Final poem draft, Week 14

Death’s Dinner Party

The Seattle fog condenses on our skin
as we walk from the Saturday house play; Antigone
would never face such a dense wall as we wallow through death’s
dinner party. We were his guests it seems as I clung to the arm
of your Armani suit. Our lungs breathe in what could
have been exhaust or the sky, depending on how you
look at it. Looking up from the balcony, I see a lone
mist barely formed across the cuticle of a moon, wipe
my glasses to hide the shiver from your cool touch. What
is there to fear as you turned to sip your bourbon?
When I was ten, the night sky was never so allusive nor fearful
as I squinted to find the lone figure staring down from the rooftop
across our building while the catacombs of the city loomed.
Turning then, I knew as if always knowing
that our deathbed tucked in so tightly could not bring back
what I had seen, the naivety of the unknowing would
hover over us as we dreamed of nothing.

Poem Draft, Week 13

Looking at my reflection, my vertical panel of teeth not yet grown glistened at my only friend. Nothing stood there. My knowledge of the canyon and its nightmares opening below me does not glimpse so easily from my gaze. I sit as if on a Windsor chair brightened by the faux sunlight, scrambling to speak but all that came were gutturals and half knowing smiles. I lingered at the ledge of my crib, spying the unknowable I would colonize one day as the pale window moonlighted as my heaven. I gazed through the mirror, unaware that its reflection was not of another. Welling from within, I did not fear the mirror facing itself. My face, within a face, within a face. I always knew what was hidden behind the closet half opened by its reflection before my lids closed, unhinged by the soft side of my pillow.

*Here's a rewrite of a previous draft. I still might need help with the framing.

Poem Draft, Week 12

What I must Have Thought When I Was Two

Looking at my face reflected the same guise,
a vertical panel of teeth not yet grown.
My knowledge of the grand Canyon
and its nightmares does not glimpse so easily
upon my face. I sit as if on a Windsor chair
brightened by the faux sunlight, scrambling
to say something but all that came were gutturals
and half knowing smiles. The ledge of my crib
was where I lingered, spying the unknown world
to colonize as the pale window moonlighted
as my heaven. I gazed through the mirror,
unaware that its reflection was not of another.
Welling from within I did not fear its nightly
gaze upon the closet. I always knew what was
hidden behind that door before my lids closed,
unhinged by the soft side of my pillow.

Poem Draft, Week 11

Elegy

Ask where you were when they built the wooden bridge across the Chattanooga from leavings of railroad pegs and the shed long abandoned on the border of Alabama, that space of illiterate signatures. What pine or oak originated

from those pillars and whose saw slid the chest of every ring? The homeless have no names and sleep under what we might call the crows feet of the wood. Like a bridge made of mortar and stone. The Appalachian sunset is not at war with skyscrapers.

Ask yourself: Whose side are you really on when the city lights mimic the stars so well, and paint a second sky on the Chattanooga?

Draft Revision Post I

There’s a photograph I keep, little known illusion of what was. Remembering that chimera of my family standing together like the paper dolls I used to cut out of stationary paper, bits of our address still peeking out from their feet. The photo fades each time I hold it. I never liked how we smiled anyway. It was my birthday then. You could see the towered cake in the back and Spike the Boston Terrier trying to escape from my sister’s grasp. My mother was never photogenic, her eyes always droop at the sight of a camera. Looking back at how my father could never look at us straight in the eye, his back always turned from us. He left soon after this picture was taken. We knew his back was always turned at us, at our mother. I still keep the picture and remember how to never have my back turned, nor my eyes averted from my reflection.

Note: This is an initial piece I wrote a while back that I would like to work on first. It seems to need some tweaking, but as far as critique goes I was wondering how to keep the more candid use of the language, but try to expand on the images of the draft. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Improv, Week 8

Poem: “Clouds” by Denise Levertov

The clouds as I see them, rising
urgently, roseate in the
mounting of somber power

surging in evening haste over
roofs and hermetic
grim walls—

Last night
As if death had lit a pale light
in your flesh, your flesh
was cold to my touch, or not cold
but cool, cooling, as if the last traces
of warmth were still fading in you.
My thigh burned in cold fear where
yours touched it.

But I forced to mind my vision of a sky
close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move—
a sky of gray mist it appeared—
and how looking intently at it we saw
its gray was not gray but a milky white
in which radiant traces of opal greens,
fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again,
and how only then, seeing the color in the gray,
a field sprang into sight, extending
between where we stood and the horizon,

a field of freshest deep spiring grass
starred with dandelions,
green and gold
gold and green alternating in closewoven
chords, madrigal field.

Is death’s chill that visited our bed
other than what it seemed, is it
a gray to be watched keenly?

Wiping my glasses and leaning westward,
clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning
into myself to see
the colors of truth

I watch the clouds as I see them
in pomp advancing, pursuing
the fallen sun.

Revision:

Seattle fog, the only marriage between the leavings
of the city and clouds who have fallen, are always
gray with a tinge of brown. It condenses on our skin
as we walk from the Saturday house play; Antigone
would never face such a dense wall as we headed
to our lighted apartment as if walking through death’s
dinner party. We were his guests it seems as I clung to the arm
of your Armani suit, our lungs breathing in what could
have been exhaust or the sky, depending on how you
look at it. Looking up from the balcony, I see a lone
mist barely formed across the cuticle of a moon, wipe
my glasses to hide the shiver from your cool touch. What
is there to fear as you turned to sip from your glass of bourbon?
When I was ten, the night sky was never so allusive nor fearful
as I squinted to find the stars of my youth that barely clung
to the night sky. Turning then, I knew as if always knowing
that our deathbed tucked in so tightly could not bring back
what I had seen, the naivety of the unknowing would
hover over us as we dreamed of nothing, nothing at all.

Calisthenic, Week 8

Our story isn’t a file of photographs.
The upended book falls from your
lap or from the kitchen tabletop
with the cover of victoriously armored
women perched upon a bow
or a balcony. You slow motion through
such tales of heroine afterthoughts
as if they were our story in reverse.

