Poem 4, Week 13

When the doctor asked me if I wanted to see the inside
of my cervix I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be bad,
like seeing a cut you made on your hand and trying not to
retch as the moist, white flaps of skin begin to bleed
or like watching a pre-med student extract a needle
from your arm after deciding it was time to “give back”
at the town blood drive. No, the causal turn of my head
to the monitor at my left proved that looking at my cervix
was no more nauseating than staring at a wad of saliva
soaked pink gum or observing what I imagine
the inside of an octopus would look like if sliced opened
and the interior of it’s slick flesh were left on a table--
as if it were a book the owner set down to answer the phone.

In 1956 William Masters and Virginia Johnson invented a sex
machine that filmed a woman from the inside, a hobby horse
with a penis endowed to record. They wanted to see a woman’s
full cycle, comparable, at the time, to her intimate relationship
with the washing machine. It was all to find penile traction
on the labia minora, to find how a woman orgasms, constantly
Asking how does that feel, miss? So when the doctor asks me
If I can feel camera as it searches for cancer, I tell him, no,
it’s about as exciting as doing the laundry. I watch
as it plunges further in the folds of pink valleys searching
For that bit of white flesh hiding from removal.
There is nothing sexy about this,
said 99% of the woman that subjected themselves to Masters
and Johnson’s spin cycle--it was all for science, for the future
benefit of others. That’s what my doctor tells me anyway
when he zones in on a patch of white tissue and claps his hands
in victory. I take a good, hard look at the screen and determine
this is the last time I ever want to see myself from the inside.

Poem 3, Week 12

When she was a girl she hated everything
except girls, except her schoolmate, Sarah.
nothing good can come from kissing
something like a boy, so even Lola with feet

like a boy’s, she hated too. Sarah tied yarn
the color of toasted almonds in her hair

and worn holey knee highs that stopped
just under her thighs. Her thighs so pale
they yelled for eyes to drift from blackboard

to their brightness, so delicious, like a sugared pear.
In college the touching began, first hands, then lips,

then Joan was her first lover. They told jokes
about the girls in their hall, smoked joints
in the closet often after hours of sex on Joan’s bed.

She never wiped her mouth after it grazed over Joan’s
body, just above her knees, but cried for days when her lover

took a boyfriend, and stopped coming to her dorm.
next semester she met Joan in the courtyard

next to the main gate. Joan was two months pregnant
and wanted to have sex with her one more time.
She slapped Joan in the face and said, Yes…please,

one more time.

Poem 2, Week 11

Power

I forgot to tell you about my love affair
with racism. The man who took my virginity
had a iron cross on the left side of his chest
and a bat in the trunk of his Mustang. He told me
the first time he shaved his head was in California-
his brother's in prison out there and they all have guns,
he said. We had sex on the couch, I bled on the sofa.
I always wondered if he hated me

the way he hated the spics who put his brother in jail.
I know now I loved him the way a woman might love
a man who beats here, I thought hate would be good in bed.
Psychologist say all women have rape fantasies-
to be dominated, to be guilty of nothing.
Maybe that's why I found it okay to sleep with a man
who beat people with off-white skin, I wasn't the one
holding the bat. I had a dirty desire for that blood
on the couch, I had a dirty want for the wrong of it all.

Poem 1, Week 10

Mouth to Mouth

Never was a cornflake girl.
Tori Amos, Cornflake Girl

It should not alarm you that I despise
something other than myself. I’m not

a feminist for nothing or else all those Tori
Amos songs taught me zilch about owning

a vagina. Yeah, sometimes I peruse through
the make-up aisle and think about lip gloss

and how nice it would be to dab its glistening
guarantee of sex on my dry mouth. But then

I remember that when I turn my head too fast
my hair sometimes gets stuck in this new cosmetic

radiance on my face and I want to go back to the bare
essentials of my own matte lips. I have always loved

experimenting with you and your love for me.
You always tease me about my reflection

and how you catch me looking at it after a bath--
how I still turn sideways and suck in my tummy,

how I won’t dye my hair, but I still paint my nails.
I look forward to the day when I can like the thought

of liking myself without the need for any woman
with unshaved or plastic body parts to tell me

what I should be. I wonder what the first woman
was like before other women came along. I wonder

who told her how to be?

Pedagogy forum, Week 9

I am really finding ‘The Writing Experiment’ by Smith hard to follow, and maybe overall, not to helpful. I don’t think this is a text that I would be interested in using in the future to teach creative writing. First, for beginning writers I would imagine that it is not completely accessible. I find it hard to access even after writing for several years now. There are sections for beginners and those whom Smith would conclude to be more advanced, yet I feel that the book does not give me a great deal of material to work with. The few exercises that I have attempted to try from this text do not produce much workable material for me. And although this is true of a lot of other exercises I find the ones included in this book not fruitful. I was wondering how others in the class felt about this text—those both new and experienced to writing and how or if (those who teach) find anything useful in it to teach young writers?

Calisthenics, Week 9

Gathering lanaguge from various nonfiction texts, like the excerise we did in class.
I like this excerise and find it very helpful in locating unexpected lanuage and pairings.

Plotting the plotless,
the world includes all of us, but this book does not.
This item-I hesitate to use the word document- has unearthed
the performer, chooses between alternative pitches for each letter.
Well today, with such rushings, went without mailing
arm in arm, they scurried off before the waitress could return with God.
New York allowed me to take three months in the middle of 1972,
how readers could see beyond the ethnic and the immigrant
spring became summer, Louise left Key West for good on June.
Some acids are burned off during the roasting process,
yet, the task of rescuing language from the bad prose of patriotism,
Upper-class English diction with its sharpened vowels, elisions, and modish slurs,
The dead house is stuffed. The stuffing is alive. It is sinful.
locating the split in the poem, however, is not that easy.

Sign Inventory, Week 9

Victim Number 48
-Mahmoud Darwish

•The poem is concerned with detailing permanence: death, darkness, prison, tattoos, mourning.
•The poem is also concerned with detailing imprisonment: prison, boxes, no travel pass.
•The victim has only a mother and a brother mentioned—the poem details the loss of familial ties with the death of the victim.
•The crime for which the victim is killed is never divulged.
•There are details of the flora or terrestrial in connection with the victim: a lamp of roses, dead upon the stones, boxthorn.
•There is also a jump from the terrestrial to the celestial with the repeated imagery of the moon.
•The speaker’s relation to the victim and the family is unknown, but he does claim ownership to his country: my country, placing himself akin to the victim if only nationally.
•The “they” who find the victim is also unclear and their relation to the speaker and/or the state.
•A travel pass is repeated—either one is in possession of one or not.
•There is also an importance of carrying items in this poem: the victim carries piastres, matches, a travel pass and his brother carries a box of garbage and other boxes.

Response to Student Journal, Week 9

Darin,
I love this improv. It is really unusual and gives way for great opportunities to grow into a strong draft. I like that it starts out grounded in a place and quickly moves into action with the Angel slinking up next to the speaker. That the Angel in fact slinks is interesting and unexpected. We normally, of course, think of Angels descending, ascending, or magically appearing, so the very verb slink implies that this particular Angel is uncommon. The connotations of the verb slink also put this Angel in a shady light, which is also an unexpected turn for this archetypal character. A few suggestions I have if you continue to work on this draft is to pay attention to your line breaks. You end a great deal of lines with weak verbs or non-images: to it, know, of, and me. It really makes a difference and sticks with the reader if you end a line on a strong, concrete image. Or consider, I may have mentioned this before, the idea of reading your lines independently from one another. For example, your line: “it might close forever, for all I know” reads as an independent sentence when taken out of context of the poem. The line, “I’ve got problems and nightmares to,” however, reads oddly if taken out of context. It’s really just something to consider when you want to concentrate on strong lines and line breaks—they do help strengthen the overall architecture of your poem.

Free Entry, Week 9

It should not alarm you that I despise
something other than myself. I’m not

a feminist for nothing or else all those Tori
Amos songs taught me zilch about owning

a vagina. Yeah, sometimes I peruse through
the make-up aisle and think about lip gloss

and how nice it would be to dab its glistening
guarantee of sex on my dry mouth. But then

I remember that when I turn my head too fast
my hair sometimes gets stuck in this new cosmetic

radiance on my face and I want to go back to the bare
essentials of my own matte lips. I have always loved

experimenting with you and your love for me.
You always tease me about my reflection

and how you catch me looking at it after a bath--
how I still turn sideways and suck in my tummy,

how I won’t dye my hair, but I still paint my nails.
I look forward to the day when I can like the thought

of liking myself without the need for any woman
with unshaved or plastic body parts to tell me

what I should be. I wonder what the first woman
was like before other women came along. I wonder

who told her how to be?

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 9

“Captured: America in Color”
-title of photo collection

“dogs are already enjoying a better life”
-Dog Island Fever

“The oldest known relatives of dinosaurs were the size of a house cat”

“the gazpacho is laced with Valium”
-New York Times

Improv, Week 9

Beside a Chrysanthemum
--So Chong-Ju
To bring one chrysanthemum
flower, the cuckoo has cried
since spring.

To bring one chrysanthemum to bloom,
thunder has rolled
through black clouds.

Flower, like my sister returning
from distant, youthful byways
of throat-tight longing
to stand by the mirror:

for your yellow petals to open
last night such a frost fell,
and I could not sleep.

