimate line) straight away also. they never changed never moved. from there i made a list of lines i liked. i wanted things that were sensual, intimate, indeterminate, contradictory, unsettling. i wanted a list poem (this was mostly because of the time restriction, but i ended up liking this form a lot), i wanted a lot of vowels.

i wrote down a lot of phrases one night when i was trying to go to sleep. i would write something down, turn out the light, think of something else, turn on the light, write it down, turn off the light, almost be asleep, think of something else. i worked with the list, pairing some things, moving the order, trying to figure out what organizing principles could hold it all together. i added more to the list and i kept reorganzing.

i read part of it to a dancer at rehersal. she liked the presence of the sense appeal and suggested adding something with "breath." it was a good suggestion and i eventually came up with the "breath and its opposite" line, a line i ended up liking.

i took it to poetry group- went over well with a couple of good suggestions. i liked "solidarity" and the "abridgement/expansion" pair, but the lines were too general at that time, particularly coming after "the moan of the whale" line. I tried moving them, ending with "sky of a tree" and "moan of a whale" lines as the next to last pairing, but that threw off the movement of the poem- there was no middle peak anymore. i moved them back and rewrote the abridgement and solidarity lines as they appear now.

i feel like it captures some things that struck me about dance. it moves me that they go on stage and reveal such intimacy. i think there is no way i could be a dancer for that alone (trust me, there's a long list of reasons why i couldn't be a dancer) i love their joy at it and the trust and comraderie it fosters between them, how generous it makes them in performance, and the way they negotiate the whole process.

oddly, they haven't heard it or seen it yet (i did read it for one of them on request) as they were changing when i read it (that was its purpose) so i don't know what they think about it or if it feels accurate to them or if it comes off as pretentious or naive or what. i liked it though, for its purpose and on its own.

what the dancer thinks while dancing

the way motion the way curve

the way infinite slips into intricate slips into intimate

how under rolls to over

how ghostly leads abroad

the anticipation of forearm for fingertip

the underside of the Bridge of Sighs

how giving stiffens to stop

the way pretending leaks into actual

why no one is ever apart why everyone feels alone

the way war is always present always at war with peace

how a hip can taste like cinammon a shoulder lemon balm

why the middle can be static why what is static is not stopped

the sky of a tree the hairs of the soil

the response of toes to a hand on a stomach

the moan of the whale in an ocean pulled flat

the way a lover expands through abridgement

how solidarity marries a form to the want

the way light appears as particle light appears as wave

the way palm sits on palm and fingers rest between

the way breath contains its opposite

the way the bridge reveals motion and the river comes to still

the way a kiss can lead to a kiss can lead to a kiss

and nothing ever appears causal at all

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat: Poem #2

The other poem that i got out of working with Choreo came from Love and War not from the process of working with them. That poem is still in process and currently is titled Serving With Schrodinger's Cat.

My interest in Robert Jenkins's story was, at first, about his refusal to serve, defection as a commentary on war. I thought that is what the poem would be about and it was called for a little while Those Who Don't. I was still interested in this idea and interested in the personal aspects of war. How absurd it does or doesn't feel to participate, how one distances or embraces that absurdity.

Then I heard a brief bit on NPR about a body they found at a military academy and how they attempted to identify it, thought it had clearly been there for a century at least. I thought about a soldier who was trying to leave his past only to have it follow him, to be DNA tested to see if it was his relative. I wanted to make it a 3 part poem- the soldier now, the soldier lost, and a slave who left the soldier lost. I wrote the 1st part, took it to poetry group and it didn't work. Too narrative, I didn't know what the poem was about, it was too confusing.

I worked on it again and by the end, the soldier was a spotter listening to his sniper talking about Schrodinger's cat exercise. Took it back to group- the DNA section was too much. I wanted it to keep the past/present shrinkage feel but it was distracting. The power of the poem was in the sniper pair now and their discussion of simultaneity and how they each understood it in relation to war. So now I am working on a version that focuses on that.