The shutter of the camera never captured
their story as much as ours, with words
that blew over every coffee shop we stalked
at 2 am. You mime the Virginia Woolfs
of our day, though she never existed
in my mind. What cyclical breathe calls
you so admonishingly to a day when our
story was, indeed, a file of photographs?
You never understood and neither did I.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 8

Junkyard Quotes, Week 8
1. The vast majority of eastern Oregon is virtually indistinguishable from Alabama.
Conversation
2. I dub thee fat-head.
Conversation with sister after taking in a stray cat with a particularly large head.
3. Lazy days are strangely exhausting.
Facebook status
4. Creation is easy. Also ugly. Hier ist kein warum. Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where. Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race.
Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow

Pedagogy Forum, Week 7

Pedagogy Forum, Week 7

Considering what Zac wrote in his pedagogy forum, I also began to think of how a creative writing class may be taught and what texts to use in such a class. The anthology does have its benefits as far as providing a variety of poems and poets a student can study, yet I also find it beneficial to provide small collections of several poets so that a student may study poems as part of a collective whole. So, I would perhaps consider using an anthology for, perhaps, a less experienced introductory class while in an advanced class, I would introduce a set of poetry collections to create a more focused outlook on a few particular poets so that students can get at least some sense of each poet’s style and context of writing.

Response to Zac Cooper's Improv, Week 7

Introduction to Exposition

I ask them to take their favorite pen
and place it in front of the paper background
like an object which provides scale

or knock on the cover, and notice
that it never sounds hollow.

I say drop a lab-mouse into a paragraph
and watch him weave in and out of letters,

or mingle through the sentences’ bedrooms
and study the wallpaper for symbolism.

I want them to dislodge from plot,
badgering meaning from white spaces
instead of black ink.

But all they want
is to untie themselves from this chair
and flee to the nearest synopsis.

The draft seems to acutely mimic the voice of Billy Collins in which it often takes the poem it improvs from and slightly shifts it into the context of writing a paper rather than a poem. Future drafts could try to shift away for the more overt use of Collins’ poem in which the voice could, perhaps, highlight a more heavy tone as compared to Collins’ lighter tone in his poem. A way to expand on the draft, then, might be to evoke a more descriptive account of the writers themselves or perhaps create a juggling act between the perspective of the speaker and the perspective of the writer to highlight a deeper connotation to their relationship.

Free Write, Week 7

Improv: “The Best Slow Dancer” by David Wagner

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet light-footed sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never
Where you would be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren’t the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else’s partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

Revision:

She always moved through the kitchen as if she danced
a slow dance, a slight flick of the wrist to wipe down
the marble table with cigarette in hand. The pots and pans
hung as suspended as her belated gate, not so much
of a time in the 50s where gin and tonic would have clung
to her breathe. No. She always knew how to answer the call
of the written word each night, another dance all together
as she never saw the eyes within the yellow wallpaper
or the shadow of a woman shaking the cell bars outside
her windowsill. Her bated breath waited still for a time
held in the photograph. She was nine then as her mother
held her with a crooked smile. What figure stood there,
so melancholy still, who did not know that she was the best
slow dancer who danced alone to whisper herself to sleep and remember.

Sign Inventory, Week 7

Poem: “Einstein’s Bathrobe” by Howard Moss

1. The poem seems to bookend with the speaker as the active agent while the bulk of the poem consists of the speaker providing a fly on the wall view of the subject.
2. The speaker of the poem seems to mythologize the simple acts of the subject as the subject would “fly down from the heights to tie his shoes/ And cross the seas to get a glass of milk.”
3. The poem seems to shift its register from a more simplified aesthetic of space with the speaker’s notions of average morning rituals, which moves towards a larger one when the speaker notes on physics leading into thoughts on the universe, and then shifts back into the space of tea time.
4. The poem seems to shift between the domestic space of morning ritual, the pastoral space, and the cosmic space.
5. The beginning and end of the poem seems to indicate the speaker as an active agent of self creation that shifts into the speaker’s perspective on the subject as a creator.
6. The speaker seems to highlight and mythologize the furniture as a shipwreck in the beginning of the poem, yet uses the surrounding furniture and domestic space as irrelevant to the larger world.
7. The impact of the subject as a silent figure seems to juxtapose to the enormity of the mythologized element of his actions and description through the voice of the speaker.
8. The domestic atmosphere of the poem seems to shift most prominently when the speaker compares the subject to a pre-Raphaelite, shaman, and a Frankenstein.
9. The image of the dawn becomes a catalyzed agent as the speaker shifts from the dawn of the domestic space to that of Europe.
10. The speaker seems to use the descriptions of domestic acts as a refrain from the heavy register of the language in the poem, yet also blurs the line between the two within the bulk of the poem.

Improv, Week 7

Poem: “For the Record” by Adrienne Rich

The clouds and the stars didn't wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions

and if here or there a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned-up buildings

intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep them roaming
or dying, no, the cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred

Even the miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds

so many depths of vomit, tears
slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn't volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it

and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.

Revision:

Ask where you were when they built the wooden bridge
across the Chattanooga creek, built from the leavings
of old railroad tracks and the shed long abandoned
along the untouched acreage, just across the border
of Alabama in that liminal space of illiterate signatures.

What pine or oak originated from those pillars? Whose
saw slides through the chest of every ring? The homeless
old women who have no names sleep under the age marks,
remnants of what we might call the crows feet of the wood
cut in their prime. Atlanta bridges made of mortar and stone

never saw such a sight as these. The sunset across Appalachian
Mountains are not at war with the sunset of skyscrapers. Yet
we ask ourselves: Whose side are we really on when the inanimate
stage of city lights hide the stars so well, yet their reflection always
catches its gaze upon the breathe of the Chattanooga?

Calisthenic, Week 7

Exercise: Building language with synecdoche

The arm of the papier-mâché doll, the scented glue, the headline print, the ink sticking to the whitewashed kitchen floor, the button eyes, the strings of newspaper clipping hair, the dried glue on the hands palm, the stained apron, the wet mud under the fingernails, the molding hands.

Papier-mâché
You pinched the end of its body, the arm an extension to the bite of glue without a scent, blurring the headline print: New York Pizzeria, The Bees Knees. The ink smears the white tiled floor as your creation stares blankly through baby blue buttoned eyes. The precision of snipping through layer after layer of paper hair as the mud dries through each palm, wiping the dried clay over your apron. The mud plasters in between fingers as the creators, the hands mold until nothing remains.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 7

Junkyard Quotes, Week 7
1. Blame the vain for what we wear, and blame the blind when we can’t see.
Song lyric, “Blame the Vain”
2. I just realized my hair is feathered. I must be out of date.
random conversation
3. I don’t need no makeup, I got real scars.
random conversation
4. When there's no future how can there be sin we're the flowers in the dustbin.
Song lyric, “God Save the Queen”

Pedagogy Forum, Week 6

Discussions on the difficulties concerning the public school system and how such difficulties stem from a certain lack of freedom from the teacher’s perspective made me think of how a lot could be learned to instill nuanced ways of teaching. By facilitating small changes in the classroom to introduce a more discursive means of communicating with students, one could then promote teaching styles and projects beyond the norm and perhaps encourage further change in the system. I think poetry among other subjects could be a perfect venue for such discursive attributes as writing poetry is in and of itself discursive in its processes. Poetry is an act of refamiliarizing oneself to the everyday, creating an uncanny point of view to a subject, object, or any other means of interpreting and sensing the world around us. One’s ability to hone such refamiliarization can and does open avenues for deeper learning and understanding that can be applied to the way we develop our education and what we do with such knowledge.

