Improv Post Five Week Twelve

This is an improv off of "Shoeing the Currach" by Mary O' Malley. I took the phrase "supple hoops" and expanded on it.

The supple hoops of her twist and turn,
smaller than a hula-hoop, but larger than a ballerina.
I wonder if she knows about earrings and tomorrow
and about the guy down the street who wants to wear
her tutu and dance rain dances in snow.

Improv Post Four Week Twelve

This is an improv off of the "Heart of the Matter" by Susan Prospere. I took words that I liked from the piece and created my own piece.

Tomorrow, I'll look past your primal sadness and flue,
and we'll go to where there are no nooks or claw-
footed foliage, jack-lit by a firebrick. Tomorrow,
I'll find the mahogany china in the alley of our apartment,
mixed in with the potpourri of corsets and fishnets of corner
girls of Peachtree Street. Are you a fallow bear? Only 
bracketed as a knave peerer over gilded air- slightly
stale from sweat and semen? Don't look at me 
like that- like a forlorn yet vivified puppy, carved 
and intertwined into my legs.

Improv Post Three Week Twelve

This is an improv off of Mary Oliver's "The Black Walnut Tree."
I took the "whip crack of the mortgage" and expanded off of that.

The whip crack of the mortgage
smacks a hole in the roof of our cottage,
pretending to care about rain and leaves
of oaks and walnuts. It's only fear-
insurance and squirrels.

Improv Post Two Week Twelve

This is an improv off of Medbh McGuckian's "Gateposts."
I took the line "A woman ripens best underground" and went with it.

A woman ripens best underground, 
like a carrot. She needs cool, dark
surroundings to let all the flavors
ruminate. Dirt helps the estrogen
build- She can become a woman
only by being alone. Carrots don't
see other carrots until uprooting
from the ground.

Improv Post One Week Twelve

This is an improv off of "Mock Orange" by Louise Gluck.
What I did was take words/small phrases from the piece and create my own piece.

The premise of union-your sealing orange
glow, telling me to light something
so I can be like you. The yard mocks me
and my decision, splits into a drifting
odor of resentment and paralyzing 
thought of foolishness, but I tell you,
nothing will complicate us. Nothing 
but the man will send me into the mouth
of a different yard. I tell you, you're mine.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Twelve

"Glitter is the Herpes of craft supplies."
- a woman named Hannah about what her husband believes...posted on her blog: "The Art in Life."

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Twelve

"Women...we have to step up our coat game. These men are killing the game."
-Ashley Warner

Critical Commentary Post One Week Twelve

In keeping with the previous posts of this nature, I want to look at yet another song that I believe can stand as poetry. This song is Don McLean's "American Pie." The song has four verses, so I think I'm just going to focus on the first part:  
[Intro]
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died

[Chorus]
So bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin' "This'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die"

The thing about this song that first drew me to it was the rhyme. The rhyme scheme seems to be an  abccb, ddee, ffgg, abbaa. The only thing about the chorus is that I think all the end words seem to rhyme. I like how that scheme seems to stay similar through the entire song. This is the form for the piece, and the key part of the argument that songs can't stand alone as poetry is because they don't have form. I also think that the reason that this song can stand alone as poetry is the subject matter. The song begins as a sort of elegy towards the Billy Holly, Richie Vallens and The Big Bopper plane crash. I see this song as a sort of "The Day Lady Died"-esque poem, or when it isn't an outward elegy in the sense that it directly states specifics about the person, but rather focuses on something else about that day. In this song, as in Frank O'Hara's poem, it focuses on what the speaker does that day and what the speaker remembers. That is why the song can stand alone as poetry. The lyrics and the form coordinate on a level that is different from present pop songs. The subject matter is deeper, which allows for a richer song in the artistic sense, which then combines with the elegy-esque form and the rhyme scheme to create a fully rounded song that then doubles as a poem.

Critical Commentary Post One Week Eleven

Since I have been reading A LOT of Richard Jackson lately, I decided to do this week's commentary on one of his poems from the Unauthorized Autobiography. "Loose Lips Sink Ships," to me, is a reversal of the Ars Poetica. This poem, instead of the poet talking about the poem, is the poem talking about the writer and how he writes poems. It's slightly confusing, but extremely interesting because the poem meditates on how Jackson writes, which lays out the nuts and bolts on writing while laying out the Jackson style: prolix and moving from subject to subject quickly and jagged at moments.
The reason I like this poem so much is the backwards nature of it, much like Jackson's style: he does a lot of what we are "not supposed" to do in writing (ie: to be verbs, telling, moons, cliches). This backwards nature is Jackson turning the idea of an ars poetica on its head, much like he does cliches. Cliches are hard to turn and make "not cliche," but Jackson does this successfully in most cases. The ars poetica could be considered cliche to some people, but the nature of this poem is not cliche in the least, and that is why I like this poem so much: it's a novel idea that I admire greatly.

The poem can be found here.

Improv Post Five Week Eleven

This is an improv off of "An Engraving of Blake" by Mary Kinzie. I picked a couple of bits of language and put them together.

A roof of tears can only find themselves
when the rivers of smoke falls into a boly.
If you only knew of forgiveness or of ceilings
that were low enough for earth.

Air can breathe climate into a beard. But
when I think about it, you try and I yield.
Casting us can only become dark,
and dark runs into proof in the field.

Improv Post Four Week Eleven

This is an improv off of "Loss" by C.K. Williams. I interchanged a couple of Williams' lines with my own.

I have felt myself raked into the earth like manure.
Brought back only after someone pulls the weeds.
Someone goes sullen, leans among the rusting
tractor, hoe, whacker in the back of the shed, bought
for pennies from the man across the street from the
bank back in Bowmont. Someone trailed it back to
here, to the deep forest of my backyard, where the
same someone creeps around and points towards
the withering meadows at nothing that I can see.

Improv Post Three Week Eleven

This is an improv off of "Tornadoes" by Thylias Moss.

Truth is, I envy tornadoes
and their perfection. The way they twist
and form into together. Turn and spin
in the gray of what they’ve picked up:
a house, a chicken coop,
people inside a vehicle- its protection.
You’re something to be forgotten after
leaving a wake of things I cannot clean
up after. Tornadoes don’t worry about cleaning.
They just disappear.

Improv Post Two Week Eleven

This is an improv of "The Broad Bean Sermon" by Les Murray. The way that I improved this one was through finding language that I liked from the piece and making something different from it.

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are recruits
in mint spiders tense and ripe. Proffered
new greenstuff appear more above the
cat and mouse floor, sagging like black
flags. Till you ask about dolphins and
edible meanings, you grin with happiness
and vow to keep the remaining weeks sane.

Improv Post One Week Eleven

This is an improv of "Of the Finished World" by Lucie Brock-Broido. What I did with this poem was pull interesting words and pieces of language from the poem and create something else.

Tenebrous heaven sloughs the tomorrow.
It’s only until the apocrypha explodes and
a thrice plowed asylum of talking trees, cotton,
and rye. It’s laden with antimony.

But do you know what the worst part is?
The fact that an astronomer clenched a
map spilled with bottle-gourds. You vexed
a mob, blanched and winded.

Whatever this is, it’s awry with freighted
hours- ruined, ransacked, but amassed
with forever. Yesterday, I sat on a log
and remembered that you missed me.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Eleven

I can't remember if I posted this quote before, but there was a moment over the summer where I was talking about unicycles with someone, specifically about how they were scary. The person I was with then called unicycles "suicycles" and I loved that word.

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Eleven

"The sign for student [in sign language] is knowledge person."
-Hannah

Critical Commentary Post One Week Ten

I am going to continue on with the idea that some songs cannot stand alone as poetry. I found another instance where I believe lyrics can stand alone. This would be the song "Dirty Paws" by the band Of Monsters and Men. These lyrics stand alone because of the language. Most songs have the bubble gum pop lyrics that have no substance to them or are based on some love story that results in the xyz plot. Of Monsters and Men is a band that situates themselves in a setting and place that is different from American song lyrics. This is an Icelandic band and the majority of their songs are Icelandic myths. This is why I think their songs can stand as poetry-the subject matter is interesting and their lines are interesting: "my head is an animal," or "the forest that once was green, was colored black by those killing machines." These seem interesting to me because there is so much to talk about. There is so much to discuss about the head being an animal, and the band uses this relation to move into the myth. But it isn't just the myth, it's that it's all in the head, so the head is the animal because it comes up with these myths. I just find the specificity and the subject matter different from the bubble gum pop of most Katy Perry or Britney Spears songs, and therefore, can stand alone as poetry.

"Jumping up and down the floor,
My head is an animal.
And once there was an animal,
It had a son that mowed the lawn.
The son was an ok guy,
They had a pet dragonfly.
The dragonfly it ran away
But it came back with a story to say.

Her dirty paws and furry coat,
She ran down the forest slope.
The forest of talking trees,
They used to sing about the birds and the bees.
The bees had declared a war,
The sky wasn't big enough for them all.
The birds, they got help from below,
From dirty paws and the creatures of snow.

