Oh, heavenly nightshade

I think I've missed the ten-things-about-writing craze, so you'll have to settle for this post instead.

I wrote a poem yesterday afternoon on the train from New Haven to New York City ("Orpheus at the Bimah." The title may be open to debate). The young man in the next seat kept looking stealthily and guiltily over at my screen, as though simultaneously sure that to read someone else's poetry-in-composition was the height of bad manners and unable not to watch the process. I thought about asking him for feedback, but he looked away so hastily every time I glanced up that eventually I decided it would be cruel. I've never written with someone watching me like that.

I've been in the same room as other people. I've written over IM. (I have improvised stories for an audience, spoken, but I classify that differently.) I've never had someone read each word as I wrote it, added others, deleted them, rewrote, reordered, and presently titled the whole text and filed it away. If asked before this afternoon, I would have said that I couldn't have done it: I'd have been distracted or self-conscious; I'd have wasted attention on the audience that should have been spent on the words. Instead, I didn't give him much thought at all. It was a perfectly normal writing experience, except that there was a young man in a pale-blue business shirt with an iPod plugged into his ears quickly averting his eyes every time I looked up. It may have helped that he was a complete stranger. It may have helped that this was a poem from scratch. But it started me thinking about how and when and where I can write, as opposed to how and when and where I think I can write. It seems like the kind of information that will come in handy someday.

Mostly what I want to do right now is write down as much of last night's dreams as I can remember: a long and slippery narrative about forced shape-changing, pages torn out of books, and an aquarium exhibit. I so rarely have the kind of dreams where you can wake up and then resume the dream when you fall back asleep, so I might as well not waste this one.

I met a shape-shifter
I let her fade . . .

The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering

From the Preface to David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937):

One other thing. It is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals—full though it may be of beauty. We feel a rubicon has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves. We doubt the decency of our own inventions, and are certainly in terror of their possibilities. That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated—but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement . . . We who are of the same world of sense with hairy ass and furry wolf and who presume to other and more radiant affinities, are finding it difficult, as yet, to recognise these creatures of chemicals as true extensions of ourselves, that we may feel for them a native affection, which alone can make them magical for us. It would be interesting to know how we shall ennoble our new media as we have already ennobled and made significant our old—candle-light, fire-light, Cups, Wands and Swords, to choose at random.