-----------------------------------------------------

To bring milk to the well,
every April, the millipede will curl
into a flat roll, like a saucer.

To bring milk to the schoolyard,
after the rain lets, after the children
pick themselves up from scrapped knee.

Milk, like the finest tusks returns
in favors from distant relatives,
leaves caught in the throat
of Spring, standing room only:

for your opal colored drops
that collect in the hand
of unexpecting orphans
that dream of warmth.

Calisthenics, Week 8

*attempt at a crowne sonnet that I tried as a collaberation with a couple of other poets via email. We would start with the each other's lines.

I wish he was here right now, please call back
to tell me if he will leave my keys. Please,
I need my keys, he can keep the damn car,
can keep the cds that are in the trunk,
even that signed Stix vinyl my dad gave
me. My dog’s locked in the shed, so I need them
back, I don’t have his number, so yes please
call him and tell him to come over quick.
And when he comes, I will have lied about
the dog, and the keys, about the car, and
about keeping it all. I want him here,
I want him here now to tell him about
how I watch the door of his house to see
when his wife goes to work, when his kids leave,

how I want to knock on the door and shout:
remember when we were married, when we
talked of kids. Let me kiss you again.

Pedagogy forum, Week 8

One thing that I’ve been trying to prepare for lately is teaching my own creative process of writing a poem to Amy’s Creative Process class. I have been mining my drafts trying to find the most accessible to teach ‘beginner poets.’ Also, I am trying to find the draft that may have the most drastic changes to give the most visual example to the students. Since most of my drafts begin as improvs or calisthenics it might also be useful to give the students an exercise to generate language and show them that writing poetry does not require a muse. I hope to show the students that how I typical begin a poem—through a writing exercise from other texts—is how they can all begin to write a poem. I want to perhaps talk about Hugo’s techniques about a triggering subject once they have a lengthy bit of material to work with. Or, at least cull some sort of thread that may be apparent in their exercise to begin to see some architecture. I think I want to use the exercise that we actually did in class—to bring in several texts and have the student write down a line and then pass the text and write down another line from the next text and so forth. I think that this particular exercise is a great start to show those students least familiar with the act/process of writing poetry that they can just start writing and they don’t have to be ‘inspired.’

Sign Inventory, Week 8

“She Didn’t Even Wave”
-Ai

*The speaker carries on two conversations, one (in the past) with her mother moments before she dies and one with an unnamed “you.”

*Only the speaker’s mother “talks” in italics, but when the speaker “talks” to the unmentioned “you” there is no italics.

*The speaker buries her mother by herself.

*The speaker covers up her mother, but exposes herself in the next line: “but I couldn’t do much about her face, / blue-black and swollen, / so I covered it with a silk scarf. / I hike my dress up to my thighs / and rub them

*The speaker changes tenses from past to present on numerous occasions: so I covered her face-I hike my dress, It was real nice-I touch the rhinestone heart, I walked outside-and face the empty house, etc.

*The conversational interjections are unclear as to who is speaking: the speaker, the mother, the unnamed you?

*The poem is occupied with step-by-step actions: I do this, you did that, she did this, etc.

*The speaker is concerned with the sense of touch: I hike my dress to my thighs, I touch the rhinestone, you put your arms around me, she squeezed me so tight, hug me again.

*The poem centers around the fear of loss; the mother is concerned with her daughter leaving home for a man and then the daughter must deal with the death of her mother.

*Jean is the only name given. The mother is never named and neither is the you.

Improv, Week 8

Miss Rose
-Lucille Clifton

When I watch you
Wrapped up like garbage
Sitting, surrounded by the smell
Of too old potato peels
Or
When I watch you
In your old man’s shoes
With the little toe cut out
Sitting, waiting for your mind
Like next week’s grocery
I say
When I watch you
You wet brown bag of a woman
Who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
Used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
Through your destruction
I stand up

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then I met you
For the last time
Your feet laced in rope
And cut with thorns
From the field of your father’s farm
The barn was to the right
Paint peeling like a sunburnt back
Or
The coat of a snake
With twenty years of dirt in each follicle
Waiting to get back to where it belongs
And then I met you
You pair of hands with yesterday’s yellowing
That used to hold me in the daylight
Through all the Georgia smoke
I left it all fall
Then I stand it up again

Response to Student Journal, Week 8

Chris,
You're right, Achilles and Hector locked in a ballet together sounds like grounds for a great poem. You could put them in modern times and really play around with scene and language. With what you have here I think you can mine these lines and amp them up a little bit to get some really useful language. For example, "Paris embraces forbidden pleasures," is pretty expected as far as word choice goes. What pleasures exactly? In detail? What if you use the ballet idea as framework for your piece and Paris is addicted to video games or his internet girlfriend or Twitter? What if Achilles and Hector are secret lovers? I just think it would be cool to set-up different scenerios for old myths to generate fresh ideas and language. Rethinking old characters is always a great writing exercise that can produce great work.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 8

"creating an artificial demand for moisture"
mnn.com

"trees that uproot themselves and migrate"
Codex Seraphinianus

"You're hunting for guns"
gladwell.com

"Dumbwaiters are everywhere"
Mental Floss

Free Entry, Week 8

When she was a girl she hated everything
except girls, except her schoolmate, Sarah.
nothing good can come from kissing
something like a boy, so even Lola with feet

like a boy’s, she hated too. Sarah tied yarn
the color of toasted almonds in her hair

and worn holey knee highs that stopped
just under her thighs. Her thighs so pale
they yelled for eyes to drift from blackboard

to their brightness, so delicious, like a sugared pear.
In college the touching began, first hands, then lips,

then Joan was her first lover. They told jokes
about the girls in their hall, smoked joints
in the closet often after hours of sex on Joan’s bed.

She never wiped her mouth after it grazed over Joan’s
body, just above her knees, but cried for days when her lover

took a boyfriend, and stopped coming to her dorm.
next semester she met Joan in the courtyard

next to the main gate. Joan was two months pregnant
and wanted to have sex with her one more time.
She slapped Joan in the face and said, Yes…please,

one more time.

Calisthenics, Week 7

Remembrance of Who I Am
-Britney Spears

No more chains
That you gave me.
Enough of pain
Now I'm craving
Something sweet, so delight
How do you stand sleeping at night?

Silly patterns that we follow
You pull me in
I'm being swallowed.
By the ones you think you love
They pull you down
You can't see up above.

Manipulation is the key
They screw it in
Because you're naive.

You come to me now
Why do you bother?
Remember the Bible
The sins of the Father.
What you do
You pass down
No wonder why
I lost my crown.


--------------------------------------------


Garbage Man


No more loose trash
That you leave in the can.
Enough of the banana peels
That don’t make it inside the bag.
Now I’m jogging
Up the street, hiding
From your son with the forgotten
sack. Something rancid in his face
Tells me its from a baby’s room.
How do you stand sleeping at night?
Those weekly patterns that we follow
You pull me in
I'm being swallowed.
By the garbage you think you love.
The trash can pull you down
You can't see up above.
Family is the key, the more
Kids, the more waste.
They pile it in
Because they’re naive.
You come to me now,
Why do you bother?
Remember the 60s,
The sins of the supermarket?
What do you pass down?
No wonder why
I lost my union card.

Response to student journal, Week 7

Randie,
This draft owns a great deal of valuable language that I think you can gather for an even tighter revision. Some of the best, most interesting lines in the draft are: my family standing together like paper dolls, looking back, my father could never look us straight in the eye, Spike, the Boston Terrier, trying to escape my sister’s grasp, her eyes always droop at the sight of a camera, etc. I think that these lines are great and you could even condense them a little bit further. For example, “Remembering that chimera of my family standing together like the paper dolls I used to cut out of stationary paper, bits of our address still peeking out from their feet.” This is a huge sentence! What about: In the photo, my family stands together like a chair of paper dolls. I like the part about the address peeking out from under their feet, but I really think that may not fit. I like the idea of a chain of paper dolls, because it seems this family is connected (like all families), but brittle and easy to tear. Another suggestion for condensing would be for the line: Looking back at how my father could never look us straight in the eye, his back always turned from us. You have look twice in the line. You could have thinking back or just leave it out all together, because it is understood that the speaker is looking back by the sheer act of viewing an old photo. What if it where something like, My father never could look us in the eye, his back always turned from us in every memory. Great possibilities here.

Sign inventory, Week 7

Empire of Dreams
-Charles Simic

*The poem notes several moments of negatation or a lack of something: I’m on a street corner where I shouldn’t be, alone and coatless, I am afraid to put [the mask] on, etc.

*The first line sets the poem in the “always present,” because it is always evening every time the speaker opens his dream book.

*The speaker’s dream is riddled with war/occupied terminology: in an occupied country, hour before curfew, all the houses are dark, storefronts gutted, on a street corner where I shouldn’t be, the speaker has to wear a mask.

*The title lends to a controlled environment in the speaker’s dream with Empire.

*The poem is set in an ominous light: hour before curfew, all the houses are dark, he is going out looking for a black dog, he wears “a kind of Halloween” mask.

*There are not many concrete details in the poem other than Halloween; the reminder of the poem is more general: in an occupied country, a small provincial city, I am on a street corner where I shouldn’t be, etc.

*The Halloween mask gives concern to the speaker’s need for concealment.

*The speaker and the dog have some kind of special connection because the dog only answers to “my whistle.”