And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes.
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines.
But she and her furry friends
Took down the queen bee and her men
And that's how the story goes,
The story of the beast with those four dirty paws."

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Ten

"My cat ain't possessed by no demon from Hell."
-Lucas Chance

"I’m not trying to write a sinner, I’m just trying to write a sonnet."
-Kelsey Fleming

Improv Post Five Week Ten

This is an improv of "Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night" by Charles Wright. What I wanted to do was find little bits of language that intrigued me or were interesting and create something different from them.

When something is borne up and curried,
Mythic comes out of the eucalyptus. Oil rigs
And lanterns float, bob, somewhere far
Out from the clued in smog. Its endgame is
Where you are, where I am, where the pin
Pricks the history of whatever this place
Among the dark is, quiet, broken, glassed into
A hill above the sea that no lighthouse of
Metamorphosis can physically light.

Improv Post Four Week Ten

This is an improv of "A Walrus Tusk from Alaska" by Alfred Corn. What I decided to do, was take little interesting bits of language from the poem at random and make something different from them.

A fossil cranium of an Inupiat ricocheted
Off an aloof walrus, donor to the bone
Conveyor belt, where bloodshed netted
A bardic keepsake. Landlubber, you’re a
Tapeloop ostinato of yearning. A keepsake
To your ear. Where I’m ringed, soot black,
And aloft on a cross section of resonance.
Waiting for scrimshaw, burin, and something
To hold my bassoon or harp sonata.

Improv Post Three Week Ten

This is an improv post of "From the Porch" by John Koethe. I found myself intrigued by the first three lines and the blatant imagery from them. That's what I wanted to improv.

The square was bright with Christmas lights, and not too far from the highway.
The house was five miles from the school, and three from the gas station. To 
my rights, there's a lake that looks almost brown from rainwater and dust. Dust
comes from somewhere, probably the airplanes going to a small landing strip 
four miles from the lake. It's to the east, and comes from the west most the time.
I wonder what the road looks like from where you are. From the place you stand 
in the morning, looking out the window to a forest of trees and weeks of neglect.
You smile, probably, and drink coffee, or tea, from a candy corn orange mug. I
imagine you putting on those brown shoes, the ones I had in a shoe box in my 
closet until your birthday last year, and locking the door behind you as you unlock
your car and drive south, away from the Christmas lights and the house and 
the school and the lake and the airstrip. Oh, and me.

Improv Post Two Week Ten

This is an improv of the pastoral by Robert Hass "Meditation at Lagunitas." What I liked was the line "to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds." and the way the speaker named a fish pumpkinseed.

I guess that one day, blackberries will grow
from our front porch, where nothing grows 
right now. Not even our children, until your
mother mixes something brown into their 
yogurt at breakfast. But you just laugh, and 
somehow, the bramble of blackberry 
corresponds. I smile, and inside the house,
our children grow without your mother.
Maybe it was the blackberries, maybe
the laugh of a mother, but I think instead, 
the small orange fish in the tank across from
the window. The children named it Pumpkinseed,
and it grows faster than a weed on MiracleGro.

Improv Post One Week Ten

This is an improv of the pastoral "Smoke" by Philip Levine. I like how this was written a lot like a letter, so I wanted to copy that idea.

Can you believe that once Wrigley Field never had lights?
It didn't. Not until 1988 when the crowd could see each other
after nine, or was it ten? It's hard to tell, because no one 
could see the hands. When I sat in the stands, while the grass
on the field was mowed over by men in cleats and polyester, 
I watched the numbers move and bounce like the squirrel 
in left field. As it scurried up the advertisement for the Home
Depot, or Lowe's, or maybe even Starbucks, I could make out
the brief turn of the head, or swish flick of the tail, and quickly
thanked the halogen lights before catching the foul.

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Ten

"hazelnuts are the saliva of God."
-Ashley Warner

Improv Post Five Week Nine

The Bear- Galway Kinnell
This is a pastoral improv where I wanted to use the phrase "sopped turd."

In lung-colored transcendence,
a parabola belches blubber
and old snow, a tentative ravine
in what should have been his thigh.
The bear knives a hulk,
odor something only whittled
by gashes and resting places.
Steam endures blood and whatever
Marshlights shine on: a dam-bear,
or a sopped turd.

Improv Post Four Week Nine

Midsummer, Tobago- Derek Walcott
This is a pastoral improv of the form the Walcott uses.

Winter, Chicago

Wide frost-flavored lake.

White cold.
A grey sky.

A monumental bean,
mirroring icicled people

from the neighboring states
and cities in January.

Breath I have seen,
Breath I have gasped,

Breath that vanished, like spring,
in my daffodil garden.

Improv Post Three Week Nine

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota- James Wright
I liked the idea of being in nature and then realizing something important. That is what I wanted to improv-Wright's version of the pastoral.

To my left, a thousand ladybugs,
crawling up a leaf on the tree
I’m perched above the featherless
cardinal, waiting for the springing
of a daffodil so he can song others
into hopefulness as the snow melts
below the tree. I lean back as four
seasons waft through hair and darkness,
as the now leafless tree shakes.
I only wanted to see.

Improv Post Two Week Nine

The Explosion- Philip Larkin
This is also a pastoral, so I kept in the nature-y mode while keeping the first line "on the day of the explosion."

On the day of the explosion
my mother pointed to the sky,
said look, and I only saw clouds.
One, the shape of a bunny without
a tail, the other, a building.
The bunny lept over the building,
or maybe molded into it since the
two were clouds, and landed softly
on the other side. The tail twitches
silently in the corner, and fades
into the fluff of a white cloud.

Improv Post One Week Nine

The Thought Fox-Ted Hughes
What I wanted to take was the "and again now, and now, and now." It's also a pastoral, so I kept sort of nature-y.


The deer touches at the green
softly, hesitant, perked ears
to the sound of a wolf, or heavy
footed human. Waiting for open
and again now, and now, and now
when only one whiff through the
breeze of sour metal and decay,
turns the white tail and darts
into the underbelly brush.

Critical Commentary Post One Week Nine

I wanted to write on a band this week. The band Jake Trout and the Flounders is especially intriguing to me, because of what I do in class every week. I am studying form, but also sound in a sense. There is always that inner ear asking if what we read is pleasing or displeasing, and with that, if it is surprising in the language. The theory brought to question was that song lyrics cannot stand alone as poetry. For most bands, yes, but I feel as though Jake Trout and the Flounders writes lyrics that can stand apart. 
First off, they are the Weird Al Yankovic of the golf music world. However, there isn’t really a golf music world. In any case, the band draws it’s claim to fame through the idea of golf mixing with rock and roll. One way that they do this is improv-ing. Now, this is what I do in my journal.  I take something I like and appreciate from the original piece and I make it my own. In the majority of Jake Trout and the Flounders, they do this with music. There are songs with some phrases and most music being shifted from “Low Rider” to “Low Riser” and “Let Her Cry” to “I Just Wanna Cry.” These well known songs offer not only what they bring to the music world as an original, but also what they bring as an object of an improv-ing. I believe some lyrics can stand on their own because of the use of rhyme scheme. The majority of the songs that I have heard have some sort of rhyme scheme aabb, abcb. This form helps to unify the songs and have potential for being able to stand alone.

Junkyard Quote One and Two Post One Week Nine

"your belief may actually be an untenable waffle."
-back of a book

“Hotcake cemetary
Coca Cola Street Kids
4 o’clock colored bricks.”
-3200 class

Improv Post Five Week Eight

This is an improv off of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" by W.B. Yeats. Particularly, the first two lines.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Until I realized the taxi wasn't waiting for
me or this theme. Standing at the curb, 
hands thrown up to either hail the cab again,
or express myself. I don't know how to 
search for a theme. Or a taxi. So I started 
to walk.

Improv Post Four Week Eight

This is an improv off of "Reading Plato" by Jorie Graham. I am improving the beginning "This is the story of a beautiful lie."

This is the story of a beautiful lie,
that floats through the window 
to be smashed by a tree branch.
I gritted my teeth, watched it fall
to the prickly bush below. Some
colored flower caught it, but that
doesn't matter. It didn't get up.
Back broken, I watched the left 
side roll onto the grass and limp
knee crawl away. But it didn't get up.

Improv Post Three Week Eight

This is an improv of "Starlight Scope Myopia" by Yusef Komunyakaa. I really like the last line "seeing the full moon loaded onto an oxcart"

Tonight, I can imagine seeing the full moon 
loaded onto an oxcart through the window
of your hotel room. The oxcart isn't attached
to an ox, and I say this aloud and you laugh,
but the moon doesn't care that it can't go 
anywhere.

Improv Post Two Week Eight

This is an improv of "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche'.

What you have heard isn't true. I wasn't in his house. I drove by, stopped at the mailbox, and kept driving. I drove slow, just faster than a deer's walk. Minnesota forests have a lot of deer. White spots and little tails, the antlers that he hoists above the mantle every year after hunting season. Right before Thanksgiving, when deer meat fills every shelf in the garage freezer, he and I grab guns and tromp through the forest. But not this year. I wasn't in his house. I didn't drink or eat anything, and didn't see the Thanksgiving day parade. His wife, my mother, didn't bring me cranberry sauce or deer meat. He didn't hoist antlers on the mantle. Well, he might have, but I wasn't there.

