aisyalam

Although I was on campus earlier than usual, for a 9 a.m. meeting with the Dean (about the June performance as well as the serious possibility of my future association with the Faculty), the day got off to a slow start. After the meeting I had to prepare some professional documents (tedious reformatting) and take care of some other business, making amendments and links to the eBook, all done without ado. After an early lunch of nasi ayam things began to pick up. I delved into the texts I was working on yesterday with poetic scalpel—and they needed work, which was fairly draining (though a couple of cups of teh terik did help matters). About ready to call it a day a couple of hours before I usually do, I instead went for a short walk then proceeded to begin putting together a poem (without computer assistance) for each of the topical texts I’ve been (co-) composing lately. The results were downright invigorating. It seems that working with language that was not my own really helped me to tune into my own verbal formations, so as I raked through my journal and concentrated on the matters at hand (namely place and subject), some really exciting verses emerged in a form I would describe as alliterative hyper-acrostic. While we were on Pulau Redang last month (a truly beautiful island in the South China Sea), I began to compile words for some acrostics there, ending up with four for each letter of the words, and continued along that path today (not for each of the dozen pieces, but for many of them). Since I was only at it for a couple of hours, I wasn’t able to really finish anything, but left the office with a draft of each piece and a charge—really a high—that I haven’t experienced in quite awhile. The ironic thing about that is that my office is a really drab and spartan setting, and I almost decided to go somewhere more aesthetically stimulating to write. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t—no one came by to offer distraction, I left the computer and Internet off, and really had at it. Anyway, I’m hoping by tomorrow afternoon to have drafts of all of these pieces to study and refine when we head off on a four day trip to Penang over the weekend (where I also hope to write some more and make a few more field recordings).