*By looking for the dog, the speaker puts himself in a sense of danger, because he is out in the city at night when he shouldn’t be; and he is cutting it close to curfew.

*The speaker has the option to conceal himself with the Halloween mask, but is afraid to do so.

Improv, Week 7

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
-James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distance of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

---------------------------------------------------------------


Next to my bed, I watch a fly flirt with the rim
Of the coffee cup, the dog sleeps at my feet,
And a breeze lulls through the window.
Downstairs the children rattle their breakfast
Plates, the T.V. shrills just above their voices,
Somewhere a door slams.
Above the dresser hangs a necklace on a nail,
Wrapped in a coat of light from the window.
Last year’s dust still layers the picture frames.
I prop myself up, pull the covers to my chest,
A daughter barges into the room for lunch money.
I have nothing but this life.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 7

"The pint-sized house of worship was built in 1989, and is just 3 feet by 6 feet and has only two seats."

"the tree's branches are draped with footwear"

-best roadside attractions

"Look at a satellite picture of Russia"
-The Washington Post

"A picture of a dog on a bike serves no social purpose"

Free entry, Week 7

There is a blue gleam in the alcohol
that swims in your eyes. I find it irresistible
not to put a straw in you and drink.
I want to put you in a pond so see if you will
float. It will only take a gentle heave
before you find yourself in a sea of starlight
and lily pads. I want to make a paper doll
of you, to keep in my nightstand to use
as a bookmark. I want to take you home
just as you are, but the empty glass in your hand
tells us we’re come to the end of the night.

I consider the flavor of your favorite ice cream,
what color it is against your tongue as I hug you
goodnight and hail a cab. You tell me not to
be so melodramatic-that there’s another bar
down the street. I consider this.
When something this good is happening,
you say, there isn’t any way to stop.
You haven’t been home in five months,
I remind you, our six-year-old started wetting the bed.

Now, I want to be the woman you took to bed
last fall, the leggy waitress with the birthmark
behind her ear. I want to remember the night
I found out, so that tonight I get in the cab.
I consider telling you that your mother called,
Thanksgiving is at Aunt Pauline’s this year.
I wondered why we never told her why
our six-year-old started wetting the bed.

Pedagogy forum, Week 6

One thing that I have been pondering over the past week or so is how to get students to understand how to give the best construction criticism to help peers in a workshop environment. This question stems from obsevering student comments in our own poetry workshop and working with Amy Ellison in 1101 English. There have been a few days of workshopping sign inventories as well as outlines from future essays in 1101 and more often than not students are afraid to ask questions of a peer’s paper. I think that the most important thing to do as an instructor is to push the students to ask questions and then based upon those questions ask themselves if it can be answered with evidence from the text. In a creative writing workshop it seems sometimes that there is an extra layer of inhibition when the work examined is thought to be “personal.” How can the myth be overcome? The myth of “well you’re the writer and if that’s how you wrote it then by all means keep it that way,” seems so hard for students to overcome. What is the reluctance for students to let this myth go?

Student repsonse, Week 6

Zac,

I really agree with your comment here, I think there is a tremendous amount of expectation for young students to read a poem and tell a teacher or write in an essay "what it all means." There is a great myth about there being one grand and ultimate meaning to a poem, but that is just not the case. Thinking small with the aid of sign inventory-ing really helps students, as you were saying, tackle the text in front of them. I have even found working with numerous students at the Writing Center here on campus that with most texts (not just poetry, but fiction, advertisements, film, etc) they have a difficult time narrowing down the focus of an essay when analyzing a text. I think that once students can begin to see that there are numerous, differing meanings to a text then they will be better able to pick one they agree most with and have the most evidence from the text to back it up, the technique of inventory-ing a text will be a great tool in making students better readers of a poem.

Sign inventory, Week 6

Morning Song
-Sylvia Plath


*The poem features a mixture of numerous elements of physical and enironvmental structure: statue, walls, the cloud, mirror, sea, window, etc.

*The poem is written in complete sentences except for "New statue," found in the second stanza.

*Actions and descriptions are often paired with animal characteristics: moth-breath, cow-heavy, your mouth opens clean as a cat's.

*The speaker claims no particular ownership of the child: I'm no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect it own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand.

*There is an occupation apparent in the poem with the celestial: took its place among the elements, the cloud that distills, swallows its dull stars, the clear vowels rise like balloons.

*There is a lack of emotion at the birth of the child: We stand round blankey as walls.

*The poem owns a preoccupation about sound-the sound of the mother and the child: your bald cry, our voices magnifying your arrival, I wake to listen: a far sea moves in my ear, one cry, now you try your handful of notes.

*Love is equated with time ticking: Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

*The poem lack minute specifics, except for Victorian nightgown, the reminder of the poem center on more abstractions: the elements, shadows our safety, the cloud that distills the mirror.

*The midwife and not the speaker/mother is the only one to touch the child in the poem: the midwife slapped your footsoles.

Junkyard quotes 1-4, Week 6

"a limitation that may frustrate hopes for spray-on trousers and other garmets."
-www.guardian.com

"Dancers are trained to land softly and keep any sounds inside them as they move with vigor around the stage. Even the stages are designed to suppress sound."

"The finding complicates the question of what happened[...]"

"Questions on Congo River Fishes."

-New York Times

"Who says making a cake is always an oven-required affair?"
-Women's Day

Calisthenics, Week 6

Armor vaccines can trip quiet problems
an orbit in linear falsehood proves,
for us, lethargic, veneer, menorah.
Mule tried idling at train
engines and outposts I surprise many
larvae mourning engines of Iran.
Muslims quote bellicose passages
from counterfeit urbanities, infectious
dollars lie, lean on us or don’t.
All banquet part tables
along money foam. Medusa,
million causes mill for a quail.
Number lassoes quiver doubtless
regions, dumb totals vent
pious valium, total arid banks
impure, tantamount animals
celebrate fire.

We are ten armoring ourselves in vaccine.
The problem of our orbit, of our linear falsehood,
proves for us, veneer. We are mule tried,
idling train stations, outposts of mourning.
We are ten and our counterfeit urbanities infect
dollar signs. We set out our money like we set
the table. All those dumb totals gather,
number after number like animals flocking
to the tantamount fire. And we celebrate.

Free Entry, Week 6

I found a garden in mid-air
and occasional under the table.
We bought supplies at the vending machine
next to the laundry mat, we popped gum
until all the pink was chewed out.
This is what it means to be a child,
to be yellow and new all over
like a coward or a virgin,
like a domino in a box-unused and cold
to the touch. The locusts left yesterday,
and the church bell disappeared
That is why the garden hung
mid-air,all sense was gone.
This is also what it means to be a child,
to lose and to like to lose
because losing means nothing
when you are five.

Improv, Week 6

The River of Bees
-W.S. Merwin

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house

Into whose courtyard a blind man followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

----------------------------------------------------------------------

In a riverboat I returned to the cave of black coats.
My oars were not wooden but stoic arms of the world’s
Oldest statue. The fingers of my oars caught hold

On the river moss and were seasoned with algae,
Drawing a wayward map in my wake. Under a courtyard
Of stars I fished for the end of surprise.

But all I found was the end of my tongue.

The stars then collected into a tight fist.

I knew this was the end
That museums from now would display.
Instead the world waited to die
As a father waits on the arrival of his children
Before his that last labored breath,

Before death retrieves his black coat
From the closet and snugs it around
The shoulders of our last moments.

Pedagogy forum, Week 5

Reading “The Day Lady Died” for class this week I, of course, had to look up several references that I was not familiar with and make the correct notations on my copy of the poem. I started to think about how this particular poem would read to a beginning poetry class with, assumedly, young, inexperienced students. It would almost be too idealist of me to assume that when a student doesn’t know a word, place, or person mentioned in a poem that they would immediately go look it up. Unfortunately, I know that most don’t. I run across this problem a lot in the Writing Center. Students, more often than not, fail to do the extra work and look up what they don’t already know. The O’Hara poem is heavy with references and not only that but the references hold certain connotations that guide a reading of this piece. These connotations are important to the reading if only on a surface level understanding of the poem. How would one teach this poem to young students (or even adult students unfamiliar with these references) that the connotations that go along with the references should be understood? There are always going to be references and connotations that students will not get without being directly informed or looking them up, but this piece seems heavily invested with an almost “stilted” reading—it is very aware of its own “intellectualness.”

Sign inventory, Week 5

Retrospect in the Kitchen
-Maxine Kumin

*The "you" addressed in the poem is addressed also as Earth Wizard and Limb Lopper.

*The poem exhibits barriers not only in life and death, but time: "stand at midnight-nine o'clock / your time".

*The speaker plans to ingest "things / unsaid" between herself and the you.

*The speaker is concerned with numerical markers and is also concerned with quanities: "forty pounds of plums," "three thousand miles," "stand at midnight," "nine o'clock your time," and "the fourth day of your death."

*Culinary items act as a connection to the speaker and the you: "I pick / forty pounds of plums from your tree," "putting some raveled things / unsaid between us into a boiling pot / of cloves, cinnamon, sugar."

*The final couplet is the only sentence that is incomplete and the least correct grammatically.

*The first two stanzas are one long sentence, the three stanza poem is composed of two sentences.

