Berley. Like Kim, but not.

Day Fourteen: Post your favourite poem

Again, it’s impossible to pick just one poem so I’ll go with Punishment by Seamus Heaney.

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge

Day Thirteen: Favourite poet

I can’t pick just one, but right now I’m reading a lot of Dorianne Laux and Seamus Heaney. Check them out!

- Kimberley Schacht

Every wave, every vibration, every joule of heat
that blazed life into him is still here,
sticking your shirt to your skin,
fanned away by the folded program in your hand.

Photons ricocheted off his face, tangled in his hair, intercepted
by his angular nose.
Trillions of particles bounced off like children,
hopscotch games forever changed
by him. Some collected in the galaxy
of your eyes, constellating
electromagnetically charged neurons.

They seeped sweat under your arms,
across your forehead,
were wiped away by the back of your hand
before resting on the black fabric
on your thigh.

XVII - Steven Price (2006)

Dusk. A stubbed candle flared, rent deep
the dark knots in her tent; she dragged it near.
Her eye sockets like blazing cuffs of bone
held an inner darkness. These are the geek effects —
the way light tattoos the chest, inks its skin;
the way a needle glides in epidermal and blind
as if stitching its long rasping thread to the lung;
the way a thumb scrapes blood to the tongue.
Stripped to the waist, nippled in blood, he sat
still, more still, her needle hooking a shame
his father had felt, eyes turned from the world.
She fixed the first cold brass buttons in his flesh.
Be still. Learn this. And the sky loosed a sorrow
the air had carried for miles, and a slow rain
flecked and tapped the tarp walls. A puddle
of grey wax cooled into a skin on her desk —
glinting buttons in a dish of light, spool of thread
moving end to end, nothing between them but flame,
a stink of sweat, candle-smoke, the darker things
filling that tent. Did he dream her fingers, soft,
twisting his topmost button, sliding it through its eye?
Something dragged at his shoulders, hauled the skin
into a wet heap on the floor: Houdini he was not;
just a boy stitched of darkness from a sky outside.
It was no great trick at all.

Steven Price is a young Canadian poet who’s also and instructor at my school and a really good reminder of why I moved all the way to the west coast to study under writers like him.

I’m bored, sooo I’ve decided to try out this little 15 days of literature…thing.

Day One: You’re favourite book and why

I can’t pick my all time favourite book. That would be impossible, so one of my favourite books of all time has to be Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. I decided to pick this book because besides the Harry Potter series, Anne Rice’s early works (I stress early work because I have to admit her writing went downhill after her publishes started pressuring her to pump out more books faster, and when she started writing about religion) are some of the books that really got me into reading. I watched the film when I was really young and decided to pick up the book when I was about thirteen and I just couldn’t put it down. This was before Twilight and the huge vampire craze, and I just fell in love with the characters. Anne Rice managed to show a real human side of vampires, and instead of glorifying them she showed how sad they could really be. This book also introduced me to one of my favourite fictional characters of all time, Lestat de Lioncourt. If you get the chance to read Interview with the Vampire, I highly recommend reading the second novel of the series, The Vampire Lestat. I know everyone is sick of vampires, including myself, but every once in a while I like to pick these books up and read about bad ass vampires that don’t sparkle. Well, they cry once and a while (okay, Lestat cries a lot) but I still think they’re pretty bad ass.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to start writing out my first drafts by hand. I used to type everything out but lately whenever I type I go into crazy editor mode right away and I can’t let myself write. I over think everything I put down and it gives me anxiety and I can’t get anything done. When I hand write I can just let go and write and not worry about if it’s any good. So my first drafts may be shitty doing it this way, but at least I’m getting a first draft out now. The only problem is hand writing a short story takes so long. My hand starts to hurt after the first page and my writing is pretty messy. And when I say messy I mean I couldn’t read some of my own writing when I went back and read it. I’ve got two pages written out, which isn’t much considering how big my writing is, but it’s a start. Hand writing is a slow process, but in the end I think it’s going to work out better than what I was struggling with before. At least I’m writing something now.