Which doesn't sound like a dance poem,but is. It was seeing Jenkins's story translated into movement that made me consider how his story was about loneliness and love, how much of the military demands a doubleness, a knowing and not knowing, a seeing but not acknowledging and what happens (as it did for Jenkins) when that doubleness gets called out or what happens when it is allowed to continue (this poem).

I'll post copies of both of these soon.

Tanya

Melting Gnomes; Performance, Movement, and Language

I was interested that I also got actual poems from working with Choreo. I thought going in Love and War would probably be unable to stand on its own as a poem and that has been true. I'm fine with that and don't feel capable of producing a piece that could be written collaboratively with a group of dancers and exist free from that movement. Right now,that's asking too much of me and the text.

But I have produced 2 poems that came directly from working with Choreo. One, what the dancer thinks while dancing, came from our latest performance at Duke. We needed poems for transition times in-between the dances, so the poets wrote pieces that came out of their working with Choreo. I had been planning on writing this piece anyway, so it was nice to have the deadline and assignment.

I was fascinated by the way the dancers talked about their pieces; dance seems to lack notation to preserve performances (this also makes me fascinated about the intersections of dance and film- i'll get to that later) or even give it a way to be tracked. So instead, there is a lot of use of language to keep phrases in memory and to indicate them. (in fact, it's sort of fascinating that a string of dance movements is called a phrase.)

The dancers kept referring to "clumpy puppies" "melting gnomes" "throwing hoboes" and other linguistic markers of place and movement. I was taken by how effective it was; i wasn't dancing but i would know where they were going to start on the stage, what came next.

However, it never helped me know where to start in the text. So say at rehersal, we would work on the transition between the 3rd and 4th sections. We might start at "melting gnomes." The dancers would know where they should be, I would know generally where we were in the whole movement, but I couldn't note the corresponding place to start in the text. Eventually I started noting on my text where certain movements occured , but usually by the dancer instead of the phrase title ("sarah across blanche" for instance).

This led me to wonder how this whole piece would work differently if Love and War was a spoken word or performance piece. I'm very influenced by the spoken word and performance poets; some of my poems have both performance and written versions, some poems started life on the page and transitioned into spoken word, (although never the other way around), and even in poems that only live on the page, I'm usually very aware of sound and rhythm above any other organizational methods. When I perform these pieces from memory, movement is one way I "remember" where I am in the piece and can trigger memory for the next section. If I ever get lost in a piece or feel my mind start to wander, I can usually look at what my hands are doing (although sometimes its walking or a different gesture) and get focused again.

All of that is a very long intro for a poem i won't post until tomorrow, but the intersections of language and movement were the direct inspiration for the poem.

Wrap Up and Begin Again

So a couple of notes to transition to the next focus for this space.

June Performance- These 2 performances went well in the Durham School of the Arts spaces. Nice turnout, good audience, and it felt like a good ending to the rehearsals. I was sad I wasn't going to be working with the dancers again- it had been a really positive creative exercise and personally, it had just been nice sharing space with them. (it had been kind of a tough spring.) Very nicely they asked me to serve as their outside choreographer in the spring of '08, using Love and War as the starting point. I'm excited.

As a writer, I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of the effort and watching text and movement translate back and forth. That translation was probably the most interesting thing overall, the fluidity between the two languages wasn't something I had expected and I'm excited to see how else that type of translation can be pushed. I like to do translation exercises (poem in a language other than English, poem in an alphabet like Cyrillic, a series of photos, a train schedule, etc.) for writing classes but seldom use them in my own writing. I loved that this wasn't just a one-way exchange but continued back and forth between the 2 languages. I'm also going to work on a project helping a dancer write a poem, a kind of mirror image of them helping me choreograph a dance.

So as part of both of those projects, I'm going to start keeping this blog again, first to catch up on some parts of the process, then to note what's happening as it does. Being able to look back on this has been helpful, so I'll try it for a bit more.