*The poem is focused on specifics (40 pds., DC 10, 3,000 miles, 4th day of your death, cloves, cinnamon, sugar, etc) yet the speaker just puts "some raveled things unsaid" into the boiling pot.

*There is a concentration on physical and intimate distance in this poem: three thousand miles and things unsaid between us.

*The you, the poem's deceased is referred as "behind" the speaker, she stands at midnight whereas the "you" would have been only at nine o'clock.

Response to classmate's journal, Week 5

Rachel,

I love this exercise that you have given yourself to find unexpected language. You have found some truly fresh images and revisited language in a new light. What really strikes me as interesting is:"the straggling wish of park rangers". A straggling wish is totally unexpected, at least for me, and I think that you could go even further with this exercise: the straggling wish of the gate, the straggling wish of chickens, of first cousins, of wildlife, and see where that exercise takes you from there. I would suggest to reconsider some other things in this draft too: fire and water never do the trick--fire and water is an expected combo and "never do[es] the trick is somewhat cliche. I think its awesome that realize a recurring "expectation(s)" in your drafts and you are addressing it through various other exercises. Sometimes, I've been told by other poets, that when you revise a draft it helps some days to not look at the whole thing, but put on your "verb glasses," or "syntax glasses," or "line break glasses,"--you get the point. Awesome work. I love what you've come up with here.

Improv, Week 5

Bread
(excerpt)
-W.S. Merwin


Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching

somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch

have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in

their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hallow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding

[...]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each rosary in the gift shop is one penny closer
to God
or even better,

closer to the urn brimmed with prayer.
Somewhere the hat walked out
without its head

and then followed the cane
without its hand.
Somewhere in Italy a preacher
forgot Latin and all his memories

where in Chinese, hiding amongst
the caves of language.
Prayer’s footprints are pale on earth,

next to sleep, its something
that they still arrive every night,
full of words that cost a penny.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 5

“All nicotine will have left your body.”
-anti-smoking website

“Maybe it’s quite good we’re no longer geographically close.”
“Giving an audience your inner monologue.”
-lettersillneversend.com

“A voice like toasted almonds coated in bourbon.”
-AJC movie review

“Know your apples.”

“Write it in the butter, on the shaving mirror, stick notes in the cereal boxes.”
-notes for improving your handwriting

Free entry, Week 5

They couldn’t prepare her for the chase, she had to
do that on her own. To be careful where she stepped
each foot in danger of sliding in mud. And then the fall,
never wanting the fall. In the woods she found an old mattress,
greened with moss, specked with ticks. Fuck,
graffitied in blue, covers the entire mattress, as if whoever
sprayed it didn’t want someone to doubt its purpose.
Her father breathes heavy and quick behind her,
belt in hand. She had hid Pete McQueen in her closet.
Pete now has a black eye, her father doesn’t want a slut
for a daughter. She stops and runs her hands over her thighs,
Her dress is torn just at the hip. She remembers the mossy
smell in her room mixing with her own
shampoo. She remembers her legs tangled in the sheets
and her 4-H trophy that fell from the shelf. Now, her cheeks
are pink like bubblegum from running, no longer flush with sex.
She lied when she told Pete it was her first time,
She lied when he asked if her Pa was home.

Calisthencis, Week 5

But the rabbit's foot
yellow and birthing pollen,
with the hands of children.
Women, that is,
in December when ice forms on their teeth
full of sour and wristwatches,
belts graze their dinner plates.
Until wheels were invented
the rabbit's mouth was full of night
and hummed of disrespect,
toothpicking the dirt from our routine.
I bite your shoulder and touch your hair
under the whirl of the ceiling fan.
The collective cry of the maternity ward
crashes into the bumper of my solitude.
What do I see when I stare at concrete?
Polaroids and cheap dinners,
footprints criss-crossing the pasture
and out into tomorrow?
How can you rest?
How can I sleep tonight?
A tooth that I can't pull
from the left side of my mouth
Is that the rabbit or just a cavity?

Response to classmate's journal, Week 4

Jonette,

I really enjoyed reading this free entry. There are many sturdy images here that create exactness in the reader’s head. For example, “I watch water swirl around the clothes in the washer,” and “Your favorite walking sticks still stand in the corner by the front door, leaning against the wall to listen for your footsteps”. I particularly like the last line here because it is interesting that it is the walking stick itself and not the speaker in the poem that is mourning a loss. It might be interesting to further this draft about this walking stick and/or other items that would miss a person instead of people—personal items that mourn, a hair brush, a divot in the living room recliner, the handle of the fridge, etc. Just a suggestion, I think it could be really a great exercise to play around with anyway.

Pedagogy forum, Week 4

I have been wondering ways in which to encourage future students in workshop, as instructor, while still giving valid criticism. I feel that I have the tendency to not be mean or give criticism without reason, but that I do not encourage the positive enough in student work. In talking to fellow poet, Nick McRae, he stated that he was actually the opposite—that he was more encouraging and less critical (constructively) when it come to other’ s work. We were attempting to talk over the delicate balance of rewarding and critically illuminating some aspect of writing to a student or even fellow classmate that they may not have had experience with yet. Neither of us came to a clear answer on how the balance could precisely be achieved, but I vowed to be more encouraging when it comes to student drafts. When thinking about future students in my own classroom I feel that I can be more beneficial to them and perhaps bolster their writing or their want to write if I posit my criticism in a more encouraging light.

Sign Inventory, Week 4

Edge
-Syliva Plath

*The poem is written in short, violently enjambed couplets.

*There is a volley of images and words that suggest a tension between releasing and coiling: flows in the scrolls of her toga, each dead child coiled, a white serpent, she has folded, stiffens, etc.

*Images of once living giving elements are mentioned as dead or empty: a dead woman and an empty milk pitcher.

*There are numerous ambiguious accomplishments and ownerships: smile of accomplishment (of what?), we have come this far (how far?), the moon has nothing to be sad about, She is used to this sort of thing (what sort of thing?), her blacks crackle and drag.

*Known and unknown objects are personified: blacks crackle and drag, the sweet, deep throats of the night flower, feet can speak of distance, etc.

*Children become white serpents, pitchers of milk, and petals from a rose.

*Greece and allusions to Greek culture appears as illusionary.

*The moon is gendered as female.

*Lines volley from short: Her dead--to--body wears the smile of accomplishment. There is also a tension between line lengths.

*The two shortest lines refer to the "perfected woman" in the poem: "Her dead" and "Her bare".

Calisthenics, Week 4

When we go to Asia i will stop dreaming
about molars and cuspids that fall out.

When we go to Asia I will wear the body
of a tiger and the head of a mountain top.

When we go to Asia you will find your feet
can't define the ground, that dirt is only

what you knew yesterday. When we go to Asia
we will die as elephants and be reborn

as the coarse split haris on a coconut.
When we go to Asia all that is unfolded

will crease itself into tiny triangles
and fill a pond like Koi fins.

We will go to Asia, we will be the children
of carpenters and learn to hammer the door

shut on the grass hut of prayer.
When we go to Asia the year is 1950

and the first manniquin will speak.
When we go to Asia we will file

into the sacred room and give up speech,
when we put your mother's heart in the other hand.

This will then be Asia.

Improv, Week 4

Intrusion
-Denise Levertov

After I cut off my hands
and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown

something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

------------------------------------------------------

After I attacked you in bed
and spun like an alligator

with its prey clenched in jaw,
salty flesh felt between each cuspid,

I trusted you would drown in the sheets.
You didn't. My fingers lost

grip and broke off into the mouth
of yesterday. The skin of yesterday

is dry with sand bumping over its back.
I grit my teeth and try to pluck

each grain to collect and rebuild
the hourglass for tomorrow.

Free Entry, Week 4

Some women marry fetishes.
Martha, for instance, dallies in yellow latex
gloves and feather dusters to keep her husband
coming home. And putting them back
each morning under the kitchen sink
next to the Brillo pads and Lysol, she smiles.
Some days she can’t wait for her husband,
for his red pick-up to roll up the driveway.
Naked, she layers herself in dish rags,
each one pinned to the next and stretches the gloves
up to her elbows to stroll past all her windows
waiting for mowers to start or dogs to be walked.
Her neck cranes at each rumbling motor that sounds
down the street, eager for her husband’s pick-up.
The street lamp clicks on, lightening bugs rise
then fall across the yard. He never shows,
never calls, and Martha unpins herself.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 4

"Please wake up in the morning speaking Slovak."
-Nick McRae

"Since 1995, twenty-four elephants have found sanctuary in Tennessee."
--The Elephant Sanctuary website

"the inventor of clouds"
-Comedy Central

"Let us now raze famous men."
-rumpus.net

Response to Classmate's Journal, Week 3

Darin,

I find this free write to have a lot of potential for future drafts. If you chose to expand on this particular writing a suggestion that I would like to make that could potentially make the draft stronger is to go through and highlight and/or circle all the abstractions. I do this all the time and sometimes I amaze myself with how much I can let slip by. Like Dr. Davidson said in class though you have to write it all out first and not think too much. In revision we go back and weed out the least strong of all the images. For example, in your draft you have the line: My heart ached. As we talked about in class, think of how many people have said this and how often. We’ve heard it so many times in poetry, prose, and everyday life that we glaze over and cannot compute what the writer tried to convey. It’s hard to convey pain without using the word “pain” sometimes, but what other ways can we think of pain where the images are more concrete. I was also looking over your calisthenics exercise from this past week and was wondering if you could pull any lines from that into your free entry, such as: “I pound at my clay, I pound the air,
Lugging my bucket back to the noisy clearing.” I wonder if you could use this line and images to portray pain or an aching heart. Maybe another way to portray pain or an aching heart would be to think about the actions that somebody would do if they were feeling this way? Just some things to think about.

