Can you write under pressure without breaking a sweat? Always telling friends that writing a crown of heroic sonnets is a cinch? Do you dream of perfect line breaks?

If you think you’ve got the write moves, Dustin Brookshire’s got the poetry competition for you: Project Verse.

(And I’m one of the weekly judges, along with Dustin and Beth Gylys. Oh the power! Mwahahahahahaha.)

Find out all the details about Project Verse over at Dustin’s site, I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin. (And don’t overlook the awesome prize package Dustin has put together for the winner. It’s pretty sweet.)

I was just going through my email, and I came across something I sent Nathan back in September of 2008. I was all excited about poetry, particularly about getting other people excited about poetry. I thought I’d share that email here.

::

We’ll have the whole world writing and reading poetry in no time. We’ll be like the Donny and Marie of poetry, only not related and not creepy and there will be no singing or fringed outfits or Mormonism.

Utah will not be involved. We will not have matching feathered bangs. We will not appear on “Dancing with the Stars” well past our prime either as a stiff, lumpy dancer or an overly enthusiastic whistling audience member.

We will not have a daytime talk show in the early 1990s that tanks in the ratings.

We will not have a creepy doll line that we peddle on Home Shopping Network.

We will not appear in Weird Al Yankovich videos on YouTube where we dance like a white guy.

We will not go on tour with our two deaf brothers — the silent Osmonds — who sign our shitty lyrics to a half-attentive audience that is distracted with its handheld recording devices aimed at our expanding waistlines and misaligned body motions.

We will not crack notes.

We will not have stage fright.

We will not secretly covet glitter and spotlights and cake foundation and water bras and girdles.

We will not fill every crack so nobody can detect that we have cracks, so they will never realize we are, in fact, still human.

We will not break down on national television about being sexually abused but refuse to name our abusers.

We will not automatically smile when someone says our name or a camera flashes.

We will not look to the full moon and smile because we mistake it for a camera-wielding fan.

In short, we will be nothing like Donny and Marie.

We will, instead, be like herpes.

Yes, we will spread the poetry reading and writing love like a herpetic sore, like an oozing, itchy herpetic sore that never quite heals, only scabs over. That is what we will do. Mark my words.

::

And here’s Nathan’s response:

Are we banning fringe altogether? I guess I can live with that.

And scabs, yes. We’ll live inside the genitals of poetry and emerge to spread and show ourselves. Scabs in the good sense, not in the sense of people who break the picket line.

I wrote this piece Nov. 20, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of. It makes me sad to read this because my relationship with sleep has fallen apart since my thyroid illness. Even now, things are not the same between us. Oh well. Not all relationships are meant to work out.
* * *

I wake up with my head smashed face-down on a pillow the consistency of a marshmallow. “When Lora used to get hungry in her sleep, she’d wake up chewing on her pillow,” I think. “Was it the consistency of a marshmallow?” But the more important question is how did I get here? I am barely awake, so it’s hard to put meaningful thoughts together. In this state, factoids about friends I had two decades ago come to me readily, but I am unable to piece together the events that led me here, to this bed. With my mind still stuck like a turntable needle in a scratched record on the image of Lora noshing on her pillow, I try to fish from short-term memory more pertinent information, like what day it is.

With one eyeball-goop-caked eye, the one not pressed smack-dab in the soft body of the warm pillow, I try to focus on what’s around me. I am in the guest bedroom. The LCD display on the radio alarm-clock reads 2:15 p.m. I vaguely remember having had big plans today. I was going to clean the house and groom my toenails. “Did I do that stuff?”

My brain, about half awake now, gives me the answers I’ve been searching for. It is Sunday. No, I did not clip my nails. The house is in the same filthy state it’s been in for weeks. Instead I ended up doing what I always do on Sundays: I took a nap. That explains why I am in bed. Having determined that I am not in danger of missing work and that I really didn’t have anything cool planned after all, my wildly relaxed body pairs up with the half of my brain that is still slumbering. They determine that I am going back to sleep. I take a deep breath and settle into the mattress. It’s gonna be a long nap.

Then something terrible happens. Just as I am about to be taken again by Sleep — my sweet afternoon lover who can please me for hours on end — the awake part of my brain reveals it has a different agenda. It wants to get up and write. In an attempt to draw me out from under the covers, that spry part of my mind starts documenting the moment. It writes the first phrase, “I wake up with my head smashed face-down on a pillow … .” Before I know it, it has completed the first sentence and is on to the second. And the third. In seconds, it has the whole first paragraph completed. Then, in a startling and rare display of mental agility, it leap-frogs to the end and ties everything up with a surprise ending.*

This is what I get for reading Gabriel García Márquez before taking a nap.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying what the loquacious portion of my brain is stringing together is any good. I am drawing no comparison between the quality of my own writing and that of Márquez. I am just saying that reading tends to stir up words, and once excited, those words want to be expressed. I tell myself I can continue sleeping. “I will remember these words later,” I half-whisper, half-snore to myself. But I know that’s not the case. There’s no way I can remember the whole first paragraph as well as the surprise ending.* As I lie in bed, I know I have a choice to make: Continue to sleep in my extraordinarily coooooomfy guest bed or get up and make my way to the computer. Guess which option I chose.

I’ve tried to put some measures in place so I can capture ideas without having to immediately flesh them out. I have a DAT voice recorder I carry in my purse. That works OK when I have an idea in the car or some other private place. But I am loathe to use it in public, where I might draw attention making verbal notes like, “nude, towel, gay porn, heat” or “80, new tits, dead.” So I also keep pen and paper handy when I want to be discreet. But even these methods don’t ensure I will successfully capture ideas for later development.

Take the following notes I’ve left for myself in the past week alone. They make absolutely no sense to me now, and I have no idea what to do with them:

1.
toilet
rat
fear

I wrote that one in the middle of the night. I think I’d just gone to the bathroom. Clearly, it means I am afraid of a vicious rat lurking in the toilet that will jump up and bite my pretty ass when I sit down to pee, but the bigger story I had in mind is lost on me now.

Then there’s this one, which I came across yesterday and have no recollection of even having written:

2.
cut thing
dick thing

It’s in my handwriting, so I know I wrote it. But what does it mean? What riddles do these words hold that I no longer have the power to decipher? Is this about sex? Am I the cut thing and LoveShack is the dick thing? Or is it something else entirely? I’m afraid I will never know.

Then there’s this note:

3.
fat
albert

No clue what that one’s all about. I even watched all four episodes of “House of Cosbys” today to jog my memory, but no such luck.

Well, I am glad I got that out. Now I am off to cut my toenails. I might even polish them, too.

* * *
Note

*I had to scrap the surprise ending my brain came up with. It was over the top and my budget didn’t allow for the special effects that would have been required.

I was just at Joannie Stangeland’s site, where she talks about feedback she received from a teacher many years ago. That made me want to share the feedback I received in 1999 from my mentor at the time. His name was Tom Wilson, and here’s what he said that was instrumental in my seven-year break from writing poetry:

Ventings of high school sophmore.* A pastiche of chest-pounding “Ain’t I hip, ain’t I clever?” You’re beating a dead horse with a broken stick.

I came across the feedback recently when I was doing a major reorganization of all my poetry. It doesn’t feel any better now than it did then. There had to have been a better way to tell me my poem wasn’t working.

What’s the shittiest or most poorly delivered feedback you’ve ever received on a poem? I bet you can’t top mine.

*Yes, he misspelled the word sophomore.

Sometimes that’s all there is to say.