Final Rehersals

so tonight is the final rehearsal before this weekend's performances. choreographing has been a very interesting experience and i haven't really been writing about it, partially because i'm not sure i have the vocabulary and partially because it just seems to be happening.

we started with one member of the collective suggesting an overall feel for the dance. there are 4 sections of the poem, so she suggested the 4 corners of the stage, with a consistent theme of a dancer lying down. i knew i wanted a fairly full stage and i wanted one central dancer that would move between all 4 sections. from there, we just talked about what the feel for each section should be, highlighted maybe some main words for the dancers to focus on, and thought about the beginning and ending shapes.

next, it was a matter of highlighting movements that felt "right." one thing i saw was that dance could fill in some parts that the poem couldn't. for instance, in the second section, i think the movement in that area is between the character finding a sense of closeness in the military, but that closeness carrying a sense of responsibility he couldn't carry. the poem talks about the weight he felt because of the love he felt,but it didn't talk about the closeness there and i think the dance can illustrate that perfectly.

after that, we tried to think about the timing of the reading and the transitions between the sections at the stage. we still need to nail down a couple of parts of the dance- the transition between the 1st and 2nd stages was way too much we found and the movement between the first and second parts of the third section was clunky- but hopefully that will go smoothly.

it's been really touching the way several of the dancers really get the poem and are able to translate that into movement. it's been such a positive, creative experience, i'm really going to miss it when it is done.

As The Poem Exists Now, Middle

Our big rehearsal is Saturday and we'll try to complete choreography that day. So I've reached a workable version of the poem, one that i think is alright and will work well in juxtaposition to the movement.

My biggest concerns were getting too caught up with the narrative, so i have decided to put a short version of the story in the program. I know everyone won't read it, but I think it takes the pressure off of the making the poem coherent as a story, poetic, and movable. As the poem exists now- (note the title change and the shift in emphasis in the middle.

Love and War Return Home, Hand in Hand

I know that the traveler must dissolve nostalgic threads
of personal history and go ahead with no baggage,
no determined route; that the so-called hero
is one who has mastered her own dissolution;
that she’s not a conqueror but a surrenderer, . . .
-Gretel Ehrlich, a match to the heart

I. Rich Square, North Carolina Juche 47 (1958)

He leans only his head through the door jamb.
Boy, don’t even think about school today.
There’s tobacco to be topped,
and the south field needs worming.
Announcements often worked
as Daddy’s version of Good Morning.

That afternoon in the fields,
he caught me staring at beyond.
Don’t Ever Leave
came out Keep worming son.
Nothing’s over there you can’t find here,
except women, trouble, and strife.

Later, I was taking the hornworms
to feed the turkeys when I found him half in,
half out of the barn. It took death
to make him indecisive, but at that moment
I knew I was done with eighth grade.

Then, I figured Rich Square
for the loneliest place in the world,
so I aimed to join the Army
and find something to do
and some folks to do it with.
There’s not much to a decision though
when you look around and all you see
is alone and alone and alone.

II. DMZ, South Korea Juche 54 (1965)

Every time I went to sleep,
all I dreamt about was me
getting one of those boys killed.
One night, I led them a step too far
and McFrances, with the sick daddy,
set off a landmine. The next night,
my mind wandered on watch
and it was an enemy’s knife
at Parham’s throat. While I was writing
his dream mother, explaining everything
I’d done to make her boy dead,
the CO shook me awake. Good morning
merry sunshine. Just heard ya’ll
are next off to Vietnam.

What I thought I was walking to
I can’t say, but just so you know,
the line you step over
to get to the other side
isn’t a real line at all.
You would think they might make it one
so you could stop
and consider what crossing it means.

III. Pyongyang, North Korea Juche 69 (1980)

Imagine my surprise to find I wasn’t alone.
Those three were a comfort to me at first.
We were all just boys,
and it was like a sleepaway camp
and when the fun was over,
our daddies would come gather us home.

One of us would distract the minder
while the others snuck out,
Abshier made a pretty fair version
of macaroni and cheese, and when
the North Koreans made a movie,
we got to play the evil Americans.

But eventually, we were four men
against a general, a country, and a whole philosophy.
By the time a bodyguard whispered
Americans have landed on the moon,
none of us believed it,
thought they must want us to imagine
a country that could send a man
to a place so far,
a land so desolate,
but wouldn’t come to reclaim us.