Pedagogy Forum, Week 3

In an interview with poet/teachers Anna Leahy and Larissa Szporluk, “Good Counsel: A Conversation About Poetry Writing, the Imagination, and Teaching,” the (almost tired question at this point) poets discuss—Can creative writing be taught? Leahy expressed issue with the fact that even as creative writing as a course has grown significantly since the 70s people still seem to be asking that question—the old argument that genius and creativity arise out of nowhere, a vacuum, a muse of inspiration. Simply not true Leahy and Szporluck’s interview argues and certainly our class syllabus would back that statement up as well. I think the fact that is question of teaching creative writing—can it be done?—is still being asked then it is still a myth to a lot of young writers that they can only write when that lightning bolt of ideas hits. The two teachers here hold strong to the benefits of mentorship in a workshop environment and creative writing community—teachers, other poets, simple steady reading of collections, etc. Szporluck asks: “If mentorship can act as a kind of stand-in for talent, what kinds of mentorship activities are especially effective in fostering truly innovative and skillful writers?” This is a very important question for future teachers of poetry and their mentorship with their students. She answers herself in stating: imitation and encouraging imitation—“I find imitation exercises to be fantastic shortcuts to learning. I’ll ask students to imitate a Hopkins poem and suddenly they’re using alliteration and consonance and internal rhyme and performing technical feats and learning much more than they would by just listening to me discuss Hopkins.” This is exciting and encouraging for me as I hope to take on students of my own soon. I plan to teach this way, by way of imitation, as one tool to get students writing, because I have experienced it as a student myself and find it extremely helpful. Our improvs that are part of our weekly routine as a class has become the way in which I start to write. I have produced numerous poems that I am proud through this technique. One comment that Szporluck makes toward the end of the interview that really resonates with me is this: “Imitation teaches you how to be original while using conventional techniques. Invention teaches you how to combine, how to associate, so that when you encounter deep imagination, you trust what happens there. Deep imagination is where you surrender to creative energy; you follow along, and use your skills instinctively, not consciously.”

Sign Inventory, Week 3

Facing It
-Yusef Komunyakaa

*The speaker states being made of various materials: “I’m stone,” “I’m flesh,” “I’m a window.”

*The poem repeatedly notes black and white distinctions: My black face fades, black granite, the booby trap’s white flesh, a white vet’s image floats, his pale eyes, in the black mirror.

*The speaker instills in the stone wall the ability to own, he personifies the wall with the ability to possess him: “I turn this way--the wall lets me go.

*The speaker continually mentions being part of the wall or inside it: My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite, the stone lets me go, the names stay on the wall, I half-expect to find my own [name] in letters, he’s lost his left arm inside the wall, etc.

*The poem is scattered with specifics: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 58,002 names, Andrew Johnson; and more general descriptions: a plane in the sky, a woman’s blouse, the sky.

*The poems features numerous negations: “No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair,” “He’s lost his right arm,” “a woman’s trying to erase names,” “dammit,” “No tears,” “I said I wouldn’t”.

*The speaker makes sure to assign race to himself and the vet with the lost arm, even the bird is red, but the woman and Andrew Johnson remain raceless.

*Vision is opaque: my clouded reflection, white flash, a white vet’s image floats, depending on the light to make a difference, my own in letters like smoke.

*The poems has a series of short, direct, declarative sentences: I’m stone, I’m flesh, The sky, A plane in the sky--in amongst longer, more narrative sentences.

*There are numerous images of flight or things that can take flight: eyes me like a bird of prey, letters like smoke, red bird’s wings, a plane.

Improv, Week 3

*excerpt*

Camouflaging the Chimera
-Yusef Komunyakaa

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
marching in from America.


-------------------------------------------------------------
Women left grass, painted in mud,
hung in the doorways. Hummingbirds
zipped in range of the wet green

smell and licked the dirt to find
it tasted of refuge. Women tied
tigers' tails to children's wrists

for luck. The body of the tiger
was sent to America, cut and crammed
into a freezer bin then boated

across the sea. Americans salivated
for the body, the rust-color fur,
the black padded paws. The eye

for a necklace, the teeth for a pin.
Women wear coats made of tiger skin
to camouflage thier own paleness
and the river of bones they live in.

Free Entry, Week 3

Some women marry fetishes.
Martha, for instance, dallies in yellow latex
gloves and feather dusters to keep her husband
coming home. And putting them back
each morning under the kitchen sink
next to the Brillo pads and Lysol, she smiles.
Some days she can’t wait for her husband,
for his red pick-up to roll up the driveway.
Naked, she layers herself in dish rags,
each one pinned to the next and stretches the gloves
up to her elbows to stroll past all her windows
waiting for mowers to start or dogs to be walked.
Her neck cranes at each rumbling motor that sounds
down the street, eager for her husband’s pick-up.
The street lamp clicks on, lightening bugs rise
then fall across the yard. He never shows,
never calls, and Martha unpins herself.

Junkyard Quotes, Week 3

"In the twentieth century scholars have attempted to draw conclusions [...]."
--found in wikipedia entry for the Battle of Troy

"The almighty bottle has come a long way."
--Bottle Art, 8 ways to recylce a bottle

"Are morning people born or made? "
--webiste on How To Become an Early Riser

"Pea-Sized Frog Found in Borneo"
--headline on Discovery.com

"While shaving with a diamond may not sound pratical at first[...]
--article on new market items: razors coated in a film of man-made diamonds

"The man as a unit of weight is thought to be of at least Chaldean origin."
--defination of batman, a unit of mass used in the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia

Calisthenics, Week 3

When we did battle and fell down
the finish line was the old fig tree--
prayer bell and dream of days, the dress I shed.
However a poet feels about himself,
the elastic belt with its metal tongue
still rusts like unwashed dogfood cans.

They are all here, the races, the classes,
at the resturant the bus boys,
like most adults, were born during a war.
I woke up. What I saw first--the light.
It is unusal that a board game involes cards
but no job accounts for the impulse to find.
I emerged through those curtained booths
like a diver surfacing, wet gleam of polish.
Greeks gave up old dishes and slid into repose,
in this way they can also articulate two stages
of the psychoanalytic process:
the brick and mortar, foundation gives way.
After this long excursion into the more
distant regions of daydream
an anthology arises devoted to small boxes,
such as chests and caskets.


The Burns boys, like most adults,
were born into a war, devoted
to aluminun wheels, planes, caskets.
They emerged from their mother's legs,
each a year apart, surfacing divers
to break the wet gleam of polish
between worlds. When they did battle
and fell, they were buried under
the old fig. Here lies brick, mortar,
and metal, etched on the headstones.
They say the Greeks fought Troy
in two stages: daydream and repose.
The Burns boys died without anthology,
without a curtain of process to drape
their shoulders and washed in war, rust.

Response to classmate's journal, Week 2

Laura,
I love the possiblities of this draft. I particularly like the line: “At the door of the house, who will come knocking?” and “A wind from a distant autumn is trying to rise.” It may be later in Triggering Town, or perhaps another poet/critic said that if you ask a question in a poem you should never answer it (the source of this quote escapes me). I think that these are the two most vivid and detailed lines from your draft that give exact images. One suggestion that would make would be to play with the order of words in these lines to make them more active and less passive. How about instead if the lines read: Who knocks at the door? And “From a distant autumn tries to rise.” If you eliminate gerrunds it helps keep words active.

Pedagogy Forum, Week 2

One method that I recently observed in Amy Ellison’s 1101 class was how she got students to realize that they were already experienced at taking an inventory of signs. Her particular method is one I hope to use myself in future classes in not only composition classes, but I think it would especially great in the teaching and analyzing of poetry. The method goes as follows: As professor walk into class on the first day and say very little. Just tell students to get out a piece of paper and begin to answer the following questions that I would begin to write on the board. On the board I would write—You are already judging me without even realizing it. Answer the following questions honestly for I will not take this work up. The questions read—How old am I? Where do I live? What do I live it, house, apartment, condo? What is my favorite color? Am I married? Who do I live with? What are my hobbies? Do I have children? And so forth. The ultimate goal is to get the students to back up their answers with evidence they gathered by looking at the professor as a sign. Many students will be hesitant to explain their answers. Many students said that Amy liked artsy décor in her apartment and when she asked why they thought so, how they gained that information, they would answer “I don’t know, just a vibe I guess.” This I found out was at first fear of embarrassment on behalf of the students, but when probed further they could back up their statements. “Prof. Ellison is wearing all black and that is why I think she has artsy décor in her home,” was what one student said. What the class eventually goes to was that all black signifies cosmopolitan, the non-descript art student whose body is a canvas free of commercialism and logos—black signified to some students New York City (which relates to cosmopolitan) and, therefore, means rich, straight line style, beat-niks, Audrey Hepburn, sophistication. What the students slowly begin to realize is that they could already read signs and take an inventory of reasons as to how they made those assumptions and what those assumptions mean.This is basically what we did with “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” in 6385 and I am beginning to formulate ways to introduce this poem to an 1101 class. The poem provides vivid examples and an available inventory for those who are inexperienced and new to reading poetry, to looking at poetry critically.

