help, rosy-fingered dawn is molesting me

It’s suspiciously nice out today, so I feel rather guilty about spending even this time inside the library computer lab. Koper just gave a rather interesting lecture on poetry and rhyme and meter, though.
There’s a line in the Odyssey that he said he took to heart when he was a wee English major, a line about how all men should respect poets because they know the ways of living. “I was quite the snob when I was a junior,” he said. “I thought that I was somehow morally superior to all those economics majors around me. Ha!” He then went on to describe the modern poetry scene in great and depressing detail: Everyone has a little magazine, and they send their poems out to their friends, and they publish each others’ poems in their little magazines and nobody ever reads them. Except for other poets.
“It’s because they don’t RHYME, goddammit!” Well, he didn’t actually say that. Actually, it was the other way around; poems stopped having to rhyme because people stopped having to remember them. Rhyme is an important mnemonic device, and the Greek poets used rhyme and meter and all those ticky-tacky things because people had to remember their poems, since they were the only kind of history around. Once you got good solid history books, you got people like Eliot and Pound (Modern Poetry is next semester, I promise) who insisted that poetry should be so frickin’ deep and crazy that absolutely nobody could understand it.
There’s a reason I like Ginsberg. He wrote about guys having sex. I can understand guys having sex. Everyone can understand guys having sex. (OK, so that’s not the only reason I like him, it’s because his poems are swarming with amazing imagery and innovative, loose form and still manage to be memorable without super-strict meter and rhyme. But it’s kind of great when the first poem you read in a new poetry book involves teenaged Allen and Neal lying in bed next to each other, sliding sweaty hands...’scuse me.)
Three semesters of Poetry Collective have disabused me of the notion that poetry should necessarily be instantly accessible. It’s nice when it is--poetry for the masses--but it’s more challenging to be able to make up your own meanings for poems. This is how poets think about poems, people, and this is why nobody who isn’t actually a poet or a frustrated poet reads poetry anymore. There are only two people in the world who will know what “I am what raspberries feel like” really, really means in the context of the entire poem, a few thousand who will take the time to make up their own meaning to it, and a billion more who will say that it’s junk because they can’t understand it. And depending on how you feel about the role of accessibility in the creation of art, they could be right.
The decision of whether to make your poem easily understandable or keep your own idiosyncratic vision is a struggle. The fact that there are people for whom these decisions are mutually exclusive suggests that poets are in some way, good or bad, crazy.
I suppose it’s easier when you don’t understand what the hell your own poem means, though. That way, other people can make up meanings for you. You’re home free.
The thing that Koper doesn’t really get is that poetry has really split into two very different groups. The group that’s called “poetry” is...well, poetry. Little blats of non-rhyming, avant-garde stuff that gets published in chapbooks. Then you’ve got what the Greeks would have called poetry--stuff that rhymes, that tells stories, that’s set to music. Stuff that gets put on albums. These poets are still revered as gods, but they’re not called poets anymore, they are called rock stars. The fact that their poems are seldom epic stories is immaterial—people memorize their stuff, pass it down, listen to it over and over. It’s the power of rhyme.

I used to write epic poems when I was a kid. I’d write them about the Red Wings (this was back when Steve Yzerman was the biggest thing to hit Detroit since the tanks that the National Guard sent in back in the 60s), stuff I saw on TV, stuff I read in the papers, stuff I saw out the car window. I stopped doing rhyming poetry mostly because I felt really silly bringing it into Poet’s Collective.
I kind of want to get back to writing things with structure, though. Maybe that’s the problem—I don’t know how to create a structure with my poems. The one that’s been frustrating me is pretty loose. (Not that I’m going to force it into a structure--I’ll wait till BJ reads it and see what he thinks to do anything more with it. Until then, I’m taking lily_lemony’s suggestion and letting it gel.)
Structured poems take time and planning. Could do an invocation to the muses. Or a sonnet. Actually, I was considering writing an Aloysius/Diogenes slash story in the form of an epic Greek poem. The subject matter is perfect—two brothers who make themselves out to represent good and evil, caught in a bizarre psychosexual struggle. Plus, I get to use epithets.
Oh, you know what those are, right? They’re GREAT. “Grey-eyed Athena.” “The salt road” for the sea. “Chocolate-orbed Mary Sue.” Stuff like “red-haired Diogenes” is not only hovering somewhere around dactylic (if you poke it a little), but it also takes up a whole third of a line if I’m doing hexameter. My work is cut out for me!
This is if I get my homework done, you understand. I’m not letting myself write anything until I’ve done the required reading for class.