Alone and alone and alone and then,
Hitomi, kidnapped to teach Japanese
to spies. She is your project they said.
You must teach her Korean
just as we taught you.
You will do it for the Dear Leader,
who takes care of you,
who takes care of us all.
And I started to, I tried,
but one night she pulled me close
and said We must remind each other
of where we are from. Together,
we can remember.
So each night in Japanese I whispered
Oyasuminasai. Goodnight, my love
she would croon in return.

IV.Camp Zama Penitentiary, Japan Juche 93 (2004)

Thirty days is a long time for something
a boy did forty years ago. And they are right.
If they let me go, it’s only more
of you boys will try to leave. But son,
how you made it four days in the desert
carrying nothing is beyond me.

I won’t speak for you, but this is where I was always walking.
I didn’t quit a war. I gave myself over,
chose in a backwards way, and tomorrow,
when I am freed, I will not only put my back
to the Army, to America,
but I will also walk directly to Hitomi.
If she will have me, I will tell her Good morning.
Ohayoogozaimasu I believe she will tell me
and we will turn to leave together,
departing towards a home,
surrendered, hand in hand.

I've also written a Googlism poem about the idea of "middle" for the middle part of the program. (Yes, there is a beginning and end too.) It is below.

Middle; A Googlism Poem

I am one of the middle-hearted.
Middle of Bagdhad, middle of the night.
Middle is the subject through which the end influences the beginning.
Middle is on the left.
Middle is what I have become.

Tanya's Blog Of Complaining About Her Poem

is what this feels like it's turning into. So rehearsal was last night and we spent maybe 45 minutes or so working on the beginning shape of the dance for the poem. This involved me talking about what I envisioned the performance looking like (I would be on stage and reading live, the dance would run longer than each section read, there would be one central dancer and other dancers on stage for some of the sections, etc.) and then reading the poem aloud to the dancers there, one of whom immediately suggested the shape and a light structure for the dance.

This involved a square shape, using the four corners of the stage and having the consistent theme of one dancer lying down, static. The "down" dancer would change in each corner and all 4 dancers would move from section to section in a clockwise manner, ending at the front of the stage on the right. We discussed what was going on at the heart of each section and they generated a word or idea for each section to guide their movements. The cue to move to the next section would be the "down" dancer standing up and moving.

So reading the poem, (here's where the complaining starts) i discovered the voice is all wrong. i wanted it to sound like jenkins since he has a very distinct dialect- very nc country mixed with an almost esl (english as a second language) feel to it- and while i think it kind of works on paper, it is not working at all when read aloud. That' s a blessing and a curse. The voice as it was is a hard one to talk about anything "bigger" with- it's not a philosophical or reflective voice, so it's hard to move beyond narrative. I think I do in the "line isn't marked" section and I think that sounds natural, but it isn't happening elsewhere.

I also realized that the poem is way too bogged down in narrative. I have to work on that balance and i think changing the voice will help move away from that for the above reasons. But mostly i realized this poem is still at least 2-3 drafts away from working. I think spoken word pieces (although this poem will also exist on the page as we are producing a chapbook for the performance) need big endings, and moments bigger than themselves, as well as some narrative cohesion to work. right now, this poem isn't either an on the page poem or a spoken word piece. it is neither fish, fowl, nor good red meat and i need to commit it to one side or the other.

i also learned from watching the dancers that this poem is about loneliness and alienation and what it means to move beyond that. i need to center that at the heart of the poem as well. which probably means it also needs a different title.

In My Head, On The Page

I haven't written in a bit, but I have been working on the poem, really spinning and revising more than I usually do with a poem. I think that is partially because it is an occasion poem. I can't write it as it comes to me. I have to grind it out to hit a deadline. That's different from my usual writing method. With work and other things, I usually do a lot of writing and planning in my head before I put pen to paper and then fingers to keyboard.

