Junkyard Quotes (5/23/2010)

"I wish she'd go back into the Woodlands, back where she came from." - a person talking about the town called Woodlands in Texas.

"A play of the Seven Deadly Sins." - a line from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

"Beer-soaked kiss."

Junkyard Quotes (4/28/10)

Since we aren't technically doing journals for class anymore, I'm going to tag my posts by date from now on and continue with my writing, especially since I'm still hearing language that I want to write down and remember, so here are some junkyard quotes:

"All I said when I met him was, 'Oh, there you are.' It was like he had always been a part of our lives." - Sandra Bullock in regard to her recent adoption of a baby.

"Horses not hookers." - I don't even remember now how this one came about, but I know it was when I was talking with Kate yesterday, and she was telling me about a friend who is moving to Montana to live on a ranch.

"They're all dancing in Detroit." - a friend of Mike's mother who was visiting last weekend. She had a lot of these little gems that I kept typing!

Strategy Essay, Week 15

Allison Joseph's poem "Teenage Interplanetary Vixens Run Wild on Bikini Beach" is a fun and exciting read that is both serious and somewhat fantastical in its language and imagery, a skill which I would very much like to learn to duplicate. One cannot necessarily call this poem absurdist, though it seems to be so at the beginning, when Joseph writes about scantily-clad green women landing in a spaceship on a beach to find "hunky" men to take home with them. However, through her imagery and language, we quickly find that she is instead describing a movie scene with faulty backdrops and bad makeup and lighting. It is interesting to note the change from absurdist to a simple critique of the theatre industry, to what eventually seems to turn into a critique of theatre-goers themselves.

She writes all throughout the poem about how the "vixens" run across the beach in their bikinis, trying to find men with whom they would like to mate. She goes into detail about the constructedness of the set and the ways in which the film is set up badly. She ends, however, by saying that "you" do not care, that the bad effects of the film are not the interesting part. Rather, it is the sex that interests "you," as "you" sit in the theatre next to a girl and hope that it inspires the same type of sex within her.

This poem is very fun to read and is interesting in its execution. What seems to at first be an absurdist work turns into a serious (but still playful) critique of the men who take women to see these silly films in the hopes of inspiring feelings of sex, playfulness, and adventure, just like the green, scantily-clad, alien ladies who come to take Earth's men away on their poorly constructed spacecraft.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 15

From "Little Epiphanies" by Allison Joseph

"The difference between what's required
and what's desired is the difference
between" fall and spring, the cold and
the colder, depending on which you think
is which. I do not pretend to hold a
distinction for you, wishing for release
for your bragging and clanking of keys
all musical, technical, and mobile.
On the far side of the shore of Cabo,
there is a cabin in which I think you
should stay for at least two or three
weeks, thinking on which glasses clink
and which glasses read. Is a difference
there, anyway? Or are they the same
in the first and last place to begin with,
or end with, you might say. I want you to
figure out which orb rises and which falls
at which time of day and which season is
which, but only for you. Do not express
philosophical movements to the contrary
and attempt to define these patterns for
the world. You can only do so for you.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 15

From "Extraction" by Allison Joseph

"If there is a poem in you,
get it out by any means necessary--"
said my teacher when I begged her
for advice on how to write, how to
scream and pull the hair from my
throat that seemed to block a
passageway to words and thought.
I couldn't release the tension,
perhaps because of her class
and constant insistence on my stark
writing, or what I thought was such.
She recommended cutting open my arm,
just below the shoulder, and pulling
with tweezers to see what would come
out. She claimed that that was one
place words liked to reside, in the
arm. I cut and pulled and searched
until I finally found where they had
been hiding all along. Now when I
need to find my words, I reach
from my back, finding the words
written there in ink and pulling
until the poem is out of me.

