poetry

"You can always learn to rhyme well later but, unless you have that compulsive pleasure in consonant sound, to the point of nonsense, you'll never be a poet."

-Gwyneth Lewis, poet, person who has experienced depression, and author of Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression.

Some of my poetry is not intended to have any meaning whatsoever - it's an exercise in breaking down language, because language doesn't say everything I want to say anyway (labyrinthlanguage). It's fun. It keeps my fidgety mind occupied during class, while I listen with half an ear. It's stringing together words that sound ... right. Here are two poems that I thought were meaningless. The first developed meaning as I wrote. The second ... I think it has meaning, though it's damn oblique. But I think it's about continuing, and continuing, and continuing to makea certain kind of effort ...

I did note that Alex wrote a piece on genderqueer students at single-sex colleges; and I felt I ought to say something, since I identify as genderqueer, for lack of a better word or concept. But the thing is, it's intensely private. And the thing is, the problem of my gender identity is perhaps the only problem which I can't solve by writing and talking about it. A friend of mine (one of those LJ friends I've never met) commented thus on one of my entries in early February: 

I'm posting a bunch of what I'm going to call associative-sound poems here, now. I might refer to them later in order to make a point about Moby Dick and Picasso and Gertrude Stein and my hypertext collage (linked to in a previous entry), but I don't have time now. Such a tease, I know ; )