For this piece though, I am writing and throwing away and revising, all with a sense of not liking the work until it gets several drafts in. Below is what I like enough to post now, but it still feels several drafts away from working. I am thinking of trying this working method for my 6 week break though. Sitting at the desk and grinding something out, whether I have anything formed or not. I'll let you know.

The poem as she exists now. The pyongyang section stopped there, but there will be more.

Those That Don’t

I. Rich Square, North Carolina Juche 47 (1958)

Boy, I best not catch you up at that school today.
There’s tobacco to be topped and the south field needs wormed.
Announcements were Daddy’s version of Good Morning.

In the field, when he caught me
staring at beyond, You Are My Life
was Son, there’s those that do
and those that don’t.
Which you gonna be?

I was carrying hornworms to the turkeys
when I found him laying half in,
half out of the barn, and I knew
I was done being in the eighth grade.

Then, I believed Rich Square
to be the loneliest place in the world,
so I figured to join the Army
and find me something to do
and some folks to do it with.
All I could see from North Carolina
was alone and alone and alone.

II. DMZ, South Korea Juche 54 (1965)

The worst thing I could imagine
was getting one of those boys killed
on night patrol. One step too far-
it’s landmines. Let your mind wander
for a moment and it’s the enemies’ knife
at your throat.

Then, I heard it. We was the next group to Vietnam.
Son the CO said If you won’t stand
in front of the communists and keep them
from your girl back home, who will?

But I had no girl or anyone else waiting for me.
My last night in the US Army, it was Hughes
in my tent with a can of beer and a picture.
Sarge, I know she’s stepping out.
What do you think I should do?
But the Army don’t allow you to say
Hellfire if I know. I ain’t kissed a girl
and I’m afraid I’m gonna die before I do.

So I told him to write her a real sweet letter
and then I wrote a note of my own.
I’m sorry for what I done it said.
Send my boys back home, especially Hughes.
We’ve all got troubles. Goodbye.
And I set to walking.


III. Pyongyang, North Korea Juche 69 (1980)

Just so you know, the line you step over
to get to the other side
ain’t no real line. If it was,
I might have stopped, but I never knew
where I was until I got there.

The poem has a diffrent voice now. Fatherhood and masculinity seems to be a part of it now, which should be very interesting since the dance troop is all female. I'm interested to see how the end will work, if it can tie together some things. Tomorrow night is rehersal and the beginning of choreographing for me.

tanya

Revision, Revision, and Ezra Pound

I was talking to another writer the other night and he was saying how important the reading, gathering information, research section of writing was for him. I feel the exact same way- i compared it to the way they make astronaut food on cartoons. They jam a ham and a turkey and a bunch of vegetables and a dessert into a machine and out pops a little food cube. the product seems much smaller than the sum of what went into it, but as homer noted, "i only eat food in bar form. when you concentrate food, you unleash its awesome power, i'm told." (of course then he finds out that the powersauce bars he's been eating are made of old chinese newspapers instead of apples. maybe this cultural reference falls apart here.) (of course, he then also learns from his powersauce bar that deng xiaoping died, so maybe it works after all.)

i've talked about this research as part of my process before, but i'm really thinking about it for this poem because ezra pound keeps appearing in my life. (not in a ghostly way- in a referential way.) this jenkins piece has a definite political undertone for me and i keep weighing how much to foreground that and how much to swallow it inside the poem. part of the tension is because this is a performance piece- read aloud with no written text for the audience to refer to, there's room for only so much subtlety- and i also want it to work as a poem on a page as well. so the balance is hard with those 2 requirements.

but i also wonder about the political requirements of a poet. i'm not a march around on the streets activist. i'm a writer and i see part of being a writer is uncovering or revealing, helping folks unpack a situation, telling stories that otherwise get lost. and i also believe this is very important political work. so for me, this piece is also a commentary on the iraq and afghanistan wars. to me, that is also a crucial part of resistence and the way i choose to participate.

