a wednesday diatribe. no, i just wanted to say diatribe.

i never want to sleep in again. waking up late steals my joy.

sufjan stevens sings some hymns, and i really like it. he also has some rare songs (apparently from the seven swans B-side) like "woman at the well" that i really like. try searching for it on youtube.

today in class we listened to an NPR interview of louise erdrich, a writer. i don't know much about her, but she said her favorite part of writing is gathering the information. she called all the words and phrases in her notebooks a "compost pile." i love that. that's what i did last night at spyhouse in uptown for a few hours. gathered information. gleaned words and ideas from overheard conversation and the scene around me. spyhouse is a really interesting place. i want to write there again. i feel stuck with my poems right now, stuck in the microlevel with all these orphan words and sentences that don't yet have a place in a poem. i'm struggling to weave it all together thematically. that's always the most dramatic, overwhelming part of my writing process. taking the compost out of the pile and forming something new.

charles wright wrote some beautiful things in "clear night," one of my favorite poems. i want to write with this urgency. i want to tangle together haunting scene and declarative diatribe like wright does:

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says "What?" to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say "What?" to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

p.s. i've taken the myers briggs eight times in the past week and keep getting the same result no matter how many times i try to change my answers. i'm just not satisfied with "the joker."