Response to Chris Yarbrough's Calisthenic, Week 6

Tasers patrol the mall for chances to silence Hollister and Aeropostle. Fads change with season as feet weep across the depressing ground.
Neon signs demand gifts from Black Friday crusaders adrenaline wastes away in the food court as respect and glory melt with each "super-sale" on Maybelline.

This exercise brings about an interesting way of culling the standard cliché of “emo” poetry by playing around with the language of the uncanny. The provided draft is a good start for expanding on such an exercise and there were a few elements that I wanted to point out with this particular piece. For one, the fact that the mall guards are presented as “tasers” is one interesting move to make in the very beginning as such a move indicates a kind of synecdoche, where the part represents the whole. Though I’m not sure if Chris is aware of this, it would be an interesting direction to go with describing the guards. Another shift that caught my eye was the description of shoppers as crusaders, which could also be expanded in description. Although the draft seems a bit allusive in it’s current state, the examples I have provided here should act as a gateway for future drafts.

Free Write, Week 6

Improv: “Memories of West Street and Lepke” by Robert Lowell

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.

These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections. . . .

Revision:
I always read to my daughter while still in our pajamas, my baby blue to her vermillion. We always bookwormed through peasants turned to princes. Tuesday night was our night to scavenge through gingerbread children as we scattered the spoons lined in a tower. I am forty and still fire-breathe through Catholicism, a ritualistic sort of metaphor always condemning my covet of her brunette hair. I wait for my sentencing as she falls deeply against my chest. In a year, all would be forgot. Our late night strolls through our stories. She’ll acquire a new sort of diet, Foucault perhaps. Given many years we walk the roof of my old high school and watch the river of grass on the soccer field as if it were the Hudson. Looking down at her heels I ponder still how age becomes us, an age that no Grimm’s tale can bring back. So be it.

Pedagogy Forum, Week 5

After helping mentor a genre poetry class with editing and finding their signs, I found that adjusting to different people and different writing styles becomes an important aspect to teaching a writing intensive course. What helped the most with working each student, I believe, was opening the dialogue with the poem they are working on to find a specific element in the poem through such dialogue. Helping the students was quite similar to how we have discussed sign inventories in class, yet at, perhaps, a different level and perspective as many of the students were new to studying and understanding poetry. The signs I discussed with the students varied as some often jumped to interpretation while others named more than one sign to work with so I was then able to focus on several ways of approaching the mentoring process.

Sign Inventory, Week 6

Poem: “Amusing Our Daughters” by Carolyn Kizer

1. The first line of the poem uses negative uses of the language to represent a positive position.
2. The poem seems to use the recursive image of bundled daughters twice, which perhaps evokes an underlying image of restriction.
3. The semiotics of food and eating shifts within the poem and evokes a domestic act in both cases.
4. The second stanza seems to indicate a static state of being with the repetition of the phrase “nothing happens.”
5. The negation of loss becomes blurred by the static as well as positive language in this piece.
6. The first stanza shifts the context of defining people as a group by being “people one meets, not people one cares for,” “and with my brother poets, go visit you brother,” “Here come your guests!” and “a swarm of strangers.”
7. The poem creates a certain peripheral view of the pastoral in the first and last stanza.
8. The poem seems to portray the daughters in a peripheral and almost systematic way through lines such as “We waken and count our daughters,” and “Nothing occurs, though we are aware you have three daughters who last year had four.”
9. The poem uses negative space created by numbering the subject’s daughters and noting on the missing fourth daughter.
10. The use of the collective in the first stanza seems to connote to a certain strategy where the individual becomes a minute figure.

Improv, Week 6

Poem: “A View” by Mona Van Duyn

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

Revision:

Looking through the glassed black wall, I see my father’s name there. An epigraph, but perhaps not. Strange how my gaze becomes the wall between us, as I simulate the breathe of his breathe. I notice turning out from that gravestone, how my tainted figure shines on the edges as if the wick burned, always on my left side. I see the reflection of the figures behind me waving, blank faces crowding and distorting that black reflection. Eyes drilling through, yet the name chipped there never moved. They were like a madness called down on my head. Everything moves backwards, always backwards as each reflected figure turned to leave until I remained, otherworldly as my father might have been before the wick faded and no reflection remained.

Calisthenics, Week 6

Object Study: Math Compass

Calculations in reverse, in a constant V.
The point of a half pencil always in the state
of wearing down, never pointed at the equation,
the obtuse look in your eye at its half circle
musings. The flick of the wrist constructing
pi again and again, much like swirls of cream
in coffee, cigarette smoking intangibles,
or the clock ticking still. Acute was what
you were looking for, the angle turning
in, constricting numerical forms, utterances
of the Pythagorean Theorem, going backward
always backward as if your unbirth could rename
the womb. You could always number every
person you met, yet could not remember
the names, every name of a first kiss, the last
smile of your grandmother, the slanted glance
of a spiteful lover; always turning, turning
to a point, back to pi, the never ending story.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 6

1. This week as sucked slightly more than average.
Conversation
2. This is either going to be an awesome idea or a very bad idea.
Conversation
3. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious. Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish.
World War Z, Max Brooks
4. The facts were out; it was now a question of who would believe them.
World War Z, Max Brooks

Response to Michael Brown's Free Write, Week 5

The greasy pole segments your body
dividing into disjointed scorpion tails.
Venomous poison under lights
Neon gas causes morals to rot and bloat

Water can't wash away memories,
hands under the tap, scrubbing
at Georgia riverstones, carrying them
away until they are smooth pebbles,
small pills to swallow and be full.

When water fills the cup, it becomes the cup
when it fills a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
When if fills the teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Water can flow, or it can crash,
grind and drown and weigh down your pockets,
keeping you here and washing you away.

