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?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
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?
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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.
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