In a Random Acts of Poetry celebration, poet David K. Wheeler has invited us to write about our Christmas ghosts: past, present, or future. He’s also giving away a copy of Contingency Plans: Poems.
Leave a comment at Dave’s place by next Thursday, 9pm EST, for a chance to win a copy. Include your poem post link, for definite links here and a chance to be featured in a follow-up post here next Friday.
I remember the hot summer afternoon in Lubbock when we had the great neighborhood Monopoly game. It started with five or six boys, as many pieces as the standard game contained at the time, the shoe, the car, the scotty dog, the top had, the cowboy, and the iron, of course.
As such games do, this one became an eternity. Late that evening, we moved the board from somebodies driveway into their garage so there would be light to continue. In my memory, my brother wins. He lands on Free Parking and steals all of the pot cash in one fell swoop. It’s not a fair rule, but it’s one we’ve always used. (Monopoly doesn’t allow that “house” rule in tournament play.)
But honestly, I don’t remember who won. I only remember the sense of tension in the entire neighborhood all that day. Monopoly is a brutal win-lose scenario and watching the game unfold fascinated me.
I’m still fascinated by games. Believe it or not, we take the game-ness of T. S. Poetry pretty seriously. Just last night we were scowering through digital stacks of books about game theory, everything from complex mathematics (Game Theory: A Critical Introduction), philosophy (The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia), business self-help (Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life), theology (Theology Remixed), and game design theory (In Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, & Playtesting Games).
With all of the elements of a game bumping around in my head, I couldn’t resist pulling prompts from Monopoly. For better or worse, I still think of it as the great American game–embodying the good and bad of our culture.
After every game, we’d like to invite you create your own mashup poems. All you need is the list of prompts and the list of responses. (Your responses are also stored online where they may look prettier.)
Even if you missed the live game last night, you can still participate in this part of the game over the next two weeks!
Here’s what to do:
Last week, I posted an article here about reading poetry while waiting in line to vote. The poetry in question was Contingency Plans: Poems by David Wheeler. Today over at The High Calling is an interview with David about his poetry and writing. Below is some information from the interview about his background and upbringing.
David, tell us a little about yourself. We know you spent part of your life in Idaho and you currently live in the state of Washington. Where do you consider home?
Home is Idaho. If there’s one place I feel calmest, most relaxed, it is at the house I grew up in, with my folks. I do my best to shuck the portrayal of my generation as extensions of adolescence; I do everything I can to appear mature and composed and erudite, but really I’m such a homebody. Bellingham will always be special, and I love living in Seattle, but (you catch me right around the holidays) northern Idaho is home.
Educational background?
A Christian school is where I spent most of grammar school and high school, so when I announced I would be attending Western Washington University for my undergrad, I got some raised eyebrows. One person even mentioned the “culture shock” I would encounter from my conservative roots, moving into a more liberal school with a lingering, outlandish reputation from earlier decades. Western’s a great university, though. I wouldn’t trade my time there for anything; the Creative Writing department has some outstanding faculty I had the privilege of studying under–Oliver de la Paz, for one, who taught me how to write form poetry, to whom I am eternally grateful–and I won’t be surprised when you start hearing of more writers come from that program. The quality of work we crafted (and is still crafted there) is stunning.
Tell us a bit about your music.
Music has been a part of me since I was very young, taking piano lessons. Mostly classically trained, once I started playing with other musicians at church and in college, I had a whole world of improvisational technique open up to me. On top of that, it gave me a new way to write. In fact, I grew so much over four years at college, I ended up having the material to record a full-length album: so I did. One friend of mine is a budding producer, and another is a fantastic graphic designer–and both musicians–so I conned them into working with me, along with a handful of other musicians. We spent entire days this summer in a basement-cum-studio, just hammering out parts; now its in this nebulous post-production phase, where my producer is polishing up the tracks. I hope it’s out sometime early next year.