Every night, a shower isn't enough,
too green tiles with dirty grout isn't enough;
Perfumed soap, the smell of lilacs and sweet pea and cucumber melon isn't enough
to drown you out.

This draft seems to shift into the more elusive in its execution, yet certain strategies evoked here could still be applied in future drafts. For example, the third stanza seems to use tautophrases to convey meaning in which a phrase repeats an idea in the same words. Also, such repetition could be twisted within the language to convey new ways of looking at an object without becoming too redundant.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 5

1. Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone warrants their doom.
White Noise, Don DeLillo
2. Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn…They are taking pictures of taking pictures.
White Noise, Don DeLillo
3. I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give precious texture to life, a sense of definition?
White Noise, Don DeLillo
4. The Definitive Guide to What to Do If Your Eyeball Pops Out
gawker.com

Free Write, Week 5

Improv: “The Night Mirror” by John Hollander

Looking at her face showed the same guise,
a vertical panel of teeth not yet grown.
The child’s knowledge of the Grand Canyon
and its nightmares does not glimpse so easily
upon her face. She sits as if on a Windsor chair
brightened by faux sunlight, scrambling to tell
me something but all that came were gutturals
and half knowing smiles. The ledge of her crib
was where she lingered, spying the unknown
world to colonize as the pale window moonlighted
as her heaven. The mirror she gazed through, through
her simulacrum but unaware that its reflection
was not of another. Welling from within she did
not fear it’s nightly gaze upon her closet. She
always knew what it was before as her lids
closed, unhinged by the soft side of her pillow.

Sign Inventory, Week 5

Poem: “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” by Richard Hugo

1. The element of time span reverberates throughout the poem, shifting from one era to the next.
2. The “you” in the poem seems to act as a static agent as his or her voice becomes muted throughout the piece until the last stanza shows slight agency, but only because the speaker states what the “you” says.
3. The third stanza repeats question after question as a building block before the last stanza.
4. The last stanza remains ambiguous to the answering of the questions in the third stanza.
5. The term “silver” repeats throughout the poem in several different contexts, perhaps making a shift in meaning with the repetitive shift in the time frame.
6. The time spans mentioned before seem to create a general sense of time while the only specific date given is 1907.
7. The poem presents certain phrases and words, such as “last,” “only,” “resolves,” etc. that provide the illusion of permanence within the context.
8. The poem seems to convey the indistinct sense of places, such as the churches, jail, mill etc. yet twists such general areas with the specific names of places, such as Butte and Philipsburg.
9. The second stanza seems to shift back and forth between images of urban and pastoral sense of place.
10. The poem seems to make a perspective shift from the image of the church in the first stanza to questioning the church in the third stanza.

Improv, Week 5

Poem: “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Revision: Advice to the Prophetess at the He & She Hair Salon

You speak of Mrs. Tiller living in sin with her lovers when her husband is away. You speak of her son, the rapscallion, who stalks still at the dive bar, The Junction every Thursday as he drinks to himself and his only companion, the Ferrari. His wheels on heels so to speak. You pinpoint every hair on poor Ms. Decker’s lip, never forgetting the tsk before whispering spinster with your eyes upturned. You tell stories that are not stories. Fragments I say. Truth you reply.

What should we be without these things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask, I say, ask what it means to remember your own birth, think back and remember the womb and wonder still whether thoughts so lofty and wise simulate Mrs. Tiller’s pink toes as a child so new. Or young Johnny with his Ferrari, such a fleeting thought to the history of playground swings and sitting always alone in sandbox castles. Your words will fail us, under the scrutiny of each quick shear of the bangs, paid in full and the echo of steps leaving behind discontent words.

Calisthenics, Week 5

In-class exercise:

We are ten and the art virtue at the High couldn’t trace our primal quiet. We were Italian, profuse and lavish, venting our literature in an ill terrain. Memories of Iran multiply in quotes above our heads, a belly past, too contrite and urban as our apartment. Inferior genius roams as our fathers attack alternatives of money and music. Every mile we walked at the High memorializes quaint numbers as we regain the dawn of a Dali. We tote the love insignia a petite virulence we always accorded, an impenetrable tainted animus, a calisthenic in the making.

Pedagogy Forum, Week 4

I found that by discussing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” perhaps how a poem is read could and should be an important element to teaching creative writing. The implication of students reading poetry out loud as well as listening to other poets read their own poetry becomes an art in and of itself, which adds to the process of understanding and indicating the several processes one takes to write and teach poetry. Having an eye and ear for the language of each poem, perhaps, heightens the student’s ability to apply certain phonemic strategies to their own writing as well.

Response to Zac Cooper's Free Write, Week 4

I found the recursive use of the language in this free write working quite well for a beginning draft, though I would suggest that repetition should be used with reserve so as not to let it completely control the content of future drafts. A way to approach a revision of this draft would be to pull and expand from interesting images and then, perhaps, apply the repetition to those images in a subtle manner, which I find to be a useful practice. Sometimes with a draft such as this, you look at each repetition and pull from what draws the most interest. You may find just that one phrase or utterance works the most efficiently in which case you do this exercise again with perhaps a similar triggering subject until you’ve constructed enough interesting language to start thinking about a more concrete poem.

While the mind sleeps atop cushions a soldier mingles
across a bar. The bars across his uniform
spawn from screaming , so says the media.
A soldiering mind searching for cushions, for sleep
to bar the truth. Yet the truth does not matter
for those screaming, searching for what matters.
They all sleep. In a spawning ground
for mediated minds. And
their screams become mingled, the truth
barred from media, screaming cushioned lies
to uniformed minds

Free Write, Week 4

Improv: “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

He means, I think, there’s an out,

built of these fistfuls of yellows.
Means, I think, there’s a door,

in this passionate and hard-won
approximation, in this rough push

and lemon smear, this difficulty,

there’s—what? In the meadows,
yesterday, great heavy presences

of the trees thinking, rimmed

around the perimeter of the field:
pendulous, weighted trees

here to be emerald pull
and resistance, suspended

their given hour, the meadow arranging itself

into this huge composition which invites
and resists at once, the world’s hung

surface: aren’t we always wanting
to push beyond it, as if behind the scrim

--old lure and spur, old promise—

lay…The bright core
breathing? Why can’t you just

love sheer play, these forms’
dynamic irresolutions

on the surface of the day?

These trees only seem still,
fixed their hour in the rush

and suction from that gate:
can’t you just walk between the yellow

word field and the green word door
and not demand to penetrate

the primed and stubborn scrim
toward some clarity beyond forms?

