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.