Compulsive updater? Me? You must be joking.

So I’m sitting at the library computer, happily typing out an invocation to the muses, when I turn around and see diraskyria there. “Hey,” I say. “What are you doing here? I thought you were off in Aryneth doing research.”

“Hey yourself,” she says. “Want some of my espresso? I’m not going to finish it.” Which should have tipped me off right there, because they don’t allow coffee in the computer labs.

But hey, I was thirsty and kind of tired, so I take the paper cup, swig it down, and say, “Hey, where’d you go?” And fuck me if she’s not in the bottom of the cup, grinning and waving at me.

“Come on in!” she says. “It’s fun!”

And actually, the coffee looks pretty nice and warm after the cold day outside, so I’m just about to jump in and join her when I see this flash of white and black streak by. Well, I can’t just let a moving target pass me by, so I chuck the cup and follow it into the stacks. It skitters around a corner, and I’ve lost it; luckily, my predator’s eye is sharp enough to see footprints on the deep-pile acid-trip-dyed library carpet. I sneaky follow it into the B-829 section.

It’s a guy in a black suit, and he’s hanging onto the moving shelves for dear life. He’s pale as milk and maybe a little shorter than me, and he’s glaring at me with the clearest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. I recognize him immediately--it’s drworm’s evil (or was it good? I can never remember) twin. Dunno what he’s doing in Mt. Pleasant, but he looks tasty. I hunker down and swish my tail at him. “My territory,” I growl.

He whips a book out from the shelf and brandishes it at me. “My book,” he says. “I just came here to get it.”

“What? No! That belongs to the library!” I try to read the title. The book’s all covered in skin.

“Not anymore!” He tucks it inside his jacket and swings off through the shelves, howling like an orangutan.

I lope off after him. He leads me on a merry chase through the B-F section, but I finally corner him and knock him down in an elevator. “Put the damn book back.”

He snarls a little, but he eventually takes it out of his jacket and gives it to me. Well, I’m breathing rotted meat on him, and I like to think that my fangs are pretty sharp. Yeah, I’m intimidating. Queen of the forest, yo. He still manages to scramble out between my legs when the elevator door opens, but now at least I know where he is: On the 3rd floor of the library, and it’s impossible to get out of there without one of the librarians showing you exactly where the wormhole is. And they’re never around anymore, because of budget cuts…so I wouldn’t worry. Anytime you want to come get him, Seth...

Anyway, I take the book back down to the computer lab, and it really doesn’t belong to the library. There’s no magnetic tag on it. So I flip through it a little, to see who it belongs to...and then a freaking tentacle whips out at me. I slam the book shut, and it kind of flops lifeless to the side. And then I see the author’s name. lily_lemony, you remember that manuscript you were telling me about, the one that you accidentally lost through the library portal system? Yeah. It’s here, and it grew.

Eh, it’s really no worse than my Journalism class. Professor Jerusalem is practically obsessed with finding out the horrible truth behind my LARP group. I keep telling him that there’s nothing going on, but he insists that a bunch of people who run around pretending to be vampires have some ulterior motive. They don’t! They’re just pretending! The fact that they only come out during the night and can turn into bats is incidental!

I tried to get him to let me cover the Satanic orgies that CMU President Rao is having, but he says that’s old news. I told him that the fact that he’s funding them out of the students’ tuition money is probably newsworthy, but he said that he already held Rao at bowel-disruptor point and yelled at him about it.

Sigh. nyghtshayde, do you think I should say hi to him for you? Maybe if he finds out that I know you, he’ll go a little easier on me. I know you guys were tight back when you were his Filthy Assistant...

Oh, and ghostgecko? The miniature Tyrannosaurus you genetically engineered for me is starting to chase its tail and whine. Are they supposed to do that? Is it lonely? I started taking up rare roast beef for it from the dining hall, because it’s kind of hard for it to find enough mice and squirrels to eat in the winter, but I’m a little worried that it’s an unnatural diet for it. What should I do?

Anyway, that’s about all that happened today. I have a Beginning Sorcery class in a few minutes, though, and Dr. Mordrid hates if you walk in late. I’m going to ask him whether necromancy is legal, though. josephwaldman keeps telling me about the time he conjured up the ghost of Elvis, and if that ever gets out...oh boy.

But yeah, other than that…it was a normal day.