Written in a sidewalks new cement:
Be happy it’s really all you have.

Happiness? Our possession
is yellow and green, dialectic

occupying the meadows,

arranging for us this moment
and the next (I’m not afraid

to die, I’m afraid to continue
in this tumult of collisions

and vanishing),
the ocher word
meadow, the green word door.
Listen,
there’s a door in these yellow handfuls,
these wild strokes
Haven’t you walked

into something like happiness but larger?
Just yesterday, inside the meadow’s

goldenrod perimeter,
near evening, in the stubble-grass,

eye-level with furled umbles
of wild carrot, chains of burr

and burdock and the clovers’ half dry blooms,

I pressed my stomach against
the warm surface of the field,

sunlight drowsing and slanting
toward us while the dogs and I

lay easy and with no need to be
anywhere. We heard a woman calling,

in a European accent, German maybe, her dog,

her chocolate Lab, who was mousing
with great patience and dedication, and she

with her patience and dedication
was calling Jackie, Jackie without urgency

because she knew Jackie would come.

That’s when I went through
the door. It was her voice,

the name pronounced softly
over and over and above the tender

yellow scent of the grass and the hurry

of intimately related and endlessly
varied yellows, the sunflowers’

golden insistences, little violet
spiking in the eyes of asters

sparking the whole field into something

like a quivering although entirely still,
and still my two curled companions

not sleeping but like me

alert and perhaps also poised
at an instance when the whole ceaseless

push and tumble arrived at some
balance and there was no lack, nothing

missing from the world,
and for the duration of that sheen

—during which you know
this moment of equipoise

is more movement of light

and flesh and grass passing through
the corridor, the world’s mild maw

of dynamic motion—
Jackie, she said, Jackie, yellow word,

and for that astonished instant

hung on the other side, permitted
entrance to the steep

core of things you think
of course this is what death

will be. Fine.

Revision:
I think he means the emerald figures, the trees who won
over the lawyers from Birmingham, Alabama.
We never look at the lemon smeared sunsets the same way.
Arranging themselves, those dogwoods and pine,
as if suspended by earthen glory, a composition written,
the pendulum of their bodies always reminded
him of their solemn promise. How else would death
call us he would ask as we passed through the
door of two arching branches that clung to our arms.
Simulacrum is a yellow word I tell him. It’s green
he would reply. As children we wrote our names
on the sidewalk next to imprinted hands that were
not our own, though we claimed them to be. The city
lights always lingered on our eyes back then, a golden
insistence. Now, we strip heads of grass from a nearby meadow,
though some refused to bend to a will other than their own.
Happiness was never a color to us, but a whimper
of a Whippoorwill. That is how death calls us I tell him. Fine.

Sign Inventory, Week 4

Poem: “Revision” by Carl Phillips

1. The recursive image of erasure appears several times in the poem, yet ends with the idea of recognition.
2. The poem begins with a question of identity and ends with the speaker calling the subject to speak first in which he will answer.
3. The recursive dynamic between naming and namelessness appears several times throughout the poem.
4. The only time a “you” appears is at the end of the poem.
5. The poem makes several lengthy asides dealing with pastoral images of leaves and the wind.
6. The recursivity of concrete, pastoral images, such a “leaves,” “wind,” and “river” are often paired with more abstract concepts, such as the “mind,” “trust,” “belief,” etc.
7. The poem seems to bookend with the “my” in the beginning of the poem and the “you” at the end of the poem in which the middle section of the poem seems to connect the two figures with the speaker’s directive discourse with the “people.”
8. The poem seems to utilize the indecisive usage of language through, for example, the question in the beginning where the speaker uses “or,” “neither,” and “possibly” among others.
9. The effect of time in this poem seems to indicate the trope longevity within the language as the speaker often refers to “long hours,” “time in its direction,” “the days,” “forever after,” “afternoon,” and “ending.”
10. The language of seems to shift from the static existence of the speaker to the active existence of the pastoral.

Improv, Week 4

Poem: “My Father’s Back” by Edward Hirsch

There's an early memory that I carry around
In my mind
like an old photography in my wallet,
little graying and faded, a picture
That I don't much like
but nonetheless keep,
Fingering it now and then like a sore tooth,
Knowing it there,
not needing to see it anymore....

The sun slants down on the shingled roof.
The wind breathes in the needled pines.
And I am lying in the grass on my third birthday,
Red-faced and watchful
but not squalling yet,
Not yet rashed or hived up
from eating the wrong food
Or touching the wrong plant,
my father's leaving.

A moment before he was holding me up
Like a new trophy, and I was a toddler
With my face in the clouds,
spinning arund
With a head full of stars,
getting so dizzy.
A moment before I was squealing with joy
In the tilt-a-whirl of his arms,
Drifting asleep in the cavern of his chest....

I remember waking up to the twin peaks
Of his shoulders moving away, a shirt clinging
To his massive body,
a mountain receding.
I remember the giant distance between us:
A drop or two rain, a sheen on the lawn,
And then I was sitting up
in the grainy half-light
Of a man walking away from his family.

I don't know why we go over the old hurts
Again and again in our minds, the false starts
And true beginnings
of a world we call the past,
As if it could tell us who we are now,
Or were, or might have been....
It's drizzling.
A car door slams, just once, and he's gone.
Tiny pools of water glisten on the street.



Revision:
There’s a photograph I keep, little known illusion of what was. Remembering that chimera of my family standing together like the paper dolls I used to cut out of stationary paper, bits of our address still peeking out from their feet. The photo fades each time I hold it. I never liked how we smiled anyway. It was my birthday then. You could see the towered cake in the back and Spike the Boston Terrier trying to escape from my sister’s grasp. My mother was never photogenic, her eyes always droop at the sight of a camera. Looking back at how my father could never look at us straight in the eye, his back always turned from us. He left soon after this picture was taken. We knew his back was always turned at us, at our mother. I still keep the picture and remember how to never have my back turned, nor my eyes averted from my reflection.