The album is called “There, There,” and I landed on the title after a lot of consideration. A lot of the songs are spun of this melancholy fabric I seem to have stored up somewhere. (My life’s not that bad! Not bad, at all, really. I promise.) The title is supposed to reflect a sort of consolatory thread throughout the songs. Even though my life might be fine, I know others whose are a bit dicier, and so I think in my music and my other forms of writing, I like to dig deep into heartache because it’s so familiar to all of us, for myriad reasons. And sometimes there isn’t anything to do to allay the grief, but hunker down together in it.
Related:
Interview at The High Calling.
Q&A at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Review of Contingency Plans at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Photo display and prompt for Contingency Plans at Three from Here and There.
The mid-term election was last week, and I prepared myself for the process with – a book of poems.
While the lines weren’t expected to be long, unlike 2008, I still wanted to be prepared to wait. Voting lines aren’t the best places to make conversation – people are very circumspect; no one wants to be accused of electioneering. So it’s generally fairly quiet.
The book I brought with me was David Wheeler’s Contingency Plans. I had started it the night before, and it seemed a good choice for what to do while waiting to vote. Cynics might say that at least I could do something productive or edifying like read poetry while waiting to waste my time with the voting machine. I am not a cynic when it comes to voting. By the time I reach the voting booth, I know whom and what I’m voting for or not. Tucked inside my copy of Contingency Plans was a sheet of paper with the names of the judges I was going to vote against retaining.
I checked in with the first gatekeeper, handing over my driver’s license and was giving a voting slip (Voter # 171). Then I stood in the alphabetical line (S-Z) to officially sign my name, initial my address, and be given the go ahead – to go wait in another line to vote.
I waited to vote, two places behind a woman who was complaining about having to wait for people to finish voting at the touch-screen voting stations. (We get our choice of touch-screen or punch card ballots.) The complainer eventually got tired and got out of line to go ask for a punch card ballot. By the time the voting officials have moved heaven and earth to get her punch card authorized, I was finished voting and walking out of the room.
While I waited, I opened Wheeler’s poems to the page I had bookmarked. The poem I turned to was entitled “Christmas Morning,” which starts with these lines:
Almost, I didn’t wake up,
and felt worse for wear.
I was so close to being swallowed
Entirely by blankets and comforters
I never asked for but wrapped
Around me anyway…
Those lines had duplicated my morning – wrapped in warm blankets and not wanting to get up early to have time to vote before work, almost being swallowed by the candidates’ representatives working the polls (always 25 feet from the entrance), people and political brochures I never asked for but seemed to wrap around me anyway.
Coincidental, I thought.
The next poem centered me in the poetry again – “Because I speak on my feet,” a kind of love poem that’s actually more about words and language. I looked up, and saw there were still three people ahead of me to vote.
Then I read “On Restlessness,” and came to these words in the second stanza:
I won’t have the time it takes to blink
before today has again stifled any question
that might hinder my progress across the floor.
Extraordinary, I thought. Did Wheeler compose this while waiting to vote? And then this:
When you can make angels touch the floor,
There will be nothing left to manually operate.
The universe will be in control of everything,
Assuring us of this when we watch the stars blink…
I was nervous for the state of everything…
Then came two shorter poems (“Compline” and “Adequate”), and I was next in line to vote. I had just turned the page to “Slaughter Season” when I was motioned to a voting booth. (Slaughter Season! Did the poet know I was voting for very few incumbents and for a bunch of amendments and propositions that would essentially restrict the growth of government?)
Contingency Plans is not a political treatise or prognostication. It’s actually a collection of rather extraordinary poems that I have already read two and three times, and intend to read two or three times more. And the lines I was reading were merely coincidental with my experience on election day. (I think.)
But it does say something about the poet and the poems, something grand, when what he has written comes alive in an unexpected way, in an unexpected place and an unintended context.
Photograph: Flag by Anna Cervova, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
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