Free Entry 2, Week 15

If Natural Born Killers got a gritty reboot,
it would have to star the Jonas Brothers instead
of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, the internet
instead of Robert Downey Jr. That would be frightening
enough: tweens ravaging the Southwestern countryside
for no other reason than to kill, fame not an option,
because fame comes with the territory of the internet.
The meme, as I'm told its called. What does that word
really mean, anyway? Is internet fame the ultimate type
of fame, because anyone in the world can see it?
(Unless, of course, one lives in a country in which
there are restrictions placed upon the internet
viewership.) I wonder if Anchee Min sees everything
on the internet. Though she now sees the strangeness
of Mao's teachings, does she still have a tug to follow
the things he said, to respect the Red Army and destroy
any bourgeois ideals within herself? I read a Mao quote
once; it claimed that America was a paper tiger, and that
it was his followers' job to tear it to pieces. Yet another
article on Yahoo! News questioned the Tiger's authenticity,
its truthfulness. It seems that even America itself must
face the white tiger that its claimed to be.

Free Entry 1, Week 15

When I woke up this morning, everyone was floating,
legs suspended in the air, heads just below, arms
holding their own against pockets on the ceiling
that we never knew existed. We tried driving into
Atlanta, our seatbelts fastened tightly against our
arched backs and puffed-out chests, hearing that a
doctor had a cure, knew why we all suddenly decided
that now was the best time to learn how to fly.
But it turned out that it was only a casting call
for a new telenovela, starring whichever young lady
the good doctor decided had enough potential despite
her sudden ability to fly. I wonder how the girls
on America's Next Top Model are doing. Do they float
with more grace than we do? Does it matter? Why not?
I lie on the floor like we used to do in the pool
when I was a child, sliding down the water to land
belly-down on the bottom of our personal lake in
Heather's backyard, but this time it was dry,
and I laid my hands flat on the floor to push upward
and found that I could float through the air just
as we practiced doing when we were tweens, showing
off our backflips and handstands in weightless fashion.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 15

"When I first started driving, the advertisements said that most people died in accidents less than 25 miles away from home. Well yeah! Nobody ever drove more than 25 miles away from home!" - my grandfather yesterday

"If there was a kicking contest, I'd win." - Dr. Hipchen

"I just want to record his voice and play it while I sleep." - Kate Gervais

"Elizabeth Bennett has Mr. Darcy's balls." - my sister after reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (The book is referring to his bullets, but my sister took it quite another way!)

"back-to-front Bodyamr" - an article that talked about how celebrities like to wear dresses backwards

Strategy Essay, Week 14

In the poem "To" by Franz Wright, one finds upon a first reading that the poem appears to be playing by the conventional rules of poetry. For example, the poem is written on a subject that is stereotypical in that it "should have a poem written about it" and uses some intesnsely emotional language throughout. However, because Wright does not identify the person to whom his persona is speaking, we cannot know precisely what kind of relationship is expressed or how the emotionality signifies. Likewise, the turn near the end of the poem to implied violence takes the poem from what could have been a saccharine account of a persona's child to an interesting display of the mixed emotions regarding a parent to his child, comparing the parent to God and the child to his "children."

The poem begins with the line "Before you were born I loved you," signifying that the poem will be very emotional in its execution, and indeed through the language of this particular piece, one may read that the persona is a parent (perhaps a father) writing for his child (who seems to be, though is not necessarily, female). He goes on to write in similar terms, allowing the persona to speak about his feelings regarding his child's first steps, again a very emotional time and one that may be expected in poetry, just as the later lines on the child's teenage years and being a "weedy thing" come in the next stanza.

However, directly after these lines, the turn occurs in which the persona states, "I loved and I was there / while they were raping you / I loved although / like God / that's all that I could do--" and the poem ends. After three stanzas of intensely felt language regarding the childhood of the persona's offspring, we find an immediate and very unexpected turn of events that is difficult to decipher. In fact, though violent, this stanza relates the same type of love as the ones previous in that it recalls the pain (both emotional and physical) that the child has had to go through in his/her life, for which the parent could do nothing but continue to love. Indeed, such sentiment expresses well the mixed power of a parent to both love and protect a child in that this persona realizes that there was only so much he could do to shield his child from the world, leaving him/her to be "raped" while he could only stand there and continue to love.

