For David Edwards
My dad’s across the sea,
a lowdown dirty shame
I play, slow and lonesome
my mom died, is dead
when I turn off
the lights, like a fish
in water too blue to be
water, too blue to be but
I’m just supposed to be
blue. You can’t take it
the same, but it ain’t
going nowhere.
-C.S. Henderson
If love has swayed its hips
like it’s the coming revolution,
I’m not sure I’ve counted the bills
properly under my headlamp
or that reality exists as evidence
of existence without needing
a shovel to bury history with.
-C.S. Henderson
The 97 year old ballerina doing pirouettes
in the waiting room tells me to feel
better, and why not!
I’m afraid the mulberry tree is rotting
from the inside, my father said with the deft
breath of axe.
-C.S. Henderson
See: Gap Project
On the other hand, trying
to write about leap
years is like blowing out
birthday candles you lit
for yourself.
We now know that Tut was buried
in a hurry, or that even the after
party can be expedited.
-C.S. Henderson
*See: Gap Project
Using bird logic to open a nut,
I dropped you to retrieve a smile.
Given the nature of the occasion,
we will forgo the customary
fire-bombing dance and replace it
with a showering of social security cards.
-C.S. Henderson
*See: Gap Project
Your idea about the function feedback and criticism is totally askew. It’s not about trusting someone else’s opinion over “your gut feeling”; it’s about having a new perspective, a fresh set of eyes looking at what you’ve created and telling you what they see. You seem to be forgetting that it’s an opinion, and that nothing said in a critique is an absolute. Per your last post, where you state that you don’t believe in criticism, you simultaneously render some shitty #spilled ink haiku worthy of the same merit as The Waste Land and reveal a cowardice and arrogance in your approach to writing. You most likely meant you don’t believe in criticizing the work of others, but you’re also saying you are completely closed to any disagreeable viewpoint of your own work. Writing is often a lonely pursuit, but it is not selfish to the point where you believe your own high opinion of your work above any other. No serious poet, novelist, screenwriter, or play write has published their work without the help of an editor. In your genesis of #the feedback project, you specifically use the word critique. What is the point of have a tag based on writers providing feedback to other writers who are interested in having their work looked at seriously if there is no “criticism.” According to you, #the feedback project is exactly the same as #poetry and #spilled ink, only you’re encouraging people to take the time to write “I love this!” Why bother? If #the feedback project is just a new way to participate in the ego inflation, self-aggrandizement, and pandering that already runs rampant among the other literary tags, then there is no true feedback and I want no part in it.Some people enjoy critiques and change their writing accordingly, trusting the opinion of another more than their gut feeling. If that’s your bag, than do what you do. But I try to be as separate as possible. Of course I can only separate to a certain extent— all is co-dependent. There is a lot of useless information ingrained which I cannot seem to erase and it only limits me artistically. The truth is, some people have a knack and others don’t; some people are equipped and others are not. What I find unique is what is unique. But that doesn’t mean that anyone else will agree. Creative writing is all about selfishness and necessity…
Against David W Pritchard
When I was four I couldn’t button
a shirt and had O’Hara
sneezing all over my love —
I’d grow frustrated and give up,
ball myself into a waste basket
until my parents would give me a Coke
and tell me to shut the hell up.
-C.S. Henderson
At first, a bag lunch; then,
a flock of bed bugs. Next,
exterminating nouns for
the sake of abjectifying
new ideas.
Who safeguards the union of gods?
Who put an orange in my bourbon?
The culprit, likely working under
the pretense of Job, refuses
to answer the phone.
-C.S. Henderson
*See: Gap Project
What I possessed appears in the distance
in a puff of dust and blood.
What is past turns over in swift,
silent, mysterious death, given
to me as potpourri in a time of peace.
Roman, the mass, subdues Roman,
the massive, with sweat and good
enough to create a whole.
-C.S. Henderson
*My first attempt at writing a Gap Poem. EDIT: I’m going to post one every day this week. Sorry if it gets redundant.
Between now and Monday
I need to fall in love a thousand times,
and I hope that God opens a dress
with every closing door. No,
I’m not lonely, just bird-throated
and ready to sing of exhumation.
-C.S. Henderson
If there’s a word for me
let it be forgery:
a couple on a health insurance policy, increased 23 percent;
my boss’s partner (also my boss);
the owner of half the island of Manhattan;
my father, who was named for his father, whom I could have, but wasn’t named after;
the loss of each with a titled letter.
-C.S. Henderson
It would have been 25 bucks to lose
to poems that are about Moral Experiences.