Improv Post One Week Eight

This is an improv off of "The German Army, Russia, 1943." What I really liked from this piece is the line "I know I'll fly apart soon."

It's four a.m on a Friday and I know I'll fly apart soon
from either the whiskey or the wings.
You're slumps asleep in the couch next to me and I sigh,
curious about your terrible, luminous eyes,
telling me that I'm the woman you don't want. 
The woman you settled for in college-freshman year,
when we couldn't look each other in the eyes
because I blushed too much. I wish I never met you
every day but Fridays. Because on Friday
I drink whiskey and eat wings and not think about you.
But in the morning I am hung over and apart.

Critical Commentary Post One Week Eight

This is a critical commentary of Kelsey's "Improv 1 Week 8."

Rework of an earlier improv.
Jason Voorhees
The covers muffle as I stretch and my hands run across
sheets, finding bare bed.
The sheets are torn again.
My feet slap hardwood towards the kitchen, past your prized
machete on a plaque, nicked with use,
through a haze of cinnamon into the cracked
sound of bread falling into egg.
You’re making French toast for me.
I think back to our first date: your clobbered face so out of place
at Waffle House, its stark yellow against your muddied jumper.
You ordered French toast for me.
How was I supposed to say no to your eager smile?
Those same hands that fiddled at the front door, whisk eggs
each time you leave, but you only satisfy my hunger when you come back,
fierce and starved for me. Every woman wants a man who can take her in his arms
and snap her like a teenager. And you will snap, and break, and hurt
those campers who return every year to interrupt your arched back,
exposed spine on the sheets. The topless girls you stampede
through the woods for every year aren’t me.
Babe, if you didn’t kill them, I would.

And this is what I said:

Dude. This is so long! For you that is...and I LOVE how this flips the Jason character on his head. I really like how he's got some sort of redeeming side to him, like Ai's "Respect, 1967." I've always wondered what Jason would be like outside of the serial killer thing. Also, I find it interesting how the speaker is the jealous girlfriend. It makes me wonder how these two met. Was she one of the campers? The other thing about this piece is the repeating word choice. The word "sheets" appears three times in this piece, twice in lines right next to each other. I'm not sure if that is what you are going for, but that might be something to look at. The other thing that I found interesting is the line "You're making French Toast for me" and the line "You ordered French Toast for me." These lines are interesting because the syntax is so similar that it stands out and makes me feel like there is so much importance on these two lines. Then I'm wondering about the importance of French Toast and why Jason is making French Toast and not waffles. So, that might be something to look at because I'm not sure if there is enough information around the French Toast to be such an important player in the piece.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Eight

"[It's like you're] stuck in a VW with a flower eating a vegan sandwich when you need a dumptruck with ribs and whiskey."
-Adam Vines on writing

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Eight

"I don't know why her hand is wrapped in burlap and wool, who cares? It's a Bruce Willis movie and who cares about Bruce Willis?"-Dr. Davidson

"Your heart is both drunk and a kid."
-Marshall to Ted on How I Met Your Mother

Critical Commentary Post One Week Seven

This is a critical commentary off of Kelsey's Improv 2 Week 7 "The Colonel."
What she wrote:

I can look past the boxes in the living room that cover
the fake hydrangea on either side of the fireplace, and see the same house
that was here at Christmas. That was six months ago.
Mom says she pretends you're spring cleaning.
My sister picks up a box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures,
the inside all red and cushioned reminds me of a casket.

I didn't walk up to the front of the church at first, I sat in the second-to-last pew
so I couldn't see inside the casket. Did you know I finally
made it up to the front and snuck glances towards the coffin?
I didn't think so. Did you know I didn't see you there?
I thought not. For a second I entertained the idea that you were still in bed complaining about your leg. 

What I wrote:

I love this scene. It is full of specificity and high registered language. I specifically love the line "for a second I entertained the idea that you were still in bed complaining about your leg." The only critique about that line, for me, was the length. It began to sound a little wordy, and I think it was because of the word "entertained." Maybe if it was "for a second, I thought you were still in bed complaining about your leg," it would be a little quicker paced. For a later draft, I would like to see more about the relationship between this speaker and the subject. I understand that this person is a close family relative, but I want to know more intimate details regarding the relationship: what kind of things happened here at Christmas? What is the importance of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures? Why was it so hard for the speaker to go to the casket? This detail would add to the specificity and create another layer of tension in the piece.

Improv Post Five Week Seven

This is an improv off of Sharon Olds' "The Language of the Brag." What I liked was the line 'the blade piercing the bark deep'.

The blade piercing the bark deep
into the fur. A wimper echoes
across the halls and I stop
for a second, curious as to blood
levels and why a dog's bowels
don't release like a chicken's.
We don't have chicken in 
New York. It's too cold.

Improv Post Four Week Seven

This is an improv off of Lucille Clifton's "move." What I liked most was the refrain in between stanzas and the way that she created her own form, so I wanted to practice that.

They had begun to trek
across an ocean, tired
of continuing to load and unload
shells on turbaned men and hairy children, protecting
ours

forever

we hesitated 
then screamed nonwords running
up and down rubbled streets toward
what was supposed to be in the middle, destroyed
ours

forever

the brown and green covers stealthly
men who look like trees, trees that
are no where to be found-oasis in this desert
of two angry lands, high on gunpowder and recoil,
ours

forever

if we could ever see the whirling blades
of a helicopter dispatched to gun cities of dust,
or rebuild a tower most have seen only on TV
that day, we claim priority-we claim control over these
landmarks, these figments of what is
ours

forever

If we destroy a mind of ourselves,
in order to comfort our future,
we hinder resolution
for our children in the years to come.
we hinder happiness, and
welcome paranoia forever,
ours

Improv Post Three Week Seven

This is an improv off of William Carlos Williams' piece "Spring and All." It is an open form, but what I wanted to improv was the idea of something new coming.

In the lateness of morning, something shifts.
Moves forward to a place unseen to most, under damp
snow, a bright nakedness appears, sprung up on the road
to my house with no heat, no insulation.
Where I sit like a tree waiting for leaf-blanket
to warm me. Under the sheet of snow coming
from my grandparents, who sent from Montana
what was excess, a dried dandelion- reminding
that once this melts, tomorrow appears.

Improv Post Two Week Seven

This is an improv off of Charles Simic's ode "Miracle Glass Co." What I wanted to improv was the idea of "I bow to you."

You stand tall and proud, reaching
just short of the ceiling and 
I bow to you.
To all you carry and store on your
shelves, where Dante sits next to Stevens
and The Bell Jar mingles with The Jungle,
and nothing is misplaced.

The printer clicks, shifts while
dresser draws creak, slam,
even the oak floor pops like geriatric
patients' spines-but not you-standing still
in the noise. Silence tucked in between 
shelves, waiting for me to get lost and flip.

Around you, bookshelf of fake oak, 
everything chews on itself, squeaks.
In you, something I want festers, covered
and one day I'll find it.

Improv Post One Week Seven

So, I read the ode "Paper Nautilus" by Marianne Moore and really loved the line "she scarcely eats until the eggs are hatched." So that's what I improved.

She scarcely eats until the eggs are hatched
on the plate. If a little nose stuck up to her,
it would eat the air she fed.
Tomorrow she'll wake up to hatch
herself from the egg-another ear, nose,
tuft of fur where a yolk should be,
a hopeful claw towards the kitchen light.
She'll grow, fed on air and yolks of other
unhatched eggs, like her mother who feeds
off her.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Seven

"The ghazal is 'the cry of the gazelle when it is cornered in a hunt and knows it will die.'"
-Edward Hirsch Poet's Choice

Junkyard Post One Week Seven

“The Scottish bagpipes tend to sound like a scalded cat.”
-Mel Gibson on "Braveheart"

Critical Commentary Post One Week Six

This is a critical commentary on Kelsey's post "Improv 2 Week 6: 'Dream Song 324' by John Berryman"
The original post:

I delight in your continents, your countries when you look at me like that, like I'm a dictator. In control of your land: the stiff upper-lip of your Germany, and the wasteland of America, so much like your hands, never reaching their full potential. Reach for my full potential.

What I wrote:

I am intrigued with this improv. The idea of a person being a world is something that could be considered cliche, but this is done in a way that works to sidestep that. I think that the repetition of the word "potential" is interesting, because it provides a slight turn in the piece. What I really would like to see for a continuation of this draft is maybe taking the idea of a person being the whole world and scaling it down to just a specific country that requires work: a third world country or a country in turmoil. For example: you mentioned Germany in the original improv, maybe you could turn this person into post-World War Two Germany, when the country was struggling to rid themselves of their debt to America and the rest of the world. Or you could turn it into a country like Iraq or Iran that is war torn, and turn this piece into a love poem that comments on how war tears countries apart. That could be cliche in some settings, but I feel when combined together in an interesting fashion, it could be sidestepped.