These methods are very interesting for Wright and are very unusual techniques for a postmodern, contemporary writer. Such language and expressions of love (especially the use of the word "love") for a child from the parent's perspective are expected realms of poetry and generally frowned upon, at least when a poet is starting out. However, because Wright is such a developed poet, he knows how to manipulate the "expected-ness" of the subject and both pander to how a parent would really feel toward a child while simultaneously adding fresh imagery and interesting turns.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 14

From Franz Wright's "Entry in an Unknown Hand"

"And still nothing happens. I am not arrested."
I crook the package in both arms and slip like
gravel through a brightly lit alleyway, no more
sleeping without the promise of disguise, and no
such thing as perfect change in this world of
kidneys riddled with paper and fax letterheads.
From the Desk of Olivia Orlando, read the note,
incriminating in its accusation of apparent guilt.
While I wrote with otherwise whipping sarcasm
and notes titillatingly tripping off the tongue,
or however it was Hamlet pretended to be a director.
Now there was a man fit for Shakespeare, a prince
hidden beneath a director, hidden beneath an actor,
all the while feigning insanity for the sake of a
lost, never to be recovered, and most beloved mother,
sure of the guilt of a most despised uncle.
I act, too, Hamlet, though not in the same capacity.
I am not insane, nor do I pretend to be; rather, my
heart beats in spite of me, "it's bowl of red blooms
opening and closing out of sheer love of me."
To stop the beating, I pretend, incessantly.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 14

From Franz Wright's "Rorschach Test"

"To tell you the truth I'd have thought it had gone out of us long ago,"
so little writing now, when all else has failed; and shouldn't that be
our biggest, last, most powerful resort, that trailing of words together,
pushing phrases between one another as though only we have that power:
to make great syllables and marked changes in language with only pens
and typewriters. No computers--those are drab and impersonal where we
are concerned; we write our letters to one another, lilting our script in
our personal hand, for our personal words, to express personality to a
long-lost friend, so far gone in the world only the changing seasons of
our languages can reach each other. I do not want your words, I have so
many of my own, so few that seem adequate to express what I find needs
your attention in my own life, my own work, my own personality that dries
without your speech. I wonder where Virginia lays on such a topic, how
her characters--Mrs. Dalloway, especially--might see such a futility
as writing letters to a lost friend, never to see one another again.

Free Entry 2, Week 14

How do doctors bring someone back from the dead?
Do the television shows lie, and does it not happen
as often as they imply? Imagine that there are spirits,
too many to count, waiting around hospitals, for
someone--anyone--to die so that a free spirit can steal
the empty body before the real spirit has a chance
to recover from the shock of dying for the first time.
A little girl died the other day, twenty spirits
hovered around her, waiting for the golden opportunity
to inhabit such a young body, to live a life all over
again, nearly from the beginning. When her soul
dissipated from her little frame, an old man jumped
into her place before any of the others could.
When the little girl's body opened its eyes once again,
he said "Mama" to the woman standing above him,
pretending that his soul was that of the girl she lost.

Free Entry 1, Week 14

When I was little, I thought orchestra directors
were rude: they stood with their backs to the crowd,
waving their arms like a patient without his Demerol
and throwing sticks at musicians who are just doing
their jobs, fingering their keys, twinging strings,
while beaters pounded and cymbals boomed.

When I was in middle school, I thought band directors
were self-righteous, teaching us the right way to play
without embarrassing him at the next concert, our tiny
fingers barely big enough to reach from key to key
but now we were the menal patients, nonetheless,
stumbling over our notes to make him happy.

When I was in high school, I thought marching directors
yelled a lot, but only to make us play our very best
on the field: they screamed from megaphones for months
while we paraded on a faux football field in preparation
for the first big competition--even football games played
as practices for us, little drummer children.