Thankfully we don’t have any of those,
Which is true?:
Morality is dead,
God is dead,
Damn the man
And damn my head.
But I need to read it again.
Whiskey comprehension
is not good for retention,
but maybe there is a genetic
link between booze and poetry?
Definitely, Muses were booze.
Even Moses was a drunk,
pouring mead down the throat
of God for Law.
-C.S. Henderson
I am a man of molehills,
standing at the reception to tell jokes
about how the world continues without us
when we’re gone and how we shouldn’t
take it personally. I might stammer
during the exegesis of how dreams
are just opinions pressed out
in a heavy world, dyed, red and syrupy,
ready to be feathered with mosquito wings;
had we only calculated the correct number
of ice cubes for a dinner party I might have found
a better tooth and tongue.
Presented with mad libs from the audience,
I walk orange-ingly down the tightrope,
shocked to find cars joking about
buying a fistful of yachts, a reminder that liquidity
solutions are the metamorphosis of value,
a bandage ripped off a wincing wind.
-C.S. Henderson
Breaking, yet again, the poetry-only streak because I think this is a great summation of what’s going on with #poetry (and to a lesser extend #lit and #prose) and why it’s pretty problematic for writers and followers of the tag.I’ve been thinking awhile about making this post, and have finally gotten around to writing it. The #poetry tag, and, to some extent, the #lit and #prose tags all need some criticism. I just want to bring to light some things that have made me fairly discouraged with the entire Tumblr creative…
Not a problem. I had to look up unheimlich, so we can call it even. I think you have a valid point re: word choice/syntax, in that it could be tightened up a bit, though some of it was intentional, as you noted in your first commentary. The first line is the most questionable, though it’s the impetus of the poem itself. I read today that the father of the internet infamous Jessi Slaughter passed away, and I remembered how much I liked the memes that came from his rant (one being that line, the other being “you dun goofed”), so I figured why not try and work it into a poem. Thanks for the response. I’m glad people are participating in the feedback project. Hopefully it’ll take off and a nice community of commentary and critique will spring from it.Ok, I broke critique rule number one and didn’t look up what ‘pareidolia’ meant. I just did and I feel like the peculiar unheimlich quality of some of the word choices and syntax make a lot more sense now. Sorry about that.
Consequences will never be the same
with our host given up on
a horse-drawn open sky.
If we unarrange the clouds
can we start seeing things in images again?
Or has our contagion made its way
to the hospital with the destructive
torrents of the tiny body,
humanity fragile like an empty street
car with no cell service.
-C.S. Henderson
We spend our time searching
for each other and hate it
when we get it. So what if
you spend all day yelling out
“Transubstantiation is crap!”
does that mean I’m not
supposed to eat?
A case race with Merlot
and I’m still on the porch waiting for snow.
I’m drunk on the throne
watching for when our poetry could have shone.
-C.S. Henderson
A dream: of bees, lemon and kiwi,
a swarm around la parca.
We’ve incentivized conception
by mapping rhythm at every fourth avenue.
We’ve underdiagnoised our disorder:
colonies collapse even when we’re still around
to buy iced coffee and cheeseburgers,
but what a last meal to have!
I understand that carrying cold drinks in a cooler
is bourgeoisie, but I’m afraid
we’ve lost the old adages
about hot drinks in the heat,
especially during evacuation.
I hope that, like a bird, our feathers
are heavier than bone. When we molt,
I want the insides hollow, too.
-C.S. Henderson
We stopped galloping together
and I had to pretend to be human
again with a heart feeling like black
paint. Oh, the heat of August,
the blue dragon sun
licking across each window.
You called me at the exact moment
I didn’t want you to call: I’m swallowing swords,
I’m swallowing grizzly bears,
I’ve got a clawed lung losing oil
in a fit of coughs.
Please, I need some water,
there’s a stranger in my face who isn’t
going to beast anymore, who ‘s looking
for dinner in the sky, who is
never going to frown on this day.
Please tell him the password
that led us to the dead’s worms.
-C.S. Henderson
At dinner, you recalculated the writing
series to be the history of yacht-
walking and tightrope-sailing:
once, in a time distanced
by wiretapping and wars
over a dusty molehill
somewhere across
a sea named not
unlike the shock
of someone leaping
out from behind,
a man used his toes
to perform a magic
trick between the taut
towers, no reflective
mirrors hiding
an elephant,
no doves tucked
into a fist,
no jokes to distract
the audience from
the turn in sincerity,
but for the sake of metamorphosing
to a sparrow committed the last great
magic of the twentieth century, proselytizing
the value of heights by pushing back
and forth against the wind.
-C.S. Henderson
