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.