Improv Post Five Week Six

This is an improv of the piece "Tulips and Chimneys I" by ee cummings. This piece uses a late rhyme scheme and I wanted to use the line "furnished souls."

We live in a world where two people
could travel in a blimp and still watch
as the stares seep into the pores of the sky,
whimpering like a cat through a peep hole,
noticing softly the furnished souls forever
to be cleaning some table in a place
where this excites. A place not here:
Wisconsin, the cheese for Eve, her
mother ordered came in, messed
the world where no one laughed,
made sandcastles on the beach or confessed.

Improv Post Four Week Six

This is an improv of "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop. This poem is a villanelle and that was my goal with the improv, trying to work in that form and use the line "I lost two cities, lovely ones."

I lost two cities, lovely ones
one was the body, the other
ran away with all my funds.

I couldn't help but cry to sons,
when simply stated, the facts:
I lost two cities, lovely ones.

The second first, of the lovely ones
had a hat named Fluff and he 
ran away with all my funds.

But fluff wasn't afraid of city one,
holding hope in a ball, unlike me
I lost two cities, lovely ones,

The first second, snagged buns
for hope from city two, knowing
I lost two cities, lovely ones
that ran away with all my funds.

Improv Post Three Week Six

This is an improv off of "Warming Her Pearls" by Carol Ann Duffy. There was no real rhyme scheme or anything I found, so I just kind of took "her pearls" and went.

My father took my pearls,
kept them by her pearls.
Told us something in Chinese
that mentioned pearls.
My father doesn't know Chinese
and shakes his head at pearls,
nods his head at pearls,
and mutters trouble, in Chinese.
Two women under one roof,
holding pearls?

Improv Post Two Week Six

This is an improv off of "I died for beauty-but was scare" by Emily Dickinson. This stanza maintained an interesting rhyme scheme for me: abcb, and I wanted to improv off of that, while using "adjusted in the tomb."

When adjusted in the tomb, 
it's hard to come back.
You think, it's okay, touched
by another's small dead slack
for a hand. It sat there
crying like a little girl,
hoping melting skin and washed
skin wouldn't unfurl
itself to the window and clean
the breeze of leaves, too bunchy
for the rest- not enough spice
or not enough crunchy.

Improv Post One Week Six

This is an improv off of "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning. With this heroic couplet, I was focusing mainly on rhyme, not really worried about much of anything else. I wanted to also incorporate "since none puts by/the curtain I have drawn for you but I."

It's all in candles, books
and some forgotten hooks,
that continue to smile
and kill a fellow's bile.
Since none puts by
the curtain but I,
I must proclaim, to chat
some teacher, patiently
forgets the anxiously 
awaiting about. One by one
we line, hoping to finish. Done.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Six

"brush off their clothes- brush off means to retire, like brushing off the Earth."
-Dan Veach explaining translations from Chinese to English

"I pulled that out of the hat of 'I don't recognize your name'"
- me to Lucas while discussing course teachers and whether or not they are new to the school

Junkyard Quote One Week Six

"Boredom is your friend."

"Co-on (I think that is how it's spelled) comes out of nowhere like a chiropractic adjustment on your head."

- both from Dan Veach's talk

Critical Commentary Post One Week Five

This is a post off of Andrew's Junkyard Quote I Week V.
The original piece is a comic strip, so I'm going to just give the link.

Here is what I wrote to him:
My first question: Where did you find this? It's, in many ways, intriguing. First of all, the line "Sup dog," is said so many times in today's culture that it's hard to count, but secondly, I have never thought about it being said to an actual dog. I am pet sitting for a friend this weekend and have found myself talking to her animals as though they were people. The cat does not stop meowing and I have asked it many a time what is wrong, as though she'll answer me. The thing that I take from this comic strip is the intrigue as to if animals even understand what we are saying. And, like this dog in the strip, what do they tell us that we cannot understand. What I think you should do from here, is write about that idea. Write about what could be an alternate reality where we do actually understand animals, and what are they really trying to tell us. I think, with your interest in the way words sound, this could become a whole idea on what animal voices would sound like. And maybe in some way, you could use it to meditate upon a whole different idea about humans and society in some fashion. I think this junkyard quote is very interesting and unique to what we are supposed to be finding in a 4210 class. I find myself stuck in the poetic realm and find it refreshing that you can find these comic strips or biology texts that use some language that most would not find “poetic,” and then use it to your advantage with sound. I want to figure out more about sound and the other aspects to language.

Improv Post Five Week Five

This is an improv of Thomas Kinsella's "Mirror in February." This elegy has an interesting rhyme scheme so that's what I wanted to improv. I also liked the line "dry bedroom air."

The night dims with lightning bugs
and giggles of children from other rooms.
Their parents, anxious for some unplug
some lack of consciousness till tomorrow,
that the giggling costumes-
masks the adult sorrow
that this is their day, forever.

In a child's dry bedroom air, a lamp 
sits in the far corner, dust covered
and unplugged, beckoning to clamp
hands over a neck, squeeze last bits
of anything to taunt rediscovered
veins to a brain unlike what split
in two on the back porch, under light

of a different lamp: one shines of aluminum,
the giggles of a tomorrow today.
Can someone really understand why magnesium
burns the way it does- rapidly
like holding out a candle on a tray
so calm, something placidly
contained within the confines of madness.

Improv Post Four Week Five

This is an improv of A.E. Stallings' "Explaining an Affinity for Bats." What I wanted to focus on for this improv was the rhyme scheme. I also liked "seem something else at first," and wanted to use it. I wasn't really focusing on the iambic pentameter aspect of the sonnet, just the rhyme.

That they seem something else, at first
a quiet figure in a room built for one,
yet attacks, play, still scares and done
my little dog has only thirst
for water, and baby birds that chirp
for these creatures sing like no other
praising something my dog can't bother
the sun? the rain? It's only an excerpt
of what my dog, or I, can wonder.
Can we chase our voices, or follow
patterns without confusing a hollow
break in wind or cloud or come asunder.
Its only then we find a home in trees
all animals know. Peace comes to those
who flit up and down among toes
and shoes and hearts of Socrates.

Improv Post Three Week Five

This is an improv off of "Heat" by Denis Johnson. I really liked the line "August, you're just...an erotic hallucination." I combined the two to make a line that fit for me. So I tried to work a little of the form, but mostly I was practicing Iambs and it turned out to be a little off from the typical sonnet form.

August,
You're just an erotic hallucination,
poised over coffee, tea and content to
tip burns and pleads for everyone in here.
August, you're no one special, some
just another. You'll own it all
by midnight, paid for full: courtesy
of lack of rain and plenty of bugs.

Improv Post Two Week Five

This is an improv of "A Miracle for Breakfast" by Elizabeth Bishop. What I wanted to try (again) was the sestina form...but also I liked the line "at six o'clock." So here we go:

At six o'clock I laid my head on the table,
not sure if I was hungry or just bored.
Some TV show with a talking sponge came on 
and without looking, I changed the channel
to the news, where a man chopped
some cucumber in two and sang opera.

My mother always told me to never give up on
my thoughts. Because "thoughts become tables."
My mother was a carpenter, and never opera-ed.
She spoke of miracles, coffee, and being bored
but one day she changed her channel
in school and instead of chicken chopped,

She turned to the forest-wood chopped
piled high in the yard, garage, couch, on
a pile higher than the kitchen channels-
"I molded," lived around the wood. Tables
are flexible. Climbing up to the star of opera,
to a high reaching mountain never bored.

Something clicked, a remote for channels
switched something- some empty chopped,
turned high, out of a plateaued table,
to awake a speaker, a patron of opera, 
person alive to the truth that was bored
back at six o'clock-nothing can be set on

the expectations of people, bored,
we own ourselves, our operas
contained only by the chopped.
Its only a matter of a clock for on 
which we can be tabled,
or not- a person must never be channeled.

Unless, it's to channel the end.
The end, at six, where bored people
sit on couches watching operas chop tables.

Improv Post One Week Five

This is an improv of the piece "Two Lorries" by Seamus Heaney. What I wanted to do was capture the sestina form, but I also liked the line "I'd vision of my..." So I don't really know if I did or not, but here we go:

In one minute, everything becomes ice,
frozen over in something called displacement.
Two men wear boots and bleed over a knife
and a box. A box no bigger than my fist, or
castrated by a man in a suit carrying a sack
with a head. A woman stands next to him.

She smiles and I'd vision of my displacement,
encased in a casserole from a season or 
from a combination of wool and burlap sack
my mother used to store the remaining ice
from the winter. She lugged it with him
wrapped in one hand, the other wrapped a knife.

He is the man on the screen with the knife
and as he lunges for the same box,
square with designs of a tribe from before the ice
age. I scream. Its over in a fit of displacement
and terror, my body rolls over polka dot sheets or
agamied from a night fit, shoved into a sack.