Sign Inventory, Week 2

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

*The speaker delineates a series of nondescript items to lose: “lose something everyday,” door keys, places, names, future travel sites, houses, cities, continents, so forth.

* The speaker mentions losing her mother’s watch--the most and only specific item listed in the poem to lose.

* The line, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” appears repeatedly (four times) in the poems to not only complete a formal technique but a personal mantra the speaker habitually states.

*The speaker states that at art of losing must be practiced and infers that the ‘art’ is not inherent.

* The poem includes two asides: “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)” and “(Write it!)” that signal as textual reminders to the speaker to remember versus lose.

*The speaker only directly mentions once in the poem her emotions about losing remembrances/places/people: “[…] I owned, two rivers, a continent, / I miss them” and then end the poem with a nod to the visual over emotional ties: “the art of losing’s nor too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”

*The speaker’s convictions about the art of losing falter in the final stanza as she states that the art of losing is not too hard to master.

*The speaker only direct comment on emotion about losing comes after losing two rivers, a continent, and cities and not after losing her mother’s watch, a item typically regarded as sentimental, a symbol of maternal lineage, a familial marker, so forth.

*The speaker states in the first stanza that physical items inherently possess the intent to be lost, therefore, instilling inhuman items with humanistic qualities.

*The speaker appears to thinks in physical relations and localities in regards to things lost, beginning with the domestic then “farther, [and] faster,” expanding to realms, continents, and rivers.

Free Entry, Week 2

I mistook your Rome for a vase
filled with money, but it was just
myth, a balled up society of gods.
Your hands are a plaster cast,
complete with fits of breaking.
Your face winces into a corset
of lines that road from scalp to neck.
I mistook your roads to Rome
for rivers, the dirt so muddy
I thought I found rain churned waters
to drop my body in. At night
the animals come to drink its stories
of water. I am not the only one
to figure it all wrong.

I mistook you for Rome, the statue
you crafted of yourself, a slow cracking
of blisters string around your neck
tell me too much of your mortality.
I mistook your hands at night
and drank your stories of war.
The bed muddy with our bodies
and the ones that were there before.
Later, I held our sex in a vase,
our sex, some kind of myth
only gods believe in. I found
wrong in the animals the will
to drink without asking first
for permission to imbibe. I mistook
the river for our bed and slept
in dirt while animals lick my toes.

Improv, Week 2

One Art
-Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely one. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look (Write it!) like disaster.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no tongue for my bitch to master;
no mate. For a bastard can be a bastard
without a spoken word. Yet, no one accepts

my mouth in heat for anything other than a dog.
To bitch is to speak, born with intent to unsettle,
born to lose and never own a word or a letter.

To bitch a man out for losing the keys, to chew
up his ears for late hour entrances, to swear
and spit complaints only builds him as master--

because to bitch to be the dog, to understand
your own four legs, tail, the command to lay.
There is no tongue for my bitch to master.

For the bastard born owns a language despite his body,
with a tongue of contest without the gamble of his sex.
The bastard is born to a mother and has no master.

The tongue does not always reside in the mouth;
but rolls up between the thighs in wait to bark or talk.
There is no tongue for my bitch to master;
there is only the dog of her sex caged in her mouth.

Calisthenics, Week 2

Work I received from another student in class:
Eyes are troubling
mostly because they reflect the light you already see
and yet, there lies something
intangible behind them
direct contact is sometimes like
starring into the sun or the flash of a camera
instantly blinding but spot on
other times there is darkness hovering
a cumulus cloud hiding the light
how much is seen in another's eyes
when no one thinks
and sometimes a chiaroscuro mixture of others
and sometimes an undecipherable
chiaroscuro mixture steals away the soul.

Then passing through another student's hands:

Eyes trouble
the reflecting light,
lies intangible, direct
contact like starring
the sun, flash of a camera,
instantly blinding other
times darkness hovering
of others, chiaroscuro
steals the soul.

I have continued to work on this next phase of the draft:

The monuments of technology trouble the eyes.
They lie like the sun to uncover what we see
in the dark. They steal time
to remind us that history is contact
and today millions of fingers speak
without ever shaking hands.
No one touches bodies anymore.
Men gaze upon breast after breast
wanting each one while their wife
showers in the next room. Women watch
two women kiss and wonder
how her cheek would feel next to another's.
Millions of fingers hide while they stretch
to find what's beyond the hands, the arms,
the chest and grab the face that carries
the fingers. A monument to flesh builds,
eyes filter through a screen, we honor
advancement, to talk to millions
but to never touch those to whom our hands speak.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 2

"A bastard can be a bastard without a spoken word."
-Stealing the Language, Alicia Ostriker

"Over the eons, the shrinkage for the Moon was only about 200 yards, the length of two football fields [...]"

"The ridges also look freshly carved in the moonscape."
-Over a Billion Years, Scientists Find, the Moon Went Through a Shrinking Phase, New York Times

"Dusting books at the New York Public Library."
-caption under photo in The Atlantic

Stategy Response, Week 12

Brigitte Byrd's collection, "Song of a Living Room," exhibits poems that seem more often than not obscure. Upon several reads through the collection I was having a frustrating time with finding the work accessible as a reader. What I also found frustrating was why was I less engaged in this work that tends to be more surreal, cryptic, rangy, and invested in word play when those tactics are usually my points of interest in female poets. Clearly Byrd is interested in the politics of poetic narrative not only evident with her prose poem structure, but with the content itself: "There was futility in the narrative and her voice broke" (Perhaps The Season Was Really That), "Same book to open. Same page to find. Last / line to break" (Something Like nobody coming Something Like went instead), "After days of rampaging through dreams she noticed a shift in the / narrative" (The Way He Stumbled On Air), etc. What occurs continuously is the comment on "breakage." Again, we return to the feminine politics of a patrilinear narrative in poems that female poets find the need to drift away from. By writing cryptically, and perhaps even cyclically, Byrd can defy the mundane traditions of the "same book" and the "same page." Why then do I in particular have a difficult time becoming involved in this collection? One element that I have noted that lends to my confusion is the heavy use of Byrd's abstractions or what I would also consider "half-abstractions." One example of this usage comes from a line in "Variation For Mushrooms And Pomeranians":"Although she had already cut through the genre with alarming ferocity this exhausted subject was splendid." Words and phrases like "alarming ferocity," "exhausted subject," and even "splendid" all strike me as half-abstractions or full abstractions. In that one sentence we do not get one Williams-like "THING" and possess no grounding in what the poet is attempting to convey. Perhaps this highlights something in me as a poet that I was not fully aware of--that being that as much as I experiment with and pleasure in the reading of word play I do need some grounding in "THINGS" to move the poem along. Is may represent a conflict boiling in my poetic feminist and patriarchal interests--that I do desire some thread of coherent narrative. Perhaps I can leave Byrd's collection with appreciation to this enlightenment to my own poetic investments and reconsider how much I let word play and narrative balance in my own writing.

Free Entry, Week 12

I carve out motives
and you carve out a chunk
of your knee on the sidewalk.
If it wasn't for all the snow
the fall would have been less
bloody. I find it hard to believe
you didn't cry. The skin peeled
like a sunburn and twinkled
with flecks of cement, but the snow
doctored it all. I take my scarf
to tie off the hole in your jeans
and cut the draft from running
up your spine. We have no privacy.
We have only this display
of winter that melts with our
every step. You ask to stop.
We are only two blocks from home
when you tell me that I failed
to mention the bluejay that flew
over head when you stumbled.
It's my favorite bird you say,
how could you not see it?

Free Entry 1, Week 12

The more you talk the more I unplan
our drapes and oriental rugs. I can hear
you fumble through boxes in the next room.
You drain them of their sinking suspicions,
our parents’ warnings. I’m experimenting
with you to find the exact coordinates.
All that I unbury is more talk, your vibrating
voice that sounds best when you’re at work.
If we were actors all the lines would be forgotten,
you reciting Hamlet when we’re performing
Macbeth and I playing Blanche Dubious.
Last week you screamed from the roof
of the house that you could see the hospital
six blocks away. This is a sign of your dependency
on sterility. I should wear you like a lab coat
just to shield myself from possibility of hands.
Your hands carry in one more box from the truck—
kitchen wares, it says. Have you seen the blender?
You ask. I begin to say no, but then I realize
if I say yes then you might believe I want you here.

Improv 2, Week 12

(THE WAY HE STUMBLED ON AIR)

After days of rampaging through dreams she noticed a shift in the
narrative. The night was broken. The air was accidental. The earth was
immutable. In this version of the story there was an obscene sun and
her words caught fire. She said What else is it but magic, that chasm
/ between things and their names and she pointed to his hands on the
outline. He painted sadness on her dress with a weeping stone. There
was no color on her tossed glance. There was no one on the road either.
They took off their eyes to rinse out ashes of sounds and for a moment
the screen was empty. He said Boredom / like an ill-fitting / speech bubble
and went on to adjust her belt. By that time it was clear that she brooded
over their setting.

