Ten Short Poems That Question Reality. Page 1.
Ten Short Poems That Question Reality. Page 2.
Ten Short Poems That Question Reality. Page 3. To view the whole document, please view the PDF below: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/tenpoemsthatquestionreality.pdf.
I compiled this collection of poetry during winter quarter of 2009, while I was simultaneously taking my first official poetry class with Dr. Barry Spacks and preparing to go to the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Meeting (this year in Chicago). I constructed this document as a "sample-capture" representative summary statement of who I am and what my blog is all about, but it ended up that I needed to turn in a three-page sampler to Barry's course toward the end of the quarter... and since I did not have any time to work on other poems, I ended up turning in this summary to the class.
Everyone took turns to read other students' poems throughout the class for about three class sessions. It was a lot of fun, though sometimes the readings were tedious to listen to because they were previously workshopped poems, and they had not altered much. Not many students read my poems in the beginning of the session, and then towards the end they started to read my work... as last resort. *Sigh.* Perhaps not necessarily that my poems are "bad" but they are more so "concept" poems--poems with big ideas exploring the interface of "science and art"--that they have not wrapped their heads around (as students are young and are still dealing with their first or second bgfriend relationship crisis and perhaps their decision-making abilities may not span much farther than which class to take next quarter... one from column A and two from column B... these may be students in general... not necessarily these writers in Barry's course). There were three students in the class who were more existentialist-surrealist-philosophically-oriented (and surprisingly all three of them were guys) and they finally tackled my poems. They did a superb job! On the last day, Barry Spacks announced to the class, "We have to catch up with Victoria's poetry!" followed by an an extraordinary reading of "Purpose or a Process;" his re-enactment of my melodramatic mind was doubly haunting than how I perceive my own mental ecosystem, and there was a chilling seriousness to the reading, as if Barry understood what I have gone through. I left feeling disturbed by someone else's reading of my poem. It made me feel emotionally restless and psychologically dissatisfied--I wanted more, but in my own time. The poetry reading felt like a psychological thriller: you have to be in the mood to enjoy it, or be absorbed in it. But if you push all the buttons with the right combinations, like The Matrix movie, then you can easily be in the mood to soak in dense material.
Barry's reading of my Purpose or a Process poem was one of the extraordinary, un-expected highlights of Winter Quarter of 2009. Such a tiny thing--one minute of appreciation of my work by a great poet--can add up to mean everything. It's funny how reality works--the level of warpedness in value and meaning in stretches of time.
I also find it funny how in my poetry I decided to be melodramatic and soap opera-ish about big-picture ideas, not my nails, my split ends in my hair, my neighbor's tattoo, nor my boyfriend's fetish with the girl across the street. I'm over it... or maybe I just never got into it.
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