Junkyard Quote 3, Post 4, Week 1

"Sometimes I don't bathe on Sundays and then I go to Target just to see them looking at me."

This was actually from one of my professors. We were talking about feeling judged when we go to the store on Sunday and we clearly didn't go to church. Our professor said she does it just to make them angry, and then she came up with this gem. I thought it was hilarious, and we warned her that she might be quoted. Luckily, she was okay with it.

Junkyard Quote 2, Post 3, Week 1

"Got my little fuckin' harmonica."

Watching a documentary about medicinal marijuana growth in California, I happened upon this line. One of the characters, called "Yellow" for anonymity, was talking about how growing marijuana isn't easy, but he enjoys his life. I think what got me with this line was the way he said it as well as the fact that this burly, tough guy was into playing the harmonica. It's not quite what I had envisioned for him. I think that the colors used to identify the people in the documentary could also be a fun aspect to play with.

Imitation 1, Post 2, Week 1

I love the sound of words and experimenting with the way a word sounds and fits with other words, so I decided to post a very early draft of an imitation of "A Mown Lawn" by Lydia Davis.

A Mown Lawn

She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was--a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could been seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. more lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

Stichic

Stichic doesn't mean quite what she thought. Maybe it's because her mind transformed it to sty chic, which is when Wilbur wears a patterned scarf and rain boots. When models bid each other farewell, perhaps they say stay chic. Stay sty chic, the pigs would say. Sty chick would be a sow. Stay sty chic, chick. Stick chic is hippie style, closely associated with tree chic. True tree chic chicks love the earth and the life around them. Maybe the sty chic chicks should throw a party with the tree chic chicks. I'm sure it would be trè chic.

Junkyard Quote 1, Post 1, Week 1

"It's a funky beat in there. We tryin' to catch it."

This quote was from a friend of mine. She is a percussionist at UWG, and another friend was asking why the part she and her fellow bass drummers had wasn't sounding right. I thought this quote was interesting because I never would have thought to say it like this. If he had asked me what was going on, I would have just said, "We're not all on the same page," or, "That part is a little weird." The image of trying to catch a beat that's "funky" is hilarious to me. I see a musician in tails in a spotlight leaping off the floor in an attempt to wrangle the errant sixteenth notes floating off the paper wall complete with a painted-on musical staff. It's quite original, and I never would have come up with it without Diamond and Luther.

Representative Poems

Billiards

The white ball sits atop the green felt

facing the colorful triangle.

Waiting for its cue,

the ball almost vibrates with anticipation.

A sharp crack,

a sudden pain,

the

cue

ball

rolls

at

an

alarming

rate.

The colors

cry out for mercy.

Another moment

and all Hell breaks loose.

Hectic collisions,

suffering screams...

Over and over the colors crash.
One by one they disappear into the darkness.

Shivering with fear, they await their turn to fall,

Newton freezing them in place with the curse of inertia.

As the cue ball chooses its victim,

each color envisions itself

rolling

spinning

bouncing

out of control.
First off the others, then off the walls.

The upside of darkness is that

there is no more pain.

The lone ball sits atop the green felt

and thinks

This is what I live for.

The Long Haul

It's just me and the road.
I'll know where I'm going when I get there.

I'm traveling, tired, with my heavy load.

I feel as though I've been widowed.

I'm alone in the middle of nowhere;

It's just me and the road.

The old map is too yellowed

to read in the interior light's glare.

I'm squinting, tired, with my heavy load.

My exhausted brow becomes furrowed

with my concentrated stare.

It's just me and the road.

The signal changes color, now mellowed.

I stop and gaze at the bulbs in the air.

I'm losing it tired, with my heavy load.

The morning comes, once the rooster's crowed,

the suns first rays begin to flare.

It's just me and the road,

still traveling, tired, with my heavy load.

Like a Lady

Watch the gaunt sing like a lady,

her slim figure haunting like a lady.

I look up the mountain's rocky slope.

It looms fearless above me--daunting, like a lady.

Branches stretch across the cave's entrance

leaving the cliff yawning like a lady.

Robins show their red breasts proudly,

fluffing and flaunting like a lady.

I sit beneath trees, but don't climb. Teasing lower limbs,

I let them remain wanting, like a lady.

A father turns away as he holds his baby girl

in case he begins blushing and fawning like a lady.

What the Cosmos Left

At first, the stars seemed perfectly harmless.

They hung in the sky in the vast darkness

Then, I began to notice them in all my thoughts,

at night in my dreams, or filling up the corners of my eyes

where there should have been ghosts. They appeared under chairs,

bright sparks where one would usually find only dust bunnies,

or suddenly shining in the bedroom underneath my turned down sheets.

Once, I found a star in the laundry, stuck in a pocket

among lint and loose change, and one night, in my mouth,

I tasted something like a warm bite of bread and pulled it out

to watch over me. Soon after that I began

to collect them, filling paintings, old lamps,

every dark corner around. I grew slightly uncomfortable

when company came. What if someone noticed them

when reading a book or straightening pictures? I longed

to set them free, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like purpose? It occurred to me finally

that I was meant to follow them, and I resisted a growing compulsion

to throw them in the air, although, in moments of great distraction,

I though it was the floor they wanted, or the low ceilings

--exhausted in the morning I laid them around my body.