Brigitte Byrd

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(AND WHEN HE WAS GONE)

After days of kicking a bottle cap down the asphalt, from Topeka to Summerset, she finally swallowed the sounds of her own voice. The taste resembled that of an accident, one in which a boy was involved, a boy with an abundance of freckles.
It was obscene. As the newspapers went there was a pick-up, an empty horse trailer, and them, the boy with the freckles and the lonely girl now kicking a bottle cap down the highway. He once ate a hot dog on the Fourth of July and they talked
of a baby. She licked the relish off of his cheek. Your freckles taste
like commemoration, she said, like the sulfur that leaks into the air from every firework. I will name you my favorite taste. It will always end this way, in a vow to never speak. A singular utterance: yes, no, I love you, could lead her back to those words. And him. Every once in awhile, when glancing up from the bottle cap, she sees a horse under a tree, on some farm, down some road, and she just keeps kicking.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 12

“God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“I don’t have to draw a new line, because Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed.”
“I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
"If limos, chartered aircraft and sex clubs are where they think their donors' money should be spent, who are we to judge?”
-The Washington Post
“4 people, 1 rat and 1 dog. Samuel L. Jackson did not say “motherfucker” even once.”
(refering to the film 187)
www.bodycounters.com
“Shizo Kanakuri disappeared while running the marathon in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. He was listed as a missing person in Sweden for 50 years — until a journalist found him living quietly in southern Japan.
Overcome with heat during the race, he had stopped at a garden party to drink orange juice, stayed for an hour, then took a train to a hotel and sailed home the next day, too ashamed to tell anyone he was leaving.
There’s a happy ending: In 1966 Kanakuri accepted an invitation to return to Stockholm and complete his run. His final time was 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds — surely a record that will last forever.”
www.futilitycloset.com

Improv 1, Week 12

(PERHAPS THE REASON WAS REALLY THAT)

The following morning she had grown. There was futility in the
narrative and her voice broke. It was a challenge. Like the continuity
of a fallen history like her eyes locked into his like his body locked
into hers like the fear of. Elle est dehors,la Vie, avec ses balencoires, ses
alcools et ses monstres. It was not a theatrical gesture surrealism it was
referential anguish it was just uninspired. She hung over the clashing
format of a limb-crushing performance and his early desire clutched to
paradoxical pleasures. The question was not her emotional modernity.
The question was not the crumbling of the Georgian landscape. He
sensed her resistance to shambling close-ups and there was absence in
their ballad.

Brigette Byrd

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(DARWIN'S BLUNDER OF MARRIAGE AND SCIENCE)

The weekly considering of the barnacle’s sex was his uptight ritual. So much so
that one morning he awoke, head in a petri dish, and discovered his wife’s
favorite question gone. It was a Tuesday. The night before they had roasted duck
for dinner and now he faces evenings locked in the light of his personal science
without the comfort of a overcooked foul. Had he paid attention to his wife’s
facial modernity, seen the freckles inch closer to her eyes, he would have replaced
his barnacle for her hand, however feminine it may be. His wife once hung her arm
over his shoulders and peered into the back of his head—a ritual of hers that meant:
the landscape is ill, you uninspire me, please forget about its sex, but not mine.
He told her he rather hammer his barnacles to wall and use them as coat racks
than forget the nature of his quest, which was to rediscover voice, evidence, and bodies not humans. From this utterance his wife closed her eyes,
letting the freckles wilt into one brown scar, and boarded a train for the inland. She hung over the clanking wheels of the last rail car and forgot all about the duck she was supposed to cook, leaving her ring in the petri dish.

Strategy Response, Week 11

One technique that Jillian Wiese uses throughout her collection is the act of naming and what is also implicit with naming—which is claiming. In “Below Water” the speaker notices “you staring at the railroad tracks / along my spine, and I thought / Mine, mine.” In “Notes on the Body (2)” the speaker states that “they call me patient”—in “Body as Harbor” the speaker points out “here is a painting of a harbor, / I will call you Captain, there is / your ship”—in “The Body in Pain” we see “This is the spine )” and then this is not only a declaration of naming—this is the spine—but there is an object given to become a embodiment of the spine in text form. The whole collection, of course, acts as an embodiment to fill the physical lack the speaker possesses as an amputee. And it is not a revelation to claim that a poet’s job to name, yet, this collection seems to want to be reclaiming or claiming more than words. What I am still trying to connect in my own mind as reader and as practicing poet is how the collection goes beyond the sheer act of naming and what is being created out of absence and how that is being done textually. What complicates this discovery for me seems to be the element of gender and the powers of gender that are also at play. In particular, “Abscission” bestows upon the male “you” in the poem the act of naming: “Your favorite post-coital pastime / is nicknaming my scars.” Here, the speaker seems to give back to the male the historical and/or Biblical role of namer and relinquishes her authoritative position. What I think enables the speaker to regain power, however, is then the males throughout throughout the collection fall into the feminine position of questioning and generating cyclical states of being: Do you sleep with it on? Do you bathe with it on? Will you take it off in front of me? Is it all right if I touch it? (“The Old Questions”) Just like our previous discussions on the rejection of the traditional, patriarchal linear-ness of poetry by Estes and Fagan, we engage here with another role reversal and possible rejection with Weise being the namer. Even after several reads of this collection I am still trying to parse my way through what is going on. I feel that is maybe because it is not textual apparent as say Fagan or Estes—but none the less still as equally demanding of our attention.

Free Entry 2, Week 11

Cow Mysticism

The great philosophers of this world eat
green tomatoes and graze among the dormant
orange groves. I'm on philosopher watch.
Day three: no such luck. The fallen oranges
haven't been touched by a tongue in days.
The sandy grass begs for hooves
to trample wisdom into their blades,
to postulate the coming of water,
or the clumsy hand that drops a cigarette
to end it all. I want to be level
with the nostrils of wisdom.
To ask the rotating chew if having four feet
is better than two. If a tail is better
than this sack of hair on my head
or if this talking world means more
than a grazing one. I'm on philosopher watch.
So far not even a bell, not even a rustle.

Free Entry 1, Week 11

The lung of Cuba
resembles so much the explosion
of sand when lightning strikes.
How this is possible
is only known by true Cubans,
they ones who stood
on street corners when missiles
threatened to ruin dinner.
The brackish wheels of the 1950s
roadster, now used as a taxi,
tremble with the quake of sand.
A young boy, never having seen
lightning before, emits a flooding
of tears down his sun-blistered cheeks.
Just lightning, his father exhales,
surrendering an answer
as brackish as the wheels of the roadster.
The boy breathes in the burning air
and gets a lungful of glass, or what would be
glass had the storm only struck a little
harder. Later that night,
at dinner, the boy asked his father
when the sunshine would stop,
when sand would become the only way to see.
Words blistered inside the father's mouth,
fighting departure from his lips.
Cuba will never be without
sunshine, he said, we ride out our days
as lungs in each other's chest.
You in mine and i in your's.
This will be possible, but only known by us.

Improv 2, Week 11

Abscission
-Jillian Weise

Your favorite post-coital position
is nicknaming my scars.
The name for the railroad track
along my back--Engine.

The dots on my wrists from IVs
Spot. These are not-me, the not-leg
beside the bed for you to trip over
like the beautiful word: abscission,

to cut off, in botany, to shed leaves.
Medical terms must communicate
clearly, I tell you, but that doesn't stop
you from asking what it feels like

when your hand is here, now here
over here. I think of the wives
of the twenty thousand masons
who raised the Taj Mahal. And how,

when it was finished, the emperor
ordered a mass amputation of thumbs
so the craftsmen could never build
a more perfect mausoleum. Did their

wives ask question while playing
with the remaining fingers of their
husbands' hands? Did they ask, Can
you feel my hand here? How about now?


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I don’t stop you from asking why I exit
the room directly after sex to shine your clocks.
Nor do I require you to ring me after five days
in which we lay on my grandmother’s quilt,

naked except for socks and my tiger’s eye necklace.
I trust in the shape of your mouth as you formulate
words that sound like stay, eyelids, peeled peaches.
We give into this clockworked habit of apologies

when it comes to departures but I pale at the hard luck
of settling. I arouse in you myself and word of mouth.
What remains as whispers is everything you find ugly
about me, but you are drunk on my body so we part

post-coitally clean as an abscission. Nothing is clean.
We learn that from our mothers and what we also learn
is that you should never over-stay your welcome.
I’m running out of polish and you are running out

of clocks. I’ve buffed the two in the dinning room
eight times this week. They are starting to know my hands
as well as you do and that I always wink when I’m through.
Let me tell you that by my birthday I’ll be gone
and you’ll have to peel peaches with somebody new.

Improv 1, Week 11

Introductions
-Jillian Weise

After we're introduced ourselves
with gin and tonic and jazz,
a woman asks to read our palms.
We decide that we are worth
at least one night together/

In the bed without sheets,
the room with blank walls
and cobwebbed windows, a green
light bulb shines, reminds you
of the ocean.

You tell me about your house
catching fire, your parents dying
while you gambled in Las Vegas.
I tell you about airport alarms set off
by metal rods in my back.

You trace the scar along me spine
and I imagine what it must feel like.
We determine the arrangement of parts,
hip bones and shoulders, your Adam's
apple to my nose.

