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.