Calisthenics, Week 4

In class calisthenics:

The mocking light of a streetlamp gazes on these flowers still kempt in a sunflower vase, It was the moon that hit your eyes as if the residue of a stagnant light throbbed and echoed through our bed where the two thin lines never pursed and the steely moonlight caught the edge of the mirror. I only love the grace my mother’s touch as the low hum of your abated breathe and the saturation of blood and non-adolescence premised our union, a trolley and its track could not undo the two words escaping your lips. You fear my whip of a nightingale’s feather, of a parade of churchgoers that silences us into quarantine. The paternal no longer rises against the bed of asphalt. Made unwise and swallowing the juiced hue as the prick of my nail upon the orange that is not. Shallow with sweat , with that ring on your finger, a warm bed never awaited us.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 4

Junkyard Quotes, Week 4
1. You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
Salvador Dali
2. Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dali
3. Mr. Belding autographed my baby!
facebook status, Lindy
4. Soldiers are given 3 stress cards.
random conversation

Pedagogy Forum, Week 3

After discussing issues of pedagogy with a professor and how to implement professional skills within the classroom, a few highlights on how to do so under the umbrella of creative writing became a bit more clear. One considerable aspect includes the very act of critiquing a student's draft in the workshop setting. I believe that creating a balance between encouraging the writing and providing productive criticism becomes a skill that can be applied to other tasks in the academic and teaching workforce as it builds one's ability to perceive what needs to be encouraged and what needs to be applied when certain habitual mistakes are made. Being delicately aware of a student's progress through such a mode of thinking could provide the experience needed to encourage and enforce effective teaching.

Response to Jeff Roper's Improv, Week 3

There was an amaranthine oak
That had to tower fort-y feet
climb down, a small dare, fear

froze me in
time, as movement proved
impossible, persuasion,

both, from the peer
perhaps mostly,
stranger, his anger.

A-Shudder in
time. I step laboriously from
fort-branch towards, tree-branch.

The moment, the body
leaving surfaces, knows
its falling

into the air, still it
fumbles for grounding
wrestling space.

I have thought, since, of
how foolish—and I know now
to resist it, was futile yet

stepping, on air
upon air, I hoped on
that impossible and last wish

of finding a branch along
the way, to sustain me.
I will die, and I cannot

rest on how it’s possible,
not possible, so
young-minds, trust, scramble

stupidly. Not the soul
to think on now, unnatural
prayer, which is for life.

For with age comes wisdom,
a true sense of time,
but youth believes, amaranthine.

The improvisation seems to function as a reminiscence of a childhood memory that shifts between the perspective of the child to the perspective of an adult. What I found interesting about this piece was the response to it after Jeff wrote it. The shift from adolescence to adulthood could be an interesting way to create a juggling act in this draft as the memory of the speaker and the actually thoughts of the child could mingle with each other, creating a kind of liminal space from what is actually occurring to what the speaker remembers of the event. Doing so could create an interesting juggling act between the two which could then be combined and blurred near the end of the poem. Also, some the language could be expanded through showing the abstractions in the work, instead of telling with such words as "fear froze me,"impossible," "persuasion," and perhaps the idea of futility could be expanded as well.

Free Write, Week 3

Impov: “Voices from the Other World” by James Merrill

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,
Then circled lazily about
From A to Z. The first voice heard
(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)
Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne.
Dead in his 22nd year
Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN
NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.
Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde
Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,
Some childish and, you might say, blurred
By sleep; one little boy
Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled
Back the arras for that next voice,
Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.
FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.
OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed
Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.
Each night since then, the moon waxes,
Small insects flit round a cold torch
We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,
Dictate addresses, begging us to write;
Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom
In way’s that so exhilarate
We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.
Indeed, we have grown nonchalant
Towards the other world. In the gloom here,
our elbows on the cleared
Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone
Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,
Than by those clamoring overhead,
Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment
We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit
By the cold reflections of the dead
Risen extinct but irresistible,
Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,
Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

Revision:
The new voices echo, lost loved ones chime
at the coffins steady slide.
The white walls reverberating
every whisper of who he once was: a carpenter
husband to two wives, father of children
too young to know the unbeating, theno-breathe
receding into the body that lay there. Once the music
procession ceases its lowly hum, the echoes still
resonating against that pillar, that line
of pews squealing from each shift of body,
the bodily collective and the silentcough.
Would he reminisce with Goethe or perhaps
Foucault in the world ahead? Or wonder still
how the bated breathe of every nail he hammered
through his adolescent years could bring back
the resemblance of his unblinking eye.

Sign Inventory, Week 3

Poem: “The Assassination” by Donald Justice
pg. 202 of Contemporary American Poetry

1. The poem highlights recursive elements in the language evoking through the first word of each line, such as “It,” “We,” “Now” and “Here” then breaks the chain of recursivity at the end of the first and second stanza.
2. The poem seems to play with the agency of the language between the static and the active as it often uses such verbs as “begins,” courses,” “mounts,” etc., but shifts with “to be” verbs throughout.
3. The subject of the poem shifts from the “we” in the first stanza to the “I” in the last stanza.
4. The subject of “It” in the poem shifts from active to passive agency as the first stanza implies its individual activity as it “courses” and “mounts” until the “We” becomes “involved with the surge.” The second stanza uses passive voice as the “It” is being acted upon rather than evoking the active agent.
5. The only distinctive characters in the poem are the woman selling carnations and the man in a straw hat.
6. The only seeming sense of the speaker addressing the subject or subjects occurs in the last line of the poem when the speaker states, “Look, we are dancing.”
7. Nearly every line formulates as a full statement, yet the poem seems to subvert such a recursive element at the end of each stanza until the last stanza completely subverts it.
8. The verb usage for “It” seems to shift from the first to the second stanza in the first stanza, “It begins,” “It courses” and “It mounts” while in the second stanza the verbs “burst” and “running” seems to evoke a speedier agency.
9. The last four lines of the poem seem to blur the lines of what “It” connotes to as the speaker introduces the ballroom and the orchestra.
10. All throughout the poem, “It” seems to actively move through the transformation of the verbs, yet in the last stanza, “It” goes through the act of confinement when it shelters itself.

Improv, Week 3

Poem: “Thoughts on One’s Head” by William Meredith

A person is very self-conscious about his head.
It makes one nervous just to know it is cast
In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead
The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last.

We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is,
Than to the interesting and involute interior:
The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places
Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria.

The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown
To anyone not accompanied by an adult.
The marquee out front maintains a superior tone:
Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult.

The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty.
These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops
About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city.
The female head is mounted on rococo props.

Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums
Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning;
This is the first place everybody comes
With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning.

This particular head, to my certain knowledge
Has been taught to read and write, make love and money,
Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college,
And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny.

It was further taught to know and to eschew
Error and sin, which it does erratically.
This is the place the soul calls home just now.
One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.


