If you get summoned for jury duty often enough, as one does in a small jury pool like Santa Barbara, you start to believe that it's only other people who serve on juries. You simply default to believing you're going to get out of it (of course!), it's only a matter of time. Play your cards right and you'll be out of there before lunch.
Never in my imaginings do I become juror #1. And it's strange, because it feels like we are, collectively, merely pretending to have a democracy, and serving on this jury is no exception. Observing all the court ceremonies, objection overruled, objection sustained, lawyers in expensive suits, lawyers making hundreds of dollars every hour they're in court while I make $15 a day. Is it our civic duty to pretend we still have civic duties? I have no idea.
There is a lot of down time built in to court ceremonies for a jury. The whole game centers around what information the jury has access to, so every time we're shuffled into the deliberation room, which is quite often, I briefly check work on my phone and then read some poetry.
Last week, I read Today In The Taxi by Sean Singer. I'm half-way through Rick Barot's latest collection Moving the Bones. I'll probably finish that today or tomorrow and move on to the latest issue of Ploughshares.
Both of the aforementioned collections have prose poems I love, which is interesting for me to say, due to the fact that I wouldn't have said this before the Kenyon Writers Workshop. I don't think I'd ever seen a single prose poem I liked at that point in time, so I simply thought they weren't for me.
Cate Marvin, who facilitated my cohort, introduced me to both Sean Singer and Rick Barot, and when we read them in class, their prose poems infected me. And for the past few weeks, I've been writing my own like a soul possessed.
I'm not sure if this form could be the home I've been looking for, but I'm pushing forward as if it is. I've had some early feedback, which proved excellent, but I've written around 18 now, so it's probably time to figure out if I should keep going.