Pennsound just made available their collection of pound's stuff http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.html. a lot of it's very poor quality and hard to understand and apparently mary derachewiltz, pound's daughter, is unhappy about that. she makes the argument that the middle of a war might be the most important time for folks to hear an anti-war poet loudly and clearly. i also read the interview with ferlinghetti in poets and writers in which he argues for pound as a poet persecuted for speaking out against war. http://www.pw.org/mag/features.htm

i'm fascinated by this new take on pound ( i also learned last night while watching a new orleans documentary that pound was in new orleans for awhile. didn't know it and that was my 3rd pound exposure in one day. a little strange.) and it made me wonder why we don't have any poets dangerous enough to be detained. are there no speeches, poems, or other activities we could take dangerous enough to worry the powers that be? it made me scribble a couple of notes in my notebook about st. elizabeth's and the guantonamanian cantos and makes me thinking about how to gracefully foreground the current war connection with the jenkins piece.

After Rehearsal

I met with the Choreo dancers last night for a little over an hour. I brought in the poem I posted yesterday to rehearsal. I talked a little about what I saw as the consistent ideas in the poem and how their movement to the idea helped bring me to this stage. I read the first section and talked about what I saw as the center action for the other three sections and just talked about Jenkins's story in general.

The only section I didn't "see" yet was section 2, so they did some movement in response to that section, simultaneously, but separately. I was amazed again at how much it helped. Section 2 is about his crossing over to North Korea and 2 of their movements really struck me. One was a dancer lying on her back on the floor, but doing occasional 180 degree spins by crossing her left leg over her right and pulling herself in a slow half-circle. The other was a sort of dis/un- jointed movement with the left arm while the dancer was standing. The first movement helped me think about crossing boundaries, the importance we place on this type of change (or not), while the second helped me focus on the process that boundary crossing requires, whether enforced by an outside agency or by the self, the steps we take in decision making.

Thinking about these aspects for the second section helped me also see how they re-emerge differently in the 4th section and I feel much more hopeful about the whole poem now, both finishing it and making it good. I also started thinking about the poem less as a poem that lives on the page and more as a part of a performance. Not a spoken word piece exactly, but as a section of a performance. That seemed to free me as a writer a little as well.

We ended by talking about how we would move from this to performance in June. The dancers recreated one movement from the earlier exercise alone on stage and then paired themselves according to those movements. They then did those movements again with the other person/people on stage, which brought out entirely different aspects. These group movements were filmed.

We also talked about how we envisioned the piece, whether there would be a reader, would the reading and the movement happen simultaneously or separately, how many dancers would be on the stage at one time, would they all be moving, would they move together or separately, etc.

The thing that shocked me the most was how many opinions I had about the choreography and what the final performance should look like. This is exactly the kind of work that Choreo does and they are very good at it, helping people who aren't dancers see and work with the dance that is already present in their own life. They jokingly suggested that they could offer a writer's block service, but it's actually very true. Not only does it help you "see" the poem's possibilities, but it also helps you "see" movement on the page and off and how that shapes the poem.

It was really tremendous and my job now is to work on the poem, get it to a draft stage.

First Draft of Poem

I've been really stuck on this poem. The version I have now is very wordy, very talky, which may work for this particular assignment, but I don't think will work ultimately as a stand-alone poem. I guess I did have the goal of this being both a poem that could work with the dancers, in performance, on the stage, and all by itself on the page, but I am doubting that a little more now. Oddly, that does seem to open up my writing a little more, get me past the block of actual words on a page.

I am always a pen-on-paper drafter. I don't think I could name any piece I have written in the last few years that has started on the computer or on a typewriter. After I get a written draft done, then I move to the computer and start the word processing version. That's when I really start to think about line breaks and the like, the rhythm of the lines as presented, whether the repetition is working or not. From there, I usually take a piece to the Black Socks, the poetry group I belong to. I take that feedback and keep revising, back to the pen, but this time on the typed out version. Then I put the changes into the saved draft, get rid of the previous version (I really do hate clutter, even in my computer files), and repeat the process until it's done enough.

For this project, it's a little different. Added in there is going to dance rehersal and watching the group move to the words or the ideas, taking some notes, and writing in response to that. Tonight I will visit the Choreo practice with the below in hand and tomorrow I'll write a little about their responses and what effect it had on my thinking about the poem.