When I was in college, and no longer played in a band,
I remembered how our director would scream, sometimes
throw his baton until we got him a Nerf gun to shoot instead.
I was struck by the lack of companionship without those
directors I thought so rude, self-righteous, mean, and thought
of the fact that there is no better feeling than watching
the crowd give a standing ovation at the end of a great performance.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 14

"Is pandemonia the plural of pandemonium?"

"Apparently there was a volcano." - a man in our hotel in Montana

"It says 'Montana Bar and Grill Casino' with 'Historic' stitched on the sign as an afterthought."

"I wish I could cry like a baby. The cathartic release." - on the plane to Montana

"The mischievous children locked the eccentric governess in the closet." - a sentence exercise in my Studies in Grammar workbook.

Strategy Essay, Week 13

In her short, two line poems, Brigitte Byrd practices a very daring and unusual form of poetry. She begins almost all of the poems the same way: "On...he/she said" and then she adds an interesting and unusual image to complete the entire poem. Because they are so short and emphasize the unusual images with italics, we personally emphasize their importance as we read, realizing as we continue through the two-line poems that Byrd is not merely writing nonsense or trying to tie together two seemingly unrelated images; rather, she is expressing thoughts on her personas lives by impressing upon us their very nature in the images they present us with.

For example, in one of these poems Byrd writes, "On finally making it to the end she said Can you see a dog jumping through a hoop of ribbons?" Though a first reading might reveal only two strange images juxtaposed together, a further dig into this particular poem reveals interesting questions. For example, the reader may decide for himself or herself what it means to say that the persona "[made] it to the end." What did she make it to the end of? Did she reading a book? Writing a book? Did just run a race? Depending on what one chooses to interpret the first section as, the part in italics can change its meaning. For example, if the persona has finished writing a book, she may be asking to find out if an idea is plausible. If she ran a race, perhaps we have a more absurdist poem in that she saw this image and is wondering if anyone else saw it as well. This, of course, raises the question as to whom she is speaking. That, again, could be anyone, and may in fact not be important to an interpretation of the poem, but is still a question one may raise, nonetheless.

All of the two-line poems present similarly interesting questions that only the reader can answer for himself or herself. In each case, one wonders what the first part of the lines refers to, to whom the persona is speaking, and what the presented image has to do with either of those. By personally interpreting each of these tiny poems, one receives not only an insight into the persona but into himself or herself depending on the scenario.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 13

Original: "On sealing the deal on a domestic circus he said But you can't have a horse in Boston any more than you can go out of your mind."

Imitation: On sealing the deal on a domestic circus he said There is nothing more depressing than walking into a Michael's Craft Store.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 13

Imitation of Brigitte Byrd #1:

Original: "On finally making it to the end she said Can you see a dog jumping through a hoop of ribbons?"

Imitation: On finally making it to the end she said That car beside us is doing an Evlis imitation.

Free Entry 2, Week 13

"Like the memory of a loved one, diamonds
last forever," says the welcome screen,
inviting me to ponder whether or not I would--
or could--wear a diamond made from a person
I intentionally pushed under dirt and grass,
never to need to see without the lights
that used to reside behind his skin.
I glance at my fingers, the two emeralds
pushing against my cornea like needles, as I
wonder what it might be like if they were
people: "This," I say, pointing to my high
school ring, "is my first husband. This"--
my college ring--"is my second husband."
Would you wear a diamond made of your loved
one's ashes? Would you make a tiara from the
bones of dead relatives, lovers, friends?
Let LifeGem do it for you, because death,
like diamonds, lasts forever.

Free Entry 1, Week 13

This is the poem I came up with in our exercise on persona poems. I wanted to post it here as a sure way of not losing it and to remind myself to work on it more.

Smokey the Bear Goes to Gotham City

Thank god I'm finally free of those damn kids:
there are no woods to protect here and no forests
to keep from their flight, unneccessary fires.
Burn it all anyway and make the world just like
Gotham City, where some wannabe child molester
in black spandex keeps buildings from burning
to the concrete, with the aide of two old men, his pets.