It's over. My mother isn't the woman with him,
I'm not something covered in ice
and forgiveness, but rather poppied displacement.
Something hard to see-squint and maybe sack
the continuation of a life. With sheets in a box-
cardboard, not tribal gemed, or etched with a knife
(I have those already) it's more intricate or 

carved in letters I can't make out or
freeze in a storage cupboard with ice,
my brain giggles a little at the sack
covering my feet- not socks, but him-
my following shadow of displacement
that clutches despair like a knife.

My body aches from him, and iced
displacement wrapped in a sack and
tied over my head with a knife or truth.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Five

 "Sir Adrian Poyning's orders for the English forces at Newhaven included the stricture that "Any English who shall fight without the town shall lose his right hand." "
--Wikipedia Did You Know article


"We run things things don't run we."
-Miley Cyrus

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Five

"Horror has a face...you must make a friend of horror."
-Kurtz in Apocalypse Now

Improv Post Five Week Four

This is an improv of "Tiara" by Mark Doty. I wanted to take the idea of people dressing the way that they want, but being criticized for it, even though there is something else going on.  I just took the main idea of the first line "Peter died in a paper tiara" and went from there.

Mary died in a tinfoil jacket
cut from her mother’s roll in the kitchen drawer.
Her mother was abducted by aliens, Mary says.
She watches CBS news everyday for eight years
waiting for a man to report, to acknowledge
and when I went to see her, the tinfoil spread to
her head. Just like the cancer. “They’re coming
don’t you see? You must be ready. I’m ready.”
She smiled toothily, adjusted her hat, and fell
asleep.

Critical Commentary Post One Week Four

This is a critical commentary of Kelsey's Improv One of "Riverbank Blues" by Sterling A. Brown.
This is the original post:

Feet glop in the muddy field, his shoes--suction
cups that slap with every pull of the leg.
He wades through ankle deep mud--reminds
him of chocolate cake batter--on his way home..
He can't tell the cow shit in this current brown lagoon.
He sloshes up the porch steps, imprints
of his shoes--the markers of his presence--and kicks
them off before walking in. The lights inside leave a yellow haze
along the walls, the couch that waits for the promise
of two figures weighing on its springs. 

This is what I said:

This is a very interesting piece, starting with the word "glop." I love the way that word sounds in the mouth when you say it, but it also fits in this piece perfectly. There are two periods after "home" in the fourth line, but that is just a type error. I think the line that starts "he wades through ankle deep mud," and the line that starts "he can't tell the cow shit" are kind of saying the same thing. For me as a reader, the second of the two is more interesting in regards to language, but as a critic it might be interesting to combine them: "he wades through ankle deep mud--not sure the cow shit in this current brown lagoon. Chocolate cake batter, the thinks--almost home."
The interesting bit to me, the turn if you will, is when seventh line interrupts with "markers of his presence." I stopped there for a moment, curious about where this piece was going to go: does this speaker have identity issues? Is this speaker trying to make himself a force in the household? Is this going to turn out like "Respect, 1967" by Ai? For me, I wanted more than the piece was willing to give. When it ended with "waits for the promise of two figures weighing on its springs," I was slightly disappointed. It's beautiful, but the first two thirds of the piece are a man sloshing through some brown muck only to leave the reader slightly confused about what was happening at home. I think a little expansion will be interesting for this ending. I want to know why the man is waiting for the promise of two figures? What is going on at home? What does he do at home besides wait for someone? I think this piece is very interesting and uncanny and beautiful.

Improv Post Four Week Four

This is an improv of "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schackenberg. I loved her rhyme scheme of every stanza rhyming the last word. I wanted to try that too. I also really loved the "Touches the page to fully understand/ The lamplit answer" and wanted to incorporate a bit of that into the piece.

My mother at the grocery store
walks every aisle as if she didn’t before
Up and down- its almost as if we mopped the floor

with shoes. As though we cleared
some sort of land Europeans feared
Native Americans reared

their children to kill. Some did, some
didn’t. The ones who held guns and from
the country, combed living and dead- some

died, unable to touch anything to find
lamplit answers. Lamplit by the rind
of a lemon or bulb, off signed

by the man who killed you.
My mother, the one who
moved to become brand new

like the way she walks every aisle,
something may not have been in style,
something might just go to file,

but you died. My mother,
in the aisle with a feather
wrapped tight with leather.

Improv Post Three Week Four

This is an improv of "The Legend" by Garrett Hongo. What this elegy did that I wanted to capture was the second stanza. It's no where close to the original stanza, but I liked the first sentence when the speaker is writing about the person that the elegy is for. I wanted to attempt to try that.

She’s American or German or Swedish. I think,
brown hair and skinny, or blond hair and
fat. All I remember: green eyes. Or is it blue?
She walks jeans and heels, receives judgment
with the stairs in a dress when wearing
the panties for the one week a month. She stands
up to vow never to be public again.

Improv Post Two Week Four

This is an improv of "In Memoram Paul Celan" by Edward Hirsch. What I loved about this piece was the line "next to the almonds and black cherries" and the way that Hirsch used nature language mixed with some of the personal language regarding the poem itself. In my improv, I wanted to use the line that I mentioned above, but I wanted to use that line to help convey the personal nature, although, Elegies are always personal.

Next to the almonds and black cherries,
an apple reminds me of you and when I wore
the red dress that day, and you were cold.
Too cold to see me, or yourself, but I placed
an apple in the crook of your hand so you’d
have a snack for later. I imagine you’d stow
some seeds in your pockets to bring up to the
other land, where He would pray to us for you,
and our responses never mattered much. But my
apple red dress stuck out, appealed to you and Him
and I walked away with an orchard on your gravestone.

Improv Post One Week Four

This is an improv of "To the Dead" by Frank Bidart. What I really liked about this elegy was the line "what I hope (when I hope)." This really encapsulates the way to tackle the idea of hope in a poem. In class, we discussed that if you are going to use an abstraction like hope, you have to do it in a way that is interesting and sort of surprising. To me, this was an interesting way of Bidart using hope and I wanted to do it too.

What I hope (when I hope) is that one day we’ll die.
Because when we die, we miss the living
and the living misses us. Unless you’re like my uncle Jack
who lives in a world within this world
in a body within his body
a man of many faces- Russian doll, barrel of monkeys,
I wish never to disappoint you, but since you’re still here
for now, I have time to clean dishes and wash the whites,
to show you that one day, I hope you die
because the love I know is the love
where we die to miss each other.

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Four

"How do we breath?"
-Speech Language Pathology textbook question

Junkyard Post Quote Two Week Four

"Oso Hormiguero is anteater in Spanish. Or literally bear of the anthill. It's my favorite word. In Spanish anyway."
-A friend of mine

 "With an open heart in hold and a closed hand, full of friends"
-Foy Vance

Critical Commentary Post One Week Three

This is a critical commentary to the post from Daniel's journal: Improv Post 2 Week 3.

The original post: 

"More practice with trochees, each line is its own thing. No cohesion between the five. Just alternating with the meter to see the different types of possible flows.
1. Sets of footpads milking through the snow in splotches. 2. Curly tones reach slowly through the maw
    of smoke. 3. Catch twenty-twos kicking shivers
    down spines of audience members hoping
    snares just saxophone old soulchild
    music imbedded spit. Skillfully spent. 4. Split the word against the spleen, crack your chest" 

This is what I said:


These are very interesting lines in themselves. I think you've really gotten the hang of the trochees, except for the third one-it scans a little different than the rest to me, but I could be scanning incorrectly: I couldn't hear the third syllable in theater. It draws the reader to the substitution, and if all of these lines were within the same piece (which I think would be a really interesting next step), what makes this one important? I love the substitution in number four: to me, it emphases the visceral imagery, the germanic language of "split" and "spleen" and "crack." Then the reader has to wonder, what is the importance of this line? What is the word that is splitting against the spleen and chest? Why does it mean so much to the speaker? 
I think that if all these lines were put together, there would be a very interesting combination of thoughts and images: this would allow a lot of leeway with the actual content of the piece, there would be different combinations and directions this piece could take. But I really like what you have done with the form, you seem to be getting the hang of it and trying new substitutions show that there is thought put into the lines. What I like to do when improving and practicing the form is to take some poem that is from the anthology and just use the form of the piece. That means all of the form. Most of them are in iambic pentameter, but I think it would be interesting if you took a stanza form and created your own combination of the form. Since the stanza is just a pattern of some kind of form, it's interesting to see what you could come up with, and judging by substitutions that other poets use, some very cool products can result.

Improv Post Five Week Three

This is an improv of the poem "The Tyger" by William Blake. The poem is a stanza, so there is no set form, just the fact that it is recurring. The form that I'm using is trochaic tetrameter for the first through fourth lines of the second and third stanzas and them iambic tetrameter for the last line of the first and last stanzas. There is also an abab rhyme scheme.

It's a question contained, burning
holes in hearts and minds: to
what or who the power's spurning?
Could someone take a walk right though?

There's a path above the marking
tree, sometimes the boys and girls clip
flowers there, of any liking.
Except roses can be tulips,

funny, not like daisies. Only
ones that people know of not, but
love the same- slantly, halfly
based on me, on others- of what

they would think. A question answered
in the hearts and minds of flustered,
impostered and buds of untrue
would someone take a walk right through?