Those That Don’t

I. Rich Square, North Carolina Juche 47 (1958)

Boy, I best not catch you up at that school today.
There’s tobacco to be topped and the south field needs wormed.
That’s the most Daddy had said at once in a month
and it’s the last words he ever spoke to me.
I was carrying hornworms to the turkeys
when I found him laying half in, half out
of the barn door. That was the end
of me and the eighth grade.

When I would get caught up in my head, Daddy liked to say
Son, there’s those that do and those that don’t.
Which are you gonna be? I believed then Rich Square
was the loneliest place in the world, so I figured
to join the Army and find me something to do
and some folks to do it with.
Alone and alone and alone.
That was North Carolina for me.

II. DMZ, South Korea Juche 54 (1965)

III. Pyongyang, North Korea Juche 69 (1980)

IV.Camp Zama Penitentiary, Japan Juche 93 (2004)

Beginning Writing

So this writing project started for me with some research and reading. I'm an academic, so research is a part of most of my poems, but it takes two very different forms. Sometimes, like for this Choreo piece, I do research on a specific subject. So for Jenkins, that meant a lot of internet database research, so i read a NYT article on his return home, a Far Eastern Economic Review interview with him, a 60 Minutes interview with him and some other pieces I found online that told parts of his story.

I reviewed the stories online and printed off the ones I liked, took them home, and read them again, this time underlining and taking notes. I keep a research notebook for both my academic and creative work. I find it a great way to organize both thoughts and quotes and it works very well for me. Everything is together and I always know where something came from.

Lots of times though, I'm just reading and researching in general, just looking for things that interest me and making connections between things. For example, my nephew (he's 5) and I were reading a book about alligators together. This was probably 4 months ago or so and he asked me if he ate alligator and when I told him he probably hadn't, but some people did, he responded that he could be an alligator scientist then. His theory was that you couldn't be a scientist of things you ate.

I love this idea and have been carrying it around with me. Last night, I woke up at 2:30am and had that racing brain thing (we all have this right? brain spins and spins at some ungodly hour? tell me you know this too.) so I turned on the radio. The BBC was all about the sailors coming home so I turned it to AM, where Coast to Coast was playing. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/ (Never hear it?? It's all about supernatural stuff, occasionally brilliant, mostly full of drunk and mentally ill callers.) There was a cryptozoologist on and I probably fell asleep after 30 minutes or so of his talk about lake monsters and Bigfoot type creatures.

This morning I wake up thinking about Nicholas's scientist theory and this guy as a scientist, put them together and come up with the draft of the poem below.

Coelacanth Mothman

His career report reads Scientist of animals I don’t eat.
Superhero if science is done.
We discuss our superhero desires. Him- Fight like Batman
but have eyepowers. Me- live underwater like Aquaman
and talk to the animals.

I buy him a book on cryptozoology; we discuss how some animals
lose their questions mark, there lie monsters
into gaint squid preening for their first photo.

The book says Yeti, Sasquatch, and Bigfoot are all different species;
lake monsters it believes are all the same. Maybe I will solve
Nessies when I get big. We agree not to eat one. It’s a plan.

Tomorrow morning I will listen to the radio, hear what has been found,
rediscovered, turn to a new page in my notebook,
write Colecanth and Mothman at the top.

This usually how my writing process goes- I cram more and more stuff in my brain and my notebook and carry it around until 2 or more things touch and connect for me. So, I've been carrying this Robert Jenkins stuff around for awhile now and I'm still not sure what it's connected to. I think it's important to ground each section in specific an incident as possible, but I haven't settled on the incidents or their focus yet. As I come to them, I'll write them down and start to work on the lines, but as for now, I'm stuck on the big picture of the poem. I know I want to work with a North Korean official telling Jenkins on the sly that the US landed on the moon, I know I want Jenkins telling his wife goodnight in Japanese and she telling him goodnight in English while they were in North Korea. (I'm thinking of making this the end of the poem as well, the reversal- he now says good night in English, she in Japanese, their daughters in Korean. We'll see.) So I sit with these things for awhile and see what happens.