Those kids never cared about forest fires,
and--as long as we're being honest--neither
did I. I suppose some marketing assistant
just out of college assumed a bear would make
an adequate forest ranger since--let's face it--
bears live in the forest; not me. I lived in
a two-bed, two-and-a-half bath in downton
Hollywood, just below Sunset where movie stars
wander streets in the day and whores strut at night.

It was--you can imagine--hel having to pretend
to car, all in the hopes of landing a bigger,
better gig, but no; I was forever typecast, just
like that girl who was always a princess
and never did anything else, besides that one film
where she "came out of her shell"--as she told
reporters--by taking off her shirt and speaking
in a pseudo-Southern accent.

That's why I moved to Gotham:
for a new start, with no trees or forests anywhere
nearby to pretend to worry about protecting.
And thank god, too, because I've already been cast
in a new thriller as a henchman. The director is a
squat, penguin-looking man, who really does resemble
those children I had to lecture to.
But for this part, I'm sure I can get past that.

Junkyard Quotes 1-7, Week 13

"Hell hath no furry (sic) like a woman who believes she has been scorned." - an internet article.

"The Wings Close In" - title of article in Sports Illustrated

"a fantasia of literary gossip" - Dan McCall

"The Rose Ecstasies" - I misheard a classmate saying "Thoreau's Ecstasies" and I liked this version better

"Which came first: the ecstasy or the reading?" - a question posed in the above-mentioned classmate's presentation.

"There is nothing more depressing than walking into a Michael's craft store." - Mike

"If Dr. Hipchen were God, Professor McFarland would be Michael." - a student I met yesterday at the conference.

Strategy Response, Week 12

Fred Chappell's poem "Janus" is perhaps a poem that epitomizes the idea of the eternal connectivity between form and function. Indeed, this poem not only comprises a very unique form but likewise does the form contribute to the overall reading and (perhaps) the reader's personal meaning of the poem. This poem is titled after the mythological Greek god Janus, who has two faces: one facing east and the other facing west. Some versions of Janus's history say that he acts as a guard for the temple at which his statue is placed, watching both ways for possible intruders. However, other versions link his double-faces with the fact that he is also the god of "open doors" and "new opportunities," meaning that his faces symbolize the extreme directions his followers make take.

Mirroring the two faces of Janus, Chappell seems to almost write his poem from the middle outward, as there is a very distinct line through the center of the poem (which is, itself, written sideways on the page perhaps because of those long lines). Upon closer inspection of that line, the reader notices that the italicized words in each line literally mirror the ones before it. For example, the emphasized words in the first line read "From east, from west" and in the second line directly underneat that read "from west, from east". The lines continue in that fashion up to the last two lines, which read "it was, it is" and "It is, it was". This distinct style of literally mirroring words reflects the duality of the god Janus and his place as central character or fixture in Chappell's poem.

Though this poem may not, perhaps, follow the distinct style of Chappell's collection Shadow Box, in which he masters the style of writing poems within poems, distinguishing them based upon their different type, the italicized words in this poem mark not an entirely new poem in and of itself but rather serve to emphasize the opposites and purposeful centering of the "double face[d]" god as the figurehead for the travelers.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 12

From Fred Chappell's "Doppelgängers":

"A man comes toward me out of the night,"
but I pretend that I don't see him.
He walks quickly, thumping his feet like
I imagine a rabbit would--though I cannot
know because I have never seen a rabbit.
He walks hard, swinging his arms like an ape
and clutching his fists as though preparing
to bend over and walk on them just before
approaching my own tired toes pointing.
His eyes are blue--light blue--and I wonder
if he is Lestat de Lioncourt, finally
coming to take my blood without hesitation
after years of pretending that he is real.
But no, his hair is too short, cropped
like a military man, like a hairless cat
who crows in its misery of being so
hideously adorable, though I do not think
I could describe this man as adorable.
Perhaps only hideous. No, he is not
Lestat, nor Louis de Pointe du Lac,
coming for me despite my wish to live.
He finally reaches my face, and I do not
move, afraid of frightening him away.
His mouth opens like a puppy's yawn,
preparing to speak and finally says:
"What kind of foundation do you use?"