Revision:

The self conscious hum, a quizzical glance at the big toe
and wondering still, what its purpose may lead. Does death
call to you so nonchalantly? Casting the eye upon its bulbous
mass, a disfigured finger would have sufficed. Rarely are
you able to play majestically on the piano with such gusto,
always in the way, always. You stubbed your toe just two
days ago and cursed its existence when the toe, in fact, was
always meant for stubbing and cursing. We pay so much attention
to its blank gaze. Remember when you were so young and you
thought your father a sadistic torturer?
Every time your tooth was loose, he would tie the thinnest
string upon that same toe, tie the other end to your tooth
and make you giggle with his good buddy grace until
you pulled the tooth out in one quick swipe. What was
so wrong with that you asked? You could doll it up. French
tips I say. You retort with such vehemence, that judgment
day will come and we will all be buried in silhouetted shoes,
hiding, always hiding, the reason why we could never see
the one error of our bodies, that one flaw to our forming.

Calisthenics, Week 3

Experimental Lexical Accretion:

Who grew up bent over a chess board?
Why you did as you pondered your neighbor
undressing her crimson self across your window.

Who grew up so poor they had to take the place of bait in a mouse trap?
It was Lindsay who always sat across from us at the cafeteria,
her sweater covered in sauce as if she painted it on herself.

Who began to grieve for awkwardness and ignorance?
The cop that stopped your sister, he never knew what was coming
as her pale lips whispered nothing before her eyes rolled back for the last time.

Who looks for something that’s been there every day of your life?
Her grandmother, always searching, searching for the bottle caps,
the linen, and the eyes of her cats as if they could bring everything back.

Who went to the Irish Pub in New Orleans, Louisiana?
Why I believe we did as we drank the bourbon of our youth away,
saturating in the coastal swagger, the bitter tides of questions with no answers.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 3

1. What we feel isn't important. It's utterly unimportant. The only question is what we do. If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?
Film, The Reader
2. The notion of secrecy is central to western literature. You may say, the whole idea of character is defined by people holding specific information which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are determined not to disclose.
Film, The Reader
3. I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
4. Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Pedagogy Forum, Week 2

Trista's pedagogy forum that alludes to the question as to whether creative writing can be taught--which I also believe to be a tired, but always present question--led me to think about the presumptions (i.e. poetry comes out of inspiration or thin air) of creative writing and how, as a teacher, one might try to deconstruct such presumptions in the first few creative writing classes they teach. Doing so could lay the foundation for a more integrative understanding that creative writing is, in fact, a skill not entirely developed innately, if at all. Therefore, by organizing and developing linguistic exercises through improvisation, free-writing, or other forms of writing could reveal the creative process involved in writing poetry or other forms of creative writing. As an unnamed professor told me, learning to write can be a bit like learning how to golf. Certain stances in golf create a sense of physical awkwardness that can be compared to the awkwardness of creating highly unusual utterances with language and therefore, takes much skill to teach that aspect of writing.

Response to Trista's Free Write, Week 2

I love the concept of this poem draft as it takes an unlikely domestic space and subverts it into an unlikely connotation of a rather sensual subject. The expansion of the draft could imply a more detailed understanding of the couple itself and how the fetish metaphor came to pass. The concept, it seems, remains more objective to the relationship between Martha and her husband. Also, perhaps a tighter ending to the draft could create many possibilities for the poem, perhaps by inserting rare instances of the husband’s perspective among other ideas. The images of the domestic could connote towards the ideal of the nifty fifties era and the subversive poetry coming out of that time, the most obvious being Plath and Sexton as offhand examples.

Free Write, Week 2

One afternoon the last week of April she answers the bothersome telephone. It hangs from heaven to earth and looks on the world as on another cloud. The hills like burnt pages, where does this door lead? I walked away with your face stolen from a crowded room. A person is very self conscious about his head and despair is big with friends I love. I had a vision of the moth-force a small town always has. Not my hands, but green across you now. We still love there in thundering foam and love, lying there lily still. One more day gone, found in the form of days.

Sign Inventory, Week 2

"Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa

1. The poem connotes the idea of the speaker disappearing with such phrases as “My black face fades”(1), “hiding inside”(2), “clouded reflection”(6).
2. The speaker continually asserts himself as part of the stone wall with such references as “hiding inside the black granite”(2), “I’m stone”(5), “…I’m inside/ the Vietnam Veterans Memorial”(11), “I’m a window”(27).
3. The image of the speaker’s distorted reflection appears throughout the poem, such as in the lines “My black face fades,/hiding in the black granite”(1-2), “My clouded reflection eyes me”(6).
4. The idea of erasure appears in the beginning and end of the poem, yet the speaker continually defines himself by declarations of existence: “I’m stone. I’m flesh”(5), “I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial”(11), “I’m a window”(27).
5. The only other instances that the speaker mentions color other than black occurs when viewing the reflections on the wall, such as the white flash, the red bird, and the white vet.
6. The only concrete physical image between the speaker and the wall occurs when he touches the name Andrew Jackson.
7. The lines “I’m stone. I’m flesh”(5), and “The sky. A plane in the sky” (24) distinguishes from the way the rest of the poem is written through their short declarative form.
8. The image of flight or floating appears several times through the red bird, the plane in the sky, and the white vet’s image floating next to the speaker.
9. The agency of the action in the poem seems to shift from static to active.
10. The poem seems to focus on one of many actions perceivably made to the wall through the reflections the speaker views.

Improv, Week 2

Poem: “Belle Isle, 1949” by Philip Levine

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.

Improv:

The gray river seeps its oiled hue like the residue
of an apocalyptic painting, drawn from cigarette

ash of a lover’s lips flicked across the bridge,
baptized by street lamps and the mid sunset fog

circling the city. The starlight never peeked
through the brine, the green peaks of swamp grass,

the heavy wall of steam and smoke speaking
in circles above the stove factory you could

leap to from the rocky monument of that same
river, cobble shrine of lost childhood names.

The gray shore reminisces the Toyota tire
long abandoned by the factory worker marching,

marching still in the depths of the industrial cogs,
unaware of the river’s keen eye, or dying breathe.

Calisthenics, Week 2

In class calisthenics:

Toward the end of his long discourse a panegyric…still it’s decent pay. Five soldiers fixed by Matthew Brady’s eye. Small mustachioed Turks, digging for the purple Moldovan stamps at Dallas County jail. No stronghold can protect those hours without twenty years delay, poets who fail. He was obsessed with success. Touching is like that, begin by looking for peaches. I can’t envision the howling buoy. In contrast to the triumphal procession of victors coming down the road like a piece of the road dissevered. I am in a house in a Japanese print.