Getting Started- The First Meeting

So Andrea Selch and I went to watch the dancers rehearse, just to get a feel for what they were interested in and to make a plan of action. For me, I talked about my idea for the poem and afterwards they did some spontaneous movement in response. I took notes during the whole process and then went home to write.

I was interested in writing about Charles Jenkins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robert_Jenkins
He's a North Carolina soldier who defected to North Korea in 1965, was long believed dead, and was "discovered" in 2002 when North Korea admitted to Japan that they had kidnapped Japanese citizens to train North Korean spies. (Jenkins is married to Hitomi Soga, a kidnapped Japanese woman.) Soga returned to Japan, but Jenkins and their two daughters stayed in North Korea, partially because (he later revealed) he was afraid he and his daughters would be killed if they said they too wanted to leave and partially because the US Army refused not to prosecute him for desertion, which has a 40 year statute of limitations. Eventually, he, his daughters, and Soga were reunited in Indonesia and he served 30 days for desertion and received a dishonorable discharge in September of 2004. He later returned briefly to North Carolina to visit his then 91 year old mother and currently lives in Japan with his wife and daughters.

I was fascinated with this story for several reasons- (1) My interest in North Korea (2) Jenkins's story- 15 when he joined the National Guard, 8th grade education (3) the connection to the war now- most immediately, the Army was afraid to pardon Jenkins because they were afraid it would encourage soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq to defect, an amazing admission I think.

The dancers had several movements which I found shaped my thinking. They gathered in 2 groups at the end of the space, crossing over back and forth between groups, often pointing across to each other while huddled in a tight group. At one point, they were grouped together on the floor in a way that reminded me of puppies or kittens sleeping in a heap. It encouraged me to think about the loneliness and separation aspect of this story, when Jenkins was both in North Korea and in the Army, how the Army is a place of instant fictive kinship, as is North Korea- they are all brothers and sisters because of the group they belong to and how attractive that has to be. (It's one thing that fascinated about North Korea, the strengths and limitations of being a member of a community.)

So these are the things I'm exploring in the poem in different areas of Jenkins's life- when he was 15 in NC, when he was on the border afraid of getting the men under his command killed, when he was in North Korea living with 4 other GI's who defected, when he was married with a family, when he saw his mother again. I'm working on a draft this weekend- I'll try to post it next week.

Dances With Poets

The Carolina Wren Press http://carolinawrenpress.org/index.html is working in conjunction with a Durham dance group, Choreo Collective http://choreo.devel.rainsdance.org/ to produce a collaborative work between dancers and poets. There are 4 poets working with the dance group. Jaki Shelton Greene is working one on one with a dancer to produce a piece (it's very hush-hush. They are meeting in secret and no one knows what they are up to.), Andrea Selch is reading a previously written poem and 4 different groups of dancers are choreographing a piece to the poem. One poem, 4 dance results. Shirlette Ammons http://www.stumphole.com/index.html is getting ready to meet with dancers and may work as the choreographer to her piece, and I am working in conjunction with a group of dancers.

This blog is a place to track the process I am going through in the production of this piece. I went to AWP a few weeks back and heard a group of poets talk about using appropriated texts and the in the presentation I liked best, Mairead Byrne http://maireadbyrne.blogspot.com/ talked about the process she went through when writing a particular piece. It helped me a great deal appreciate both the poem and understand my own process as a writer. (If you haven't read Mairead Byrne do so quickly- she's my new favorite poet, but really, why wasn't I paying attention earlier? Let's hope my intervention here will help you avoid the same mistake.)

I do this all the time when teaching composition- talk the students through what I do when approaching a similar kind of assignment. I often show them my notebooks that I keep for different projects and I often describe both my thinking and the steps I take and the order I take them in. No reason poets shouldn't do this for each other as well. I hope this blog will work in a kind of similar way. I'll be posting drafts of work, descriptions of the process, and any useful visuals along the way, as well as a recap after the performance. Questions or comments? Let me know.

Tanya