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 12

From Fred Chappell's "On an Antique Picture":

"We sat smoking when the orders came"
to use our flaming fingers to burn today's
one and only meal, a non-existent fire
except in our eyes, a literal burn
every time we dared to shut them.
Close your eyes; don't let it be me who
willingly takes your life because you
ventured into that place where K.W.
ordered us not to go--defy him
if you dare, but do not tip the scale
with the tips of your fingers
to give our acquaintance unfair advantage
over the approaching and too-young
(supposed) hoard--or is it horde?
That new program about Hoarders we aren't
allowed to see because of its graphic
nature, too much for children, like we
supposedly are, according to the singers
we dared to listen to while closing
our eyes in silent reverence of the fire
inside our pressing fingertips.

Free Entry 2, Week 12

If The Sandlot got a gritty reboot,
it'd be Reservoir Dogs, guns
instead of baseballs and men in suits
instead of boys in uniform.
Though Tarantino did say his Dogs wear
their own type of uniform, dressed
so classily with such ill intention
as to steal the workings of a thousand
years of rock and hot air.
Mr. White is the Wolf, but Mr. Pink--
for whom the artist named herself--
is Little Red Riding Hood, faded
perhaps in the wash with a stack
of white towels.
Has Pink ever worn a red cape? Would
it be ironic or gauche if she did?
Mr. Brown, the director, getaway driver,
and first casualty says yes: that's too
much color for any criminal.
Those little boys who play at the old
and overgrown field don't know what
Mr. Blonde has written for them, already
planning their getaway before they've
had time to run to home plate.

Free Entry 1, Week 12

How a woman eats tells you a lot about her sexual
habits: examine, for example, Audrey Hepburn--famed
for her tiny bites, "appetite of a bird." Was she,
then, just as polite and cautious in her bedroom?
Perhaps a mottled brand of lipstick or nail polish
sat wistfully on her dresser, watching and wishing
that she were as daring as the red it gives her.
I hear that Angelina Jolie has quite the appetite,
scarfing her food with insatiable curiosity as to how
it's made; though it could be that you already knew.
Is that why, then, there was such a correlation--
not so long ago--between a woman's appetite for food
and her manners? Is that why we still consider such
princesses as refined, asexual, or rather nonsexual
and pop-princesses as simple or "easy" in their
will to flaunt their larger figures? The film Spanglish
told us that American women are afraid of curves
and the suggestion that they make of sexuality.
WARNING: Female sexuality ahead.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 12

"Ode to My Chap-Stick" - a title Mike recommended.

"Supposedly, how a woman eats tells you a lot about her sexual habits" - read in an article on the internet.

"I used to play with the mounted deer head in the den." - explaining to Mike our very different childhoods.

"Why doesn't anyone ever mention Hera favorably?" - a satiric book on Greek mythology I flipped through last week.

"Article Questions Tiger's Honesty" - the title of a Yahoo News article today, and though it is pretty obvious that they're talking about Tiger Woods, I thought this might be fun to use in contest of an actual tiger.

Strategy Response, Week 11

Jillian Weise's poem "Notes on the Body (1)" from her collection An Amputee's Guide to Sex exemplifies the technique of marrying form and function. The poem is made up of five couplets with a single-line stanza at the end, and each stanza is comprised of relatively short, clipped sentences. The interesting part of those sentences is that one does not necessarily read them that way the first time. In fact, she hides the short structure with a variety of enjabments and end-stop lines. The surface-level reading of the poem also speaks to the theme of the entire book: an amputee's romantic relationships and how those are accomplished despite social prejudices or physical inabilities.