Improv Post Four Week Three

This is an improv off of the piece "Riverbank Blues" by Sterling Brown. This is a ballad so the form is abab with iambic tetrameter on the first and third lines and then iambic trimeter with the second and fourth lines. The hope is that I improv the form.

A student acts concordant, yet 
they graduate at four
and freedom ensues. Happy, fretless
like birds that fly through clouds
at night when normal sleep, concrete
to inner brainlike workings, loud
on silence, humming: Pete
will eat, will eat tomorrow proud.

Improv Post Three Week Three

This is an improv of the pastoral by Babette Deutsch called "Urban Pastoral."
What I wanted to carry through to my improv was the line "spring brightly traveling, summer half awake," and the sort of pattern of five accents per line...not sure if I got that right, but its worth a shot.

There's something in the fact that
spring travels. Bright and bubbly, while summer
is half awake. Its still covered in small blankets of
frost and expectation, deep underground like
unsprouted mushrooms. The wind marches,
a final call til the standstill of heat, the sun
over takes clouds and rain knows nothing
of the sky. Spring travels to avoid the war,
this peaceful battle of humans and nature,
where everyone wins and everyone loses.
A cow grazes the final patch of green,
he can't migrate like cardinals, only takes
the patch dealt. A farmer with a burning tan
runs his hand through a sweaty mop,
pondering, hoping for the grace of rain.

Improv Post Two Week Three

This is an improv on the poem "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen. It is a heroic couplet and so the form is in iambic pentameter and so I wanted to improv not only the line "some profound dull tunnel" but also the form itself (aabb rhyme and iambic pentameter).

In some profound dull tunnel, men with beams
down shirts and armor wait. For waiting seems
too long, like wars or lines. They stopped me
and held their hands out, again waiting: ID.
Bologna guards in front of me, but see
another some one stood- in dreams, me
in real, his face not seen. The days where dreams
maintain the truth are far and few it seems,
but nights where wandering appears to you,
it identifies, guards the deja-vu.
 

Improv Post One Week Three

This is an improv off of the pastoral by Janet Lewis called "Remembered Morning." I wanted to keep with the rhyme scheme of abcabc ababcc ababcc and the three accents per line.

The wind in the trees sings
a song to me and friends,
the song whispered in leaves
of what death can bring.
My father axes the end
of what laughter the tree heaves,

and instead the silence hums
through trickling rivers, rocks
and pops in a cackling drum
fire on the tiny docks
where groups gather to chase
the sensation death laced

away. With lattes they hide
the fear of winter- of snow
that buries happy inside,
warmed by what spring'll show.
It prepares them all 
to devour the precious wall.

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Three

"I feel my average feeling."
-Jerome

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Three

"Poetry is like lice."
"Poetry eats at my brain scalp."
-Me and Diamond

Critical Commentary Post One Week Two

For my critical commentary, I took an improv off of Andrew's blog. The original post was this:

1. Severnaya Zemlya, Laptev Sea
2. Port-au-Prince, Haiti

[C1{Lena with a tip tongues her tartar,

[C1}eyes algid along an urodid's cacoon,

[C2{Charlot cutting a net of clams feels

[C2}a psyburn, shoulders bake hush in sun. 

[C1{alike a plastic lattice for clementines,

[C1}molded for a ripe jalapeno. 

[C2{She's an ant neath a leaf when rain hits,

[C2}and a gear whenever reeling winch,

[C1{snips stem and winding up the silk strand,

[C1}as one would a hose scaled for spiders. 

[C2{"Will the rain freeze on the dry airs

[C2}sandy as some cat's tongue?" "Probably,"

[C1{she said, letter to the pal afore her pen.

[C1}"We would be the first on Pioneer

[C2{to see these beads of gelid hails. I'll 

[C2}be waiting with a bottle of port when

[C1{your boat comes in." And she signed her name

[C1}in orange gel quilled from metal, tastebud to

[C2{second bicuspid, licking the nacre left

[C2}when the last of a shellfish was cleansed of flesh.

This is what I posted:

This is a really interesting idea you have going on. I'm not exactly sure what the C1 and C2's are for, but I think you have some interesting language going on, especially the "when the last of a shellfish was cleansed of flesh," and then "alike a plastic lattice for clementines/molded for a ripe jalapeno." These, especially the last one, are very ramped on language. But that isn't all we are looking for in the class, and that being said, I think that there are moments when the language almost gets confusing. For me, that moment is in the beginning, when there are words like "psyburn," and "algid" being thrown around. I think sometimes, when the piece is set in a place like Haiti, there are going to be aspects to the piece (in regards to content) that are unknown to most of the readers, and that is where the focus needs to lie: clearly explaining what is happening. My suggestion would be to strip away the form for now, try to clearly (and simply) explicate what is occurring; from what I'm reading, it's a couple of girls fishing and talking about something having to do with ports and the weather. I think one of them is writing a letter and eating shellfish. What I'm not sold on is the point. What is the tension in the piece? What raises the stakes? I think the idea of form is to show a way of saying something that couldn't be said before, and I think you've got some interesting things trying to fight their way out: the setting of Haiti for one, or the idea of clementines molded for a ripe jalapeno, but if you strip out the form, then there isn't a rhyme scheme that has to be futzed with or a stressed or unstressed count to be monitored. Its just the writer, telling the story and trying to explain "so what." My suggestion, focus on Haiti. Flesh it out: why are these girls fishing? Why aren't there any men with them? Why is one signing her name and talking about rain and cats? These might be just basic ideas that we've learned before, but they will continue to be the basics...they will transfer over when you re-apply form and might even create more ideas than first seen.

Improv Post Five Week Two

 This is an improv off of the piece "The J Car" by Thom Gunn. It's a heroic couplet and that intrigues me. I've never really tried to write one of these, and I think Gunn deviates from the form with the idea of the caesura in the middle of the line. So what I wanted to accomplish with the improv was the actual form: iambic pentameter, caesura in the middle of the line, ten syllables, aabbccdd rhyme scheme. I hope I did that right. I also loved the line "a love he might in full reciprocate."

A love he might in full reciprocate,
like love he might in part not try to hate.
Small between the crevices, final glances
and dances lie. The samba, lovers dance
through rising seams, through doors, through voices heard,
until we come and stop. But only blurred
to hold off hope until a love returns,
and sambas right then wrong: another's arms.

Improv Post Four Week Two

This is an improv off of the piece "The Roman Baths at Nimes" by Henri Cole. The thing about this piece that really drew me to it was the line "mixes sweet with fear." It's such an intriguing little phrase. What exactly is mixing sweet with fear? How do you do that? I'm not sure if my improv really matches anything with the questions I posed, but I was trying to capture the form of the Sonnet. I am still working on all of this, so help would be welcomed.

When someone mixes sweet with fear, please care
like mothers at the playground. Slides, out there 
on swings, their kids like whatever they do.
A little boy lay crying, having one
small scrape from plastic slides, except the flow
from cuts on wrists and arms, like fighting done
to kids before, the ones from since been gone.
Until the mothers see their kids, its fear
that keeps them home. They wonder what can spawn
a fear, a debilitating career
of love, of hate, of rising hope and eyes
that see to only that of blue surprise.
Surprise a mother knows and carries close,
unfolding stairs and chairs, like what's imposed.

Improv Post Three Week Two

This is an improv of the piece "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. The piece is a stanza form so I took the trochaic pentameter approach. I hope this scans right. I took the line "driven out the cold."

We can wonder about everything and 
nothing except about winter. You had
driven out the cold as I was vermin,
hoping someone forgot about blanketing in 
something unlike stars, of colder essence-
permanent of snow and hapless never.

Improv Post Two Week Two

This is an improv off of the poem "Directive" by Robert Frost. This piece is in blank verse with Iambic lines (ten stresses and five beats). I loved the line "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion." I think this is a correct version of Iambic Pentameter but I'm not sure.

The boy who sits on fuzzy carpet laughs,
too shy for Daddy. Nursing bottles, glass
not plastic. Bluer still, a softer eye
of innocence, of thirst for something-drink
but still not whole once again, beyond doubt
of any mind or thought of confusion.

Improv Post One Week Two

This is an improv of the poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden.
The aspect of this piece that drew me to improving was the way that Auden did his form: the first part of the poem was free verse the second part of the poem was unrhymed hexameter and the last part was the eight beat rhyming couplets. I also really liked some of the lines from the poem: "but in the importance and noise of tomorrow," and "follow, poet." I wanted to grasp the idea that this person was going to be missed, without coming right out and saying "I'm gonna miss them so much." So here we go: An Elegy

She melted with the white
of winter, bloomed with spring:
tulips purpled as the brook bubbled
with the hysteria of silence.
The day she died was quiet.

Covered in blankets, like the rose
bushes outside her brick house, the
squirrels chewed on stored acorns while
the wind sang mourning through the branches
and feathers in the sky.

I could hear a wail from Haiti:
a cold, bone chilling squeal like something
from the cat under her bed. A black, white pawed
claw bats at the sky as we sit, roaring
like this feline wants to on the inside.