We decide all of this without speaking.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


We meet like two anatomy charts
rubbing together, wedged between
the introduction is our thighs.
In the bed of my backseat we stumble
over buttons and regrets of current
location. Packed in the far corner

of the church lot, the street lamp
fails to reach us in our mission.
There must be a punishment for this—
for this moment when you watch me
tug out my tampon and then I smile

at your eyes as they watch my hands.
I’m convinced this moment will be
goose-fleshed, robbed of cinematography,
but this is better than any movie.
We ration our limbs, verb each other,

hope the cops don’t cruise by.
You crack the window to let the night
in and cover us like sheets. This all reminds
me of where we are not. That somewhere
outside the car, next to a puddle, is my tampon.

So this is love, this is how we meet.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 11

"God wants you to name a baby after him."
--Baby name book

"When you're in love the whole world is Welsh"

"Break hearts with liquid nitrogen."

"The art of turtle stacking."
--www.buzzfeed.com

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."
--Steven Wright

Free Entry 2, Week 10

Let’s bury the hammer and nail the steel
Door to pratice our balance. Once the pond
overflows the dam we can build a new.
We can sling and lug wood like we were built
for hard labor, though I really rather tea time
or paint-by-number a felt unicorn, but only use
aqua. Florida uses aqua to line the floor of pools.
I know this because I’ve seen them all with my toes.
Once a team of men built a door in the bottom
of a pool. They tired to hammer and nail the door
without removing the water. I waved to them
from above the surface. Turns out they were drowning.
So when take the last bit of aqua to the hoof
of my horse I think of the men nailing the bottom.

Free Entry 1. Week 10

Think of Herb Alpert playing 3 O’clock Jump
on a Sunday in your backyard
while your father mows the lawn.
How much would he have to gleam
pressure to his his lips to overcome
the loud, twirling blade of your father’s
weekend ritual? Your father primming
the bulb as Herb prims his brass.
The weekends have morphed into lawnmowers,
and the mailboxes curb us
with their electric bills.
Praise the bottles of cheap beer,
for there’s too many hands.
And by that I mean there’s not enough
watches—or at least Herb doesn’t have one,
because for him its always 3 o’clock.
My father once tried to brew his own ale.
He called it Tijuana Brass,
and drank it as he mowed the lawn.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 10

"Segovia Castle, located in an ancient town of Segovia in central Spain, started off as an Arab fort in the 12th century. Its unique shape of the bow of a ship makes the fortress one of the most distinctive castles in the country. In the Middle Ages Alcazar was a key fortress in the defense of the country. Apparently, it was a source of inspiration for many of the castles produced by Walt Disney."

"Remembering Where People Get Their News"
--Columbia Journalism Review

"The armature: the body of the bird is a straight tube attached to two bulbs, approximately the same size, one at either end. The tube flows into the upper bulb, like the neck of a funnel, and extends almost to the bottom of the lower bulb, like the straw in a lemonade."
--What is a Dippy Bird, and how is it used?
www.math.ucr.edu

"The airspace above the mine is closed for helicopters because of a few incidents in which they were sucked in by the downward air flow."
--fact on the Mir Diamond Mine in Mirny, Russia

"I thought it better -- at the expense of truth -- to put into his mouth language familiar to the domestic circle."
--W. Somerset Maugham on minced oaths

Strategy Response, Week 10

What strikes me in Kathy Fagan’s collection Lip as a venue for further exploration is not just word play, but form/structure play. The entire collection ranges in form from the prose poem, “Constant Craving,” to “Butter” which contains only one period at the end and no other punctuation, to “Progressive Lenses” which can be read as almost a list of commands in stanzas of varying lengths. What also proves interesting is that from time to time Fagan’s titles, if we are supposed to refer to them as such, are quotes taken from singers, authors, poets, the Bible, and so on. When looking at the poem that begins “In lieu of the latkes” that itself begins with the “title”—an Eartha Kitt quote: “There’s just one thing: a ring. I don’t mean on the phone.”—a survey of this collection starts to take the argument that we presented in class last week with Angie Estes’ Tryst—a departure from the traditional, patriarchal standards in poetic form and a forge in a feminine realm of non-linear, an absence of terminal punctuation, and an almost circular, disorientating flow of words in how they are physically placed on the page. Yet, Fagan plays with the classic form of the pantoum with poems such as, “Postmodern Penelope at Her Loom Pantoum,” “Pontoon Pantoum #505,” “Saloon Pantoum,” “Womb to Tomb Pantoum,” and “Go to Your Room, Pantoum.” In each of these poems, however, she tweaks the traditional form of having the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeat in the first and third lines of the next. At times Fagan will keep the line exactly as it is and others she will keep on a common word or rearrange the phrase with the same words from the previous lines. Perhaps this slight mocking—if that is in fact the correct word for this particular poetic action—also highlights the mocking of the content and titles. Looking specifically at “Saloon Pantoum” Fagan uses the traditional pantoum form as a venue to tell a dirty joke, or just a plain bad joke. There is a definite mixing of high and low art here. The poem’s framing lines: “Tell if you’ve heard this one before” and “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before” also plays on the possible archaicness of patriarchal poetic traditions. The question becomes then with Fagan’s collection is what is purpose of calling attention to conventional art forms only to manipulate their structure? Not just with the pantoum, but extending as a metaphor to the entire collection?

Improv 2, Week 10

Kathy Fagan

Darling,

you slayed
in your starling
suit at midnight,

the only goldfish
in the castle.
How aqueous backyards

were back then,
how silver the
streets, like a

bevel of thermometer
still slick with
your tongue. You

bet you were
fluent in exhale.
You were just that

gone.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You bloomed,
for the third year,
in your slick October

suit. Your teeth
purpled like a drunk’s
nose from the wine.

We were peacocks
then, or were we
more lions? No.

Lions travel in prides.
Bet you don’t
remember when

I spilled wine
on the stars. Never
did I tell a lie,

but this one is true.

Improv 1, Week 10

Go To Your Room, Pantoum
--Kathy Fagan

My room is in Angers, France.
A rind grows around it.
A bear sleeps under the window.
My room is in Grandioser, Illinois,

The painted Desert, Arizona,
Big Savage Mountain, USA.
I have a runaway truck ramp
In that room, I have plenty

Of local color. My room is in
Caliban, Mass., Indigo, Japan,
Aporcrypha, OK. Sundays we grill
Panhandle-Hellenic, and feel the residual

Blues. Xerox the corn & you'll
Find us. Cut out the pictures of fog.
You won't get a proper pantoum
In my room, but I'll paint you

A portrait of lonely from memory:
A nest of red bees are the baby
Mice, a roof made of birds
Is the Steller's Jay laughing.

My room's on the corner of Castle
& Liberty, Wormwood & 116th.
You've seen the signs everywhere.
My room is in Angers, France.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

My daybed is five acre cornfield, not golden
but yellow. Sheets move like a forbidden lover
across a creaky floor board with popping knee.
My pillows huddle as mice, though not grey

But sequenced in ruffles of varying blues.
Some even have threads that poke
to make whiskers. Cat naps—I have plenty.
I curl the sheets into chocolate swirls

that never mix in my mug. Never understanding
500-count means that somewhere in India
a worm spun its legs for my domesticity.
I cut out the possibility of my legs tangling

in the carpet as I trek gloss eyed for tap water.
I make noises like people trying to not make noises.
You know the sounds: the laugh door hinges offer,
the rude scoff of toe on wooden chair, the flutter

of terrycloth robe as it cascades from the chair’s back.
Only in silence the robe sounds like a dying bird
crashing to a sidewalk. In India, families sleep
in the dirt, similar to flowerbeds. Tunneling as mice

would to find warm under a layer of earth.
Heavy in bird heat, if birds go into heat, the dirt
bows under the body weight of India’s children.
All spun in the sounds of silence, quiet as silk corn husks.

Strategy Response, Week 9

In Angie’s Estes “Wrap in Parchment and Also Pink Paper” I became particularly interested in the permanence of memory as it is passes through manifestations of text or language. The first stanza gives us the “first images of the human face” as it was “carved on limestone / slabs” (lines 3-4). The faces are anonymous, yet the exist just the same in the limestone—as if upon examination today we would see these peoples as they were in the third millennium B.C. There stands the idea of permanence for this particular group of peoples through a textual representation of their appearance on the stones slabs. What I find jarring in relation to the remainder of the poem is the second stanza allusions to silence—“faces with no ears or / mouth—as if, in the place they were / headed, they’d have no desire / to speak or hear, never need to / eat” (6-10). Silence comes back into the poem with the figure of Mina Pachter, a woman who starved to death in a concentration camp; and who, ultimately, was physically silenced. Just like the faces in limestone, Pachter and the other women from Terezin became victims of extinction and the limestone faces eerily function as a symbol of future fate for the women of the camp. Just like the representations of the humans on the stone slabs the women also have created a text of themselves to exist in the permanence of memory. Through the language of familial recipes Patcher creates a cookbook that can continue as a representation of a physical embodiment of her after death. There is legacy in language/text and that is especially true in this poem; and also extends to the overarching collection. One question I have for this piece is how does Estes make that turn from the third millennium B.C. to the shaded allusions to holocaust? Is it in the silence of “faces with no ears or / mouth” with “no desire / to speak or hear, never need / to eat”? What is this text saying about both social and poetic traditions? The text speaks to other poets/poems we have covered this semester—Matejka and Meeks mainly come to mind with strategy and the theme of allusion; but also Trethewey and a more maternal link through Estes’ figure of Pachter who passes down her recipe, her textual representation, and her memory of existence through language.