Daniel Bailey's Blog, page 18

yrfriendliz:In case you were wondering where grandma is gonna...

yrfriendliz:

In case you were wondering where grandma is gonna be today. @atdoors

Anne told me to start sharing more of this stuff online cause to be honest with you, living with a grandma is a wild ride. This makes it funnier.

whoa. hey. my grandma’s gonna eat spaghetti with john hammond, InGen ceo and creator of jurassic park.

[image error]

this is why you go to walmart

this is why you go to walmart

here is a nature photo of a jam band

here is a nature photo of a jam band

Photo

Photo

here is a nature photo of a professional poet

here is a nature photo of a professional poet

guys, i am currently unemployed and living in my...

guys, i am currently unemployed and living in my grandmother’s basement. none of the jobs i have applied to are getting back to me. i had an interview this morning for a temporary job grading standardized test essays, but that won’t start until the beginning of october and will only last a month.

in my pitiful state of unemployment, i have decided to write another book of poetry.

it will be called THE UNEMPLOYMENT SONNETS.

as a way of making money and emptying my head of thought, i am asking asking YOU to paypal ME $5 to write you a sonnet.

you can give me whatever restrictions, themes, subject matter you want. for your $5, i will handwrite your sonnet, to your specifications, and mail it to you. i will then add that sonnet toward the aforementioned THE UNEMPLOYMENT SONNETS.

why should you hire me to write a sonnet?

the more sonnets the better: poetry!

the more sonnets the better: i need money while i look for a job! 

i have an mfa and am, therefore, highly qualified for this task. i have previously written and published (one is still forthcoming) three books of poetry, one of which was a semi-popular book of sonnets. if you need anymore credentials or references, feel free to inquire by emailing me at hisnameisdan@gmail.com.

if you choose to hire me to write you a sonnet, please paypal me at hisnameisdan@gmail.com

include, in the message, whatever specifications you want me to apply to the writing of the poem.

now, you may be asking yourself: is this some sort of pyramid scheme?

the answer is no! i am simply trying to find a way to financially support myself while not feeling guilty about taking time to make art when i could be aimlessly searching indeed.com or monster.com or whatever site for jobs that i’m only half-qualified for.

i also get excited about prompts and for there to be a reason behind a piece of art or writing, some kind of actual human exchange. this poem exists because…

because you wanted it to exist!

it’s kind of like paying a caricature artist at carnival to draw you, except i won’t write a caricature of you (unless you ask me to) and the carnival is the internet.

and just think how much money a hand-written daniel bailey might someday be worth!

let’s do this.

let’s do this.

i am still a bug

and as an addendum to the last post, i just walked by the banana spider’s web, at least a week and a half old, and noticed how the lines are no longer perfect, connecting at strange angles where the spider had to revise and reshape the web, and even a space between two strands that i could fit my arm through.

i spent all of mfa party school hearing the phrase...

i spent all of mfa party school hearing the phrase “negative capability” thrown around like an amen, but i never knew what the phrase itself meant and never cared to look it up, even though my poems were said to contain negative capability. 

after mfa party school, just a few months ago, i looked it up and now i forget what it means. i remember it has something to do with keats.

now i look it up again. on wikipedia, the first sentence from the negative capability article reads, “Negative capability describes the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts.” 

keats describes it as, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

now i find myself a year and three months out of finishing my mfa party school degree, without a job and without much partying. 

i console myself by searching my grandmother’s yard for spiders and other tiny life. i’m a big fan of the spiny orb-weavers, and i check in every day on the banana spider and its massive web. i appreciate the mud dauber’s nests that resemble organ pipes made with red georgia clay. i’ve successfully treated (exterminated) several fire ant mounds, near where the dog gets tied up, and a yellow jacket nest next to the garage.

i find myself wishing i could be an expert on spiders, specifically web-building. 

i’ve exorcised some shit writing a chapbook of twelve poems called orb-weaver, where i attempted to write poems of nineteen lines that i wrote all at once, a line at a time, while cycling through the twelve poems in a notebook. now i’m trying to decide whether to revise the form, which was originally intended to resemble the beautiful webs of these spiders, and let the poems take on their own lengths and shapes, and move away from the form they were intended to tribute. 

it seems silly, and maybe it should be. i’ve always used poetry to try and push myself toward better realities, to use the poem as a new form of natural beauty, more specifically through the images and conjectures that a poem contains. a form should be able to rewrite itself much in the same way. let the content determine the way the poem settles on the page/screen/etc, much like the shape of a spider web is determined by the natural and man-made structures the spider chooses to build between.

i know how to create lines, but it’s finding the appropriate structures, which has been a struggle lately, to tie them to, to realize that there is no perfect form, only the poet’s task to make lines between the quivering branches of an ever-shifting reality.