THE DELENDA

THE DELENDA
A Requiem for My Wanton Words

The Purpose of this Delenda: A Limbo Between Digression and Deletion

During my last college semester I studied under a brilliant professor; he taught me to quiet my inner censor and to just write as I wish--despite my post-traumatic-professor-disorder which paralyzes me with self-doubt, these the war-wounds worn by so many students after years of terrible teachers, each either entirely apathetic or deeply entrenched within the utterly rote—their lectures just jaded regurgitations in Power Point, those slides cycling while the students fitfully sleep in-seat.I began writing a memoir for his class and I have yet to finish it; my writing has not been as clear and precise as it was while under my professor’s mentorship and I have more than doubled my original page length, though very little has actually been said therein. I am increasingly lent to my own obsessive compulsive writing tendencies. My prose has of-late been lost in loops and tangles of meaningless tangents—self-indulgent insertions of the beautiful words I love to taste in text.This blog is a collection of passages deleted from my memoir—an attempt to preserve wasted words, which are intrinsically sacred in spite of me. May they have their heaven here; may this final resting place, this Delenda, be better than nothing at all—better than true deletion.

If this unjust medium--this blog--be not the cure for my wild-fire writing, then surely The New School will be.

I was recently accepted to The New School in New York City for their MFA Creative Nonfiction Writing program for Fall 2010. Being accepted into such an esteemed university, being awarded such a coveted spot in their writing MFA program -- it's like winning the academic lottery. I have never been happier than I am in my dreams of a true academic setting. I know this will be the solace I have sought since being under the mentorship of my undergraduate writing professor.

This is me...

This is me...

This is me as well...

This is me as well...
In Death Valley, the Sand Dunes and Solitude Suited me Well.

March 6, 2011

"A Song at Dawn" (The Follies of Nine)



FROM MY JOURNAL OF 'UNCONSCIOUS POETRY'
A POEM CALLED "A SONG AT DAWN"
(Better known, for some reason, as "The Follies of Nine")


This is a little poem I wrote a few years back when I had first discovered (and fallen madly in love with) Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. It's hardly the genius of 'peeled pencil choke, rub her coke' or 'a carafe is a blind glass' or 'a no sense a no sense a no sense when sense a no sense when sense a no sense" but I loved to say these words out loud as I wrote them. I wrote this really fast, in under five minutes, and I wrote it without thinking about what I was writing and without attempting to assign these words any meaning. They were just the muse-born sounds and concoctions that I came up with on the fly, and strangely as a result this poem always seems to have some deep, obvious meaning to those who read it, and they speak very passionately about it, explaining to me all the clear and evident sub-textual messages I subconsciously encoded therein, but honestly it's the one time I wasn't contriving and crafting and planning my poems. This one is heart-sloughed and, though it's rough (it's photo copied from my notebook, where I originally wrote it) it's still one I find myself feeling strangely proud of.

xoxo