I am a house in Japanese print, a road dissevered,
a triumphal procession of victors. I can’t envision
a howling buoy that no stronghold can protect,
those hours without twenty years delay. Poets
fail toward a panegyric, a long discourse
of small mustachioed Turks who begin by looking
for peaches, obsessed with success. Touching
is like that, like a house, a road, a victory.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 2

1. I have wet hair like a horror movie victim.
facebook status
2. I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.
Michael, The Big Chill
3. It's not surprising our friendship could survive that. It's only out there in the real world that it gets tough.
Nick, The Big Chill
4. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
Ecclesiastes

Pedagogy Forum, Week 1

The first class of the semester provided an insightful outlook on how to introduce a creative writing class by initially enacting a writing exercise to share with the entire class. I believe that by starting off with an exquisite corpse type of exercise allowed for groundwork into introducing each classmate with their initial sense of each student’s writing and editing style. By sharing the result of the linguistic wordplay and then allowing class discussion into how the exercises could be further edited seemed to create the sense of teaching creative writing as a communal act rather than just following the teacher into a particular direction. The ability to lead a class into discourse with the writing, then, becomes one of many key aspects to developing a creative writing class.

Response to Jonette's Free Write, Week 1

The act of creating a list of rhymes and forming a poem around such rhymes provides an introductory catalyst into the act of writing. Rather than writing with a clear subject in mind, this practice utilizes the language and allows for linguistic play, opening ways one could let the language lead rather than trying to formulate around the subject. Also, this seemingly simplistic practice could allow for the poet to open their ears to the sounds of language and could eventually be used in the practice of more subtle internal rhymes in future poems. Having an ear for language provides useful skills within the spectrum of creative writing as it could lead to an unexpected combination of wordplay to a degree.

Free Write, Week 1

Improv: “In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has
Been Condemned” by James Wright

Beyond the riverside against the grain of Ohio’s
border she grieves alone in the hobo light, her coat
askew with vinegar and buttons sewn without thread.

She pondered and gazed at the open doors of the maid
who drowns in the lock and key at the Hilton.
Who grasps the hand of one who was always drowning

in the Ohio’s dissidence? Or wonder still, how the brothel
women carrying trench coats in Virginia’s stale air
belittle her so, when only two shores lead the way to

salvation or to the tender smell of ripe peaches you
only find in Georgia.

Sign Inventory, Week 1

Poem: “My Shoes” by Charles Simic
pg. 432 in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

1. The poem shifts the agency of the speaker through each stanza by the use of the possessive “my” to “me” and to the “you” when conveying the purpose of the shoes.
2. The fourth stanza is the only moment that the speaker uses the first person “I” in the poem.
3. The poem bookends the image of the shoes with the first stanza describing them as “toothless mouths” and “partly decomposed animal skins/Smelling of mice nests,” while the last stanza provides more animate and personified images with the shoes being “ascetic and maternal” and more in kin “to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,/ With your mute patience, forming/ The only true likeness of myself.”
4. The third stanza is the only one to open with a question.
5. The first two stanzas evoke images of decomposition, decay, and death while the last two stanzas evoke the ideas of building, endurance, and formation.
6. The words “Gospel” and “Saints” are the only two words capitalized outside of grammatical correctness.
7. The agency shifts from “continuing” and “guiding” of the shoes in the second stanza to the speaker who would “proclaim,” “devise,” and build around the shoes in the fourth stanza.
8. The poem mentions the term “life” three times, all in different contexts.
9. The poem mentions the shoes as “toothless mouths” in the first stanza and having “mute patience” in the last stanza.
10. The first stanza creates a catalogue of specific and concrete images while the last stanza creates a catalogue of more abstract images of the shoes.

Improv, Week 1

Poem: “The Dream” by Irving Feldman

Once, years after your death, I dreamt
you were alive and that I’d found you
living once more in the old apartment.
But I had taken a woman up there
to make love to in the empty rooms.
I was angry at you who’d borne and loved me
and because of whom I believe in heaven.
I regretted your return from the dead
and said to myself almost bitterly,
“For godsakes, what was the big rush,
couldn’t she wait one more day?”

And just so, daily somewhere Messiah
is shunned like a beggar at the door because
someone has something he wants to finish
or just something better to do, something
he prefers not to put off forever
—some little pleasure so deeply wished
that Heaven’s coming has to seem bad luck
or worse, God’s intruding selfishness!

But you always turned Messiah away
with a penny and a cake for his trouble
—because wash had to be done, because
who could let dinner boil over and burn,
because everything had to be festive for
your husband, your daughters, your son.

Improv:

To shun the lamb and the beggar after you died
years ago after dreaming of your dinner boiling
over the gas stove long in need of a new burner.
You could never fit in the ideal of the nifty fifty
porch swing aprons and cleaning, cleaning, clinging
to the penniless afterthoughts of husbandry
and the doings of poker night, always a cold
Heineken, 5:30, on the dot. The rituals flung by you:
dress the kids, make the PB&J before 8am, clean,
knit, clean, iron, never a thought came across
your countenance until the death bed where the lamb
and the beggar asked one simple request, to wonder
and dream what could have been, what could have been.

Calisthenics, Week 1

Foundations: Exercises
Expansion/contraction modes

The bitter split between the crack of a rotting apple and the justice of a blinded alley in the early year does not alter your countenance, the thin break of grass under your feet. The tip of your fingers, the shotgun shells or leavings of the sea. No one could tell other than you. How does the honey bee’s steady faith beat against the stain glass window? We never knew when we passed that same abandoned church each day, always aware of the train’s throb as we walked those abandoned tracks, those same tracks leading our adolescence further apart. The bottle caps we used to flip across the interstate where you always wondered which 62 Buick had carried your father away before you were born, wondering how the dinner table was bare of silently reading the New York Times to your mother: the world of stock exchanges and the War. What clings to our cyclical breathe so sweet yet so distant as the language of ever was no time at all for us.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 1

1. And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you?
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
2. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
3. Nothing like playing the Backstreet Boys to get your testosterone pumping at the gym.
conversation, Lindy
4. I had this dream we were at this game and then there was a tornado and everyone was like ARGH and we hid in a ditch and didn't die and then we were on a cruise ship but there weren't people because almost everyone died in the tornado and then we all fought over a didgeridoo and I made out with Gerard Butler.
conversation, Lindy