The short sentences and stanzas of "Notes on the Body (1)" complement the subject matter of the poem in that she discusses her smaller leg by comparing her lover's "bend-step" to her "skip-step" and wishing that she could "climb a staircase, without / the clank of metal." Weise puts emphasis on those phrases like "the clank of metal" and "Perfection would be" to emphasize the difference between her persona's gait and the lover's, not merely marking their difference in terms of limbs but in entire body makeup. She spends her short sentences previous to the end talking about metal and rods and wondering why her lover is not inhibited by them. Her final line, however, gives the reader the answer in both its form and funtion: "I see the statue of David." This line is the most emphasized in the entire poem because it stands alone. Therefore, the reader puts heavy emphasis on it in a reading and determines that while she sees the statue of David in his form, he sees a similar statuesque woman despite her prosthetics.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 11

"Let us make that movie, your suggestion"
to take a classic horror tale and turn it round
into a comedic piece of Reduced Shakespeare Theatre,
without the Ides of March and their parody.
Rather, you wanted me to dress in a tutu, parade
myself before the camera with a hockey mask
covering my face and a butcher's knife in my right
hand, the good hand. Didn't H.L. Mencken write
that story already? It seems like a tale he might
spin, accidentally of course, before creating
a biting wit to go with that play.
I was to kill the main characters, make myself
the center of the stage and call myself protagonist
while I Believe in a Thing Called Love acted
as my aggressor. Don't play that song again.
I might just kill.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 11

"It was mid-afternoon, the blinds were open."
My cell phone blinked a new message; I opened
it to find an I love you, baby from whats-his-name
and wondered the difficulty of conducting a real
love letter--in our age of emails and texts
and fingers that type 100-words-per-minute on my
skin despite my pounding fists insisting written word.

I do not click Reply as though purposely defiant
of this new-fangled tradition; is that what my grandfather
would call it? That's what I would call it, the text.
Text once meant words on a page, while I wrote in pen
or pencil in class and learned to type at such a young
age, the term of text remained the same no matter who
you were writing a love letter to. Instead, we find
ourselves locked inside an eternal love text.

Free Entry 2, Week 11

The bangs of the oak drape its face,
a hard-won testament to its century-long life
before the men with their axes--their Xs,
their axis--march to the beat of a mechanical
drum and play a tune on metal instruments.
Instruments of torture are made of metal and wood,
but so are woodwinds and brass, their turns
just slightly different from the screams you
would hear with that old face staring beneath
its own limbs and leaves.
Dante's suicidals know that punishment better
than any: they dangle their wooden limbs
helplessly, before a wandering poet comes to bite
the tip from its edge and allow their blood
to speak their forgotten words.
In all of Inferno, they were my favorite torture,
hung upside down, in contortional positions,
wherever they happened to land after Charon's
maniacal--mechanical--ferry.
I once saw a man named "Ferriman" and wanted
him to be my ride to the underworld,
where I might land in a split or other
gymnastic position until Dante broke my finger.

Free Entry 1, Week 11

The Things They Ask Her To Do
Thursday Noon wants to be wrapped in cellophane,
pink or blue, but not clear to any other color;
beats a little strange here.
She wraps him tightly before leaving the room
to watch The Bold and the Beautiful, wondering
who Brooke is married to this week.
Just Passing Through asked to live in a cage
in her basement for the three hottest weeks of summer,
but she rejected putting his life in danger.
He cried like a slave almost always does, but
this time she hadn't even done anything to him.
Honestly Not A Lesbian likes for her to dress up
in a kitty outfit, furry ears on her head, face
invisible beneath the glued whiskers and blue paint.
Every Other Friday has a penchant for ants:
she puts something, anything sticky and sweet
between his legs and lets them crawl to his pleasure
until their hour is up.
She rings her bell like she imagines a pyschiatrist might;
Dr. Austin, she'd call him, just like that failing city
that she couldn't help but miss. Is she the opposite
of a psychiatrist, she wonders, as she places a heeled foot
gently on the floor between Down Low's fingers.

Junkyard Quotes 1-6, Week 11

"convent threshold" - written on the board in one of my classes

"Are Gabriel's feet on fire?" - the class discussing Dante Rosetti's Annunciation

"I don't