The sun came quite as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort. That night, as I expected, they were gone.

In their place a faint glow, and the familiar smell of longing.

Sestina for the Birds

I stood, watching the fire

and noticing how quickly the birds

rose from their watery chairs,

the tips of their wings barely brushing

the water's surface. They left only the imprint

of their stout bodies as they performed the fire drill.

It's amazing how well they know the drill.

All their lives they wait for the fire,

and when the flames finally reach high enough to print

their dancing shadows on the birds'

domain, they fly over the brush

and search for a more solid chair.

As the leader of the flock reaches his blush, leafy chair,

the others begin to squawk, and drill

him with question; Will the brush

ever return? Or will the fire

ruin it forever? The crescendo of the birds'

chorus would take ages to scribe and print.

The leader steps forward, creating talon prints

one by one as he leaves his judge's chair.

He moves among his fellow birds,

explaining the point and purpose of the drill

itself, the reason it is necessary to be conscious of the fire.

He caws that in order to live near the brush,

one must be aware of the dangers that surround the brush.

One must know of the strange boot prints

left behind after gunshots. One must know of the fire,

of course, and of the way the watery chairs

seem to rock to and fro with the most conviction just before the drill

begins. And oddly enough, one must be aware of the other birds.

One must know of the tall, featherless, flightless birds.

These, the leader explains, hide in the brush

and wait for us to begin our drill.

Into us they blow the bullet print,

sending us careening before we reach our chairs.

They delight in the dancing of the fire.

#1

Elegies and Aubades and Pastorals. Oh my.

I have no idea how to approach these. I'm not used to writing poetry of this sort. I don't know how to be sentimental without feeling overly cheesy and cliche.

So naturally, I went on good old google and searched for tips on how to write one.

www.mahalo.com (which from what I gather is Hawaiian eHow) gives these helpful tips (complete with grammatical errors):

• An elegy poem is a poem written on the occasion of someone's death. How to Write an Elegy Poem explains everything you need to know to create a lasting work of art.

• Writing an Elegy Poem Tips

  1. Fitting subjects includes the death of a loved one or a president.
  2. The poem must be somber in tone.
  3. There is no set form, but a good elegy should include a metrical pattern or rhyme scheme.
  4. Try to create distinctive imagery.
  5. Include some of your own thoughts about death and dying

I'm sure that whoever wrote that had the best intentions, but I feel like it's quite opinionated, considering the tone of tip number three. So I moved on to the normal eHow site and found this:

An elegy is a poem to memorialize someone beloved or respected who is deceased. One of the most famous elegys ever written is Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln entitled "O Captain! My Captain!" In English literature, this type of poem usually contains specific lyric essentials. When writing your own elegy, include the elements in the steps below to craft a moving and personal tribute.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Step 1

   Describe when and why you are writing the poem. Explain where you, the author, are now and why you are looking back. Depict your relationship with the deceased. Pastoral references, like portraying the author and departed one as shepherds, are commonly used in an elegy as metaphors for the relationship.

2. Step 2

   Explain how the person died and express not just grief, but anger and astonishment that the person has passed. Include the cause of the death. Let the means of death inspire the poem's imagery; for example, if the person drowned, incorporate the sea as a character or symbol.

3. Step 3

   Include attempts to deny the reality of the person's death or resurrect the person. Eventually accept of the unavoidability of the loss.

4. Step 4

   Reflect on how the person's death has impacted the world. Ask how the world can go on without this person. Imagine what this person could have contributed that will never be fulfilled.

5. Step 5

   Meditate on the nature and inevitability of death within the cycle of life. Conclude the elegy with a degree of comfort and reassurance in the certainty of how life progresses and a hope of the afterlife.

This description not only has a spelling error, but they invented a word as well! Unavoidability was, I'm almost certain, meant to be inevitability. I don't know if I'm the only one, but seeing a spelling or grammar error in a document that is supposed to be instructional or informative comepletely discredits it. I don't trust people who can't put a sentence together to inform me of what I'm supposed to do. Maybe I'm crazy for that. Maybe not. Who knows? But back to the point.

There are some good points, though. Step five helps out a bit, guiding me in the direction of the poem at least. But I was still not satisfied. So once again, I searched a bit more. This times I googled "How to be sentimental without being cliche." No luck there. I tried various versions of that phrase, but to no avail. Looks like I'm on my own on this one.

#1

I'm having a little trouble with the definition of exactly what a "found poem" is. From the understanding I got from class, I would assume that anything is a "found poem" because the inspiration occurs by something you just happen to see.

Am I alone in wanting a more solid definition? I'm sure we were given one but I can't for the life of me remember it. So here I go on a web search to find more specific parameters as to what a "found poem" is.

Wikipedia (which may or may not be reliable) states: Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original

So in that definition, very few of us really followed the directions this week.

According to poets.org: Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

So it's generally the same idea. I think most of us assumed just because we "found inspiration" in a certain object, that the resulting piece was in fact a "found poem." As illustrated by these examples, that is not the case. I think many of us (including me) might need to do a little more research to ensure that we are following the form laid out for us.