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow,
we sit in silence of what lies
unpublished on the desk, flipping in the wind.
She dances in on the words, floating, singing,
laughing at something I can't see.

The day she died was quieter than the rain she
loved. She'd run out and let it soak into her lines
and words and speech. Rapunzel locks puffed like the fish,
always a hairbrush and pen: pocketed 
now, drawered and dust covered, decayed like her. Men
spawned her little children, protected with press 
of key, now men strive to be children-keys only
make words not meaning. Words down a page survived us
all as we pump up our biceps in a gym with
the smell of testosterone and hopelessness, an
futile attempt at a better version of me.

A version she found long ago
in a field outside as we blew
dandelions into never
and she spoke how cheesy we were.

Like Italy, scorched and starved and 
broke, Sydney followed a command
of her own. Follow poet, meet
in the rainstorms of your two feet.

Tread lightly like she, but with faith
that what could be must fill with grace
as she's placed into the silent ground
fill the Earth with glorious sound.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week Two

"Rolling Rock [Beer] smells like three fat guys in a two man tent."
--Article online about ranking the cheap Fourth of July beer choices.

Junkyard Quote Post One Week Two

"Old age is the only disease that you don't look forward to being cured of."
-Citizen Kane

Improv Post Five Week One

This is an improv of “Dream Song 324” by John Berryman. I liked the Elegy format, and I wanted to try the rhyme scheme of Berryman’s piece. I didn’t catch a significant stress or unstress pattern, so I just wrote using the idea of an elegy and the rhyme scheme that Berryman uses.

Lisa in Atlanta to EJ underground:
How you must hate, to be without sound.
Dear father, content must you be until
we’re around. You’ve sneered with a mouth, still
echoing the insult to the others in my life,
I know your pain, alone and full of strife.

You’ve tried to raise us right,
never angry, except when I broke mother’s light,
and they say widows are always
black, grim, like it rains for days.
You left with a twinge below the ribs,
like a knife, over and over, jabbed like fibs
told that one day, turned into lies
oozing, through the backs of our eyes.

Critical Commentary Post One Week One

This is a reply to Kelsey Fleming's Improv 1, Week 1 "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.

ORIGINAL POST:
"As the man holding a slender neck begins to strum in slow motion
that speeds into now, a woman clad in a burgundy skirt that grazes
the floor gathers its cascading fabric and dips in circles every time his fingers touch
their memory. Her feet slide across the bar's gritty floor, slick with beer.
Worn limbs in the partial air, half-clouded by mouth's fatal fog.
Watch her wake from a dream when sound no longer presses
against her: a small waste of sleep."


WHAT I SAID:
"I love this. There are images in here that I want to steal: "Mouth's fatal fog," for example. This hits me in the gut. I think you're talking about words and the power of speaking, and that is definitely an interesting and different way to think about it. Words have such an impact on the world that they can almost kill. I think you can expand upon this idea, you start to talk more on sound when you said that "sound no longer presses against her," but what I ask myself why doesn't sound press against her? If she is such a deep sleep why is it a waste? What happens to her when she wakes up? Was that whole thing above a dream? If so, what made her wake up?
I also think there are some things you can do to help the actual reading of the piece: some of the lines (the first three) sound really long and run-on-ish, so I would take a look at that. But over all, I think this piece should be continued."

Improv Post Four Week One

This is an improv off of the piece "Tropics in New York." Its a stanza and I found the ten syllables with an alternating rhyme scheme and 5 stresses per line. I liked the idea that McKay uses throughout this piece about displacement. To me, this piece is a person remembering what the tropics were like because of the things that are happening in his home town of New York. I went abroad this summer and that displacement became relevant to my life once I returned home to Atlanta. I'm still trying to get the hang of this form thing.

Penne Arrabiata, foamy each
cappuccino and gelato for days.
Wine and beer and fizz water within reach,
feast for twenty, A la fruita: nine ways

stuffed in chairs of wicker, laughs ring
through rooms, now empty of English
and filled with Italian and cars they bring
over Spoleto's hills, small mounds of wishes

glimpsed only once. Fleeting as I now gaze
at the label of a frame, a road known,
the one down the hill to Vincenzo, maze
never leading anywhere: until now.

Improv Post Three Week One

This is an improv off of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool." I really liked the line "Jazz June" because it was just completely backwards to me. In my mind, June would describe jazz. But it's almost as though jazz is a verb. So that is what I'm going to start with, and since the original is a ballad, I'm attempting that form.

We jazz in June, because we can't,
and solemnly slip sand.
We rock July to hear our pant,
and feel the heat drip band.

We welcome August, then winters gust,
In December there lies
a trust: snow, maybe dust,
but June will never die.

She lives on, throughout spring and fall,
peaking in between, so
that we can fight the seasons all
with noodle knees and elbow.

Improv Post Two Week One

This is an improv off of the piece "Ozmandias" by Percy Shelley. This sonnet struck me because of the line: "But when you die nothing beside remains." This is very profound to me: when you die, nothing but remains is what remains. I wanted to try and take another spin on this idea, all the while keeping in sonnet form with iambic pentameter and fourteen lines and the rhyme scheme. I'm not sure how it worked but here it is:

You might make money, see
when you die nothing besides your body remains.
And then your family won't laugh at what's funny,
but only expect what Porsche they'll gain.
I met a man in stripes by the bank, where
he told me "give it all up," since he lost.
I watched the street light blink their colors and there
instead flash rings my mother owns, each tossed
aside gifts from stepfather, who loves young her,
while he's cancered and sixty, buys mansions here.
The old man disappears and in a spur,
I throw my pocket coins into some fear
and walk back, opposite of where I came
never go back- material in shame.

Improv Post One Week One

This is an improv off of "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke. I found that the original poem (a villanelle) is 19 lines with 10 syllables and alternating rhyme scheme (and repeating lines every other stanza). I know that was a very complicated observation I just made, so why don't you click on the  poem here to see for yourself what I was trying to say.

But anyway, I really liked the line "I learn by going where I have to go." It mimics my thoughts about life. I tried to capture that in my improv. I have no idea if it's right. This is my first attempt at form.

I learn by going where I have to go
without a map, my guesses guide me there.
I itch to find you, however slowly,

but I travel as the river below,
and the road leads past the forest bare
yet covered in something now new to know

like my plane, pasta, a pen's ink flow,
all etched above a block's furry glare
I itch to find you, however slowly.

While my hand glides, like the waves below
without a bump or rock yet to weather,
you uncovered something now new know

at the block, where my road forks what to do,
like the pasta tied up with food to tear,
and I itch to find you, however slow.

my combination: my box and my bow,
wrapped perfect and I understand its fair-
why I itched to find you, however slow,
now I'm covered in something new to know.

Junkyard Quote Post Two Week One

"Chihuahua's are just rats that are very persistent."- Lucas

Junkyard Quote Post One Week One

"peanut butter is like good karma"-Sydney and MacKenzie

First Blog Post for Fall 2013

From here on out, this blog will be devoted to my Advanced Poetry class for the Fall of 2013. I will be posting my own imitations/improvisations on poems, junkyard quotes and commentary. Just so everyone is aware.

Response to Blog Post Week Five

This is in response to Thomas' Week Two Junkyard Three:

 

"The smell of curry fills my nostrils even before the Indian Restaurant comes into view. Window shoppers peruse the various goods in shop windows nearby, and an older Italian beggar approaches me with a bird and a chest filled with lottery tickets. I do my best to be firm in my refusal to participate and I leave him awkwardly with regret and embarrassment flooding my belly."

This is what I said in response: 

"This is a really interesting image. I feel like you could have something here with the idea of the beggars. I would love to see that expanded: how do you feel when they put out those empty coin bowls? Do you think they are for real or just acting? How do they compare to the gypsies in Rome or Assisi? The other thing you should expand upon is the regret and embarrassment. That is a really interesting and revealing idea, why would someone have this sort of reaction with beggars? This shows some sort of empathy with them and at the same time, the feeling that you are better than them. I urge you to explore that, and do what Davidson has told us this whole time: dig deeper, ask questions of yourself and this scene. Also, if you choose to create this into a longer draft, of course you are going to dive into specifics. Where are you? What is the name of the indian restaurant? What are the shoppers buying? What are you wanting to buy? What shops are you passing? What is the beggar wearing? What kind of birds are they? These are questions you know the answers to...leave the meaning to the readers."

Original Post Week Five

This is taken from Deep Travel's piece "Egyptian Mummy in the Etruscan Museum at Cortona" by Charles Wright.

Doves release themselves from the post by Francis' statue
in the Basilica in Assisi, unlatch this landscape, the thornless roses
and spikes prevent perching, till feathers shrink to a glow.
I stand in awe of this halo, this aura of what we can't grasp.
Francis seems to smirk at me from Giotto's rendition,
all lapus lazuli and perfection,
telling me in a Mona Lisa smile of everything bad in my life
I tucked away under the good. You'll never be this way,
never be someone for whom shrines are built,
someone clothed unwillingly
in gold. My heart pulsates in my chest as I reach
for Sydney's eyes, her gaze a pale messenger
from the wordless world:
a worthless Basilica for a priceless connection.

