Junkyard Quotes Entry 1 (Week 1)

"...the Devil adjusted  
your new spiked antennae
almost delicately, with claws curled

and lacquered black, before he spread  
his leather wings to leap  
into the acid-green sky."
-- Mary Karr All This and More

The reason I picked this passage from All This and More was because I really like the specific descriptions Karr uses...she has strong imagery that really hits me in the gut with how truly evil and frightening this place is.


"I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light."
--Robert Lowell Epilogue

The reason I picked this quote from Epilogue was because I really like the part in italics...it gives a contradicting comparison to what vision is...vision isn't something that offers clarity, but creates a hindrance.

Calisthenics Entry 1 (Week 1)

For the first Calisthenics post, I wanted to replay the exercise we did in class on January 12th. We had looked at the poem "Under the Vulture Tree" by David Bottoms, which used the concepts of ladder of specificity, defamiliarization, germanic over latinate, strong imagery, and the fear of adjectives to describe vultures and being around them. So, for the first Calisthenic, we were tasked with describing a maggot like Bottoms describes a vulture.

My List of Descriptors for "THE MAGGOT:" (some of them)
-blind, appear out of nowhere, garbage disposal, white, ugly, nutritious, beginning stage of insects
The maggot is like a disappearing act of the garbage disposal, what goes in never comes out.
The maggot is like a blind newborn puppy following the scent of dying decay.

I took the descriptors and tried to describe what a maggot was like to me...but by trying to defamiliarize and trying to use the ladder of specificity, which is why some words are crossed out...they meant the same thing as the words before it.

My favorite of the descriptions is "the maggot is a newborn puppy following the scent of decay." It relates the maggot to something you wouldn't expect.