Reportage Week Five

Its a nice circular building at first glance. Not too small, not too big, and from a distance, unnamed. This is the well where Orvietians retrieved water for ages. For five euro a head you can see it yourself. Feeling like the donkeys that carried Italians, our legs clomp down the cobbled steps, jiggling to maintain stability. Every few steps there's a window built in to check your progress, hold on to the ledge or you might pitch forward and down the 250 steps. A double helix system in steps allows for air circulation so far down, resulting in chilliness. Throw a coin in St. Patrick's well and you might find luck walking back up. The heat and sun hits your face, you make your way out the revolving door, and pitch forward to the water fountain gasping against the history.

Junkyard Quote Four Week Five

A doorway to the underground opens and we file in, listening to our guide explain Orvieto as a series of tunnels. Protection from World War Two, storage containers, or just breeding ground for pigeons. I think of A Cask of Amontillado and Edgar Allen Poe and wonder if he had one of these birds. I imagine snuggling up to dirt walls mixed in cement from limestone, listening to the metal tools of Italians and the noises of donkeys. The ground dips, and I catch myself on a metal railing, jolted back into the world of steep steps and pillars. Where olive oil must be hidden from enemies and poured on their heads through a drain in the wall, and water comes from a well 250 stairs down.

Memory Post Week Five

While we ride on the bus out to dinner last night, I looked out the window at a parking lot, half expecting the University Bookstore to appear in the front right corner of the bus. Wracked with a case of deja vu, I shake my head to remind myself that we were not in Georgia, instead finishing up our five week trip here. Thoughts of packing up have yet to occur; violent memories flash of the end of fall semester, a year ago.
We finished a movie night, Hostel, the first one, and it was Thursday. Everyone who lived in the dorm gets kicked out the next night at six, I remember my RA shouting down the hall. It was quiet hours, and I wished I could have written her up for disturbing my studies. The boxes that I moved in with sat on my bed, mocking my procrastination. I didn't want that year to end. I knew once summer hit, and then we all came back for the fall, my group of friends would fall apart, be torn to shreds by school and walking distances.
I feel that now. A sense of preemptive nostalgia, once we disembark from Lufthansa's plane, we vanish to the corners of Carrollton and the world, only to relive the fun from Facebook. The inside jokes fade away, just like summer tans from Rome, only replaced by school and winter whiteness.

Junkyard Quote Three Week Five

Florence Hostels are full of nonworking locks and British teenagers. Florence itself is full of pizza, pigeons and Americans. Dante gets thrown in there somewhere, along with Irish pubs and construction from the corner. Our room opens to a balcony, where we drain a bottle of wine into our mouth holes, some pregaming for that night, I'm trying to sleep. There's a set of loft stairs missing a transition step, you lunge from first to third. The space-filled with injury and fear. Fear of the thoughts from Taken and Hostel when I'm left in the room by myself. My company: three beds and a door that doesn't lock.

Junkyard Quote Two Week Five

While lost in the market of Bologna, a tunnel of white tents and Indian men that yell in Italian, I found a park. A place with steps and a fountain, covered in spray paint and history. I lay out my jacket on the dusty grass and settle in for an afternoon of sweat and Gomorrah. Heineken bottles litter the ground, three in a circle with a little liquid left inside. To my right, a couple pulls scarves and prayer rugs out of plastic bags, showing off purchases to each other, anxious to share in the excitement. She bounces up and down trying to pull a new sweater over her head, even though they sit right in the middle of the sun. I shake my head, turn to my left where Lucas lays on his back in the grass, hat on his face, dead to the world.

Junkyard Quote One Week Five

The train station at Borgo Nuovo is not a train station. Its more of a bench with an awning that holds a do-it-yourself ticket kiosk and validater. To say that this was the sticks-an understatement. This place, this train stop, was Bowdon's bastard brother. Tucked further up the mountain, in the foothills of the unknown, hides a restaurant that will render even the professional wordsmith speechless. The wine flows freely, everyone laughs and sings along offkey to the open mic artist who stands in front of the bar. Plate after plate of lasagna and wild boar, potatoes and cheese from goats and cows. Its a place where its 30 euro a head...if you're friends.

Original Post Week Four

This is taken from Deep Travel's "Mid Winter Snowfall in the Piazza Dante" by Charles Wright.

If there is one secret to this life, it is this life.
This life and its hand-me-downs that you laugh at me when I say I love them.
Make me feel close to someone,
like I have a piece of them
on my feet, or in the fabric of my shirt. Isn't that why we search,
why we travel?

From Bologna to home takes
four hours too long, Arezzo finds us confused with laughter,
doubled over with the Perugia train chugging behind us,
who hopped off to check the Partenze,
I'm left behind,
a hand-me-down girl in a brand named world.

A bottle of wine to calm only creates hysteria
inside, with no food to sop it up. If there is one secret
to this life, it is this life. This life and its sop.
Puddles after a rain, Venice floods, not enough bread.
You loop my arm, say We're only learning, killing it.
I shake my head yes, inside- a grenade of Gomorrah ready to explode.
No-I'm happy as second hand sop.
World traveler headed home. 

Response to Blog Post Week Four

This is in response to Merrick's blog post "Week 4: Memory 1: -The Audition"

"I was new to the community theatre group and felt distinctly like an outsider, but there was no way I was going to let my insecurity keep me from doing my best to get a part in this play.  "10 Little Indians" was the first serious play had participated in with this community.  I truly wanted to be murderer in this play and I figured the best way to do that was to just be the darkest, sexiest bitch there.

I lowered my voice to an alto whenever I read a line and made sure I moved with a grace that bordered between sex kitten and assassin.  I never felt so comfortable in a cold reading audition before.  I was enjoying myself and after a while, I no longer felt like I was being watched and judged on my acting. I was the character.

I didn't get the part, but I found out later the reason why they didn't give me the part was because I was apparently too good.  They said I was too creepy and dark and though they loved my characterization, they thought it would be too obvious I was the murderer.  I felt a lot better about not getting the character then, and through myself into portraying an old man who murdered his wife, went insane, hit on a younger woman, only to be murdered himself.  It was awesome.

And, as it turned out, I was able to use the same characterization I created for the murderer audition, for my portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West in 'The Wizard of Oz"

This is what I posted in response:

"Merrick,
This is a really intriguing and fascinating memory. I was never into theater, but took a class in High School on acting. I love the line "moved with grace that bordered between sex kitten and assassin." This is such an opposing idea, but it works here. It works very well. I think if you wanted to turn this into prose or a poem, the next step would be to relate this to something else, to get away from the triggering subject and into something deeper. My thought would be to relate this to Italy and traveling here, because I know we have all felt a little out of place and a little intimidated by the people we are with. My suggestion would be to find something about the people that you are with (ie: the group) or something about how you feel about traveling with us that reminds you of this theater moment. I love the idea of morphing yourself into a character. Would the speaker be morphing themselves to fit in here? Are we morphing ourselves to fit in with Italian life? How is traveling like acting? I think if you meditated on how the two relate, you could have a really interesting and thought provoking piece on your hands. I will be more than willing to help you with sorting out ideas and such."

Masters Reading Response Gomorrah Part One and Part Two

Gomorrah Part One by Roberto Saviano reflects an Italy that is the heart of criminal activity. He starts out discussing Naples as a sphincter muscle that squeezes out products. I love that analogy of it being a part of the body: its a very visceral image that connects with all the Camorra killings. There are images of people being dissolved in acid, being burned in cars, being shot multiple times, and being killed by drug dealers. There is a moment in this part of the book that really stuck with me: the moment when the man is "dead" and his girlfriend pees on his face. This makes Italy seem like a land of insanity. Confusion and wonderment. Drugs and prostitution. Recently I traveled to Bologna, where the car that I was in passed by a street where prostitutes were waiting for someone to stop. This made everything seem so much more real. Italy, though this part, manifests as a place of justified violence. Its a place that everything goes, there are no rules even when the police catch you, nothing happens of major significance. Rome shows this immensely. Its a place where people don’t want to follow the rules because their history is all about oppression. This remains the same all around Italy, people from Bologna talk about when going to America, it is amazing how people actually follow rules. I think its very intriguing how this book truly shows how Italy’s violence really comes out. That’s not something advertised, even though people know about it.

Part Two goes deeper into the behind the scenes mental activity of the Camorra. For example, the most intriguing part of the part two was the chapter about Hollywood. I found it fascinating how much Hollywood plays into the naming and the dress of the Camorra clans. I still cannot grasp the interest with the Hollywood lifestyle for the bosses, and while being here, nothing has pointed to that idea other than the way some people dress. The book talks about how the Scarface and the Godfather ideologies play into the life of the Camorra, and that then extends into what the other people wear. People follow those around them, and fashion is what Italy is known for throughout the world. It makes me wonder whether or not Italy is turning into a country of another Hollywood. I like this idea of Camorra following Hollywood, but it begs the question, is Hollywood actually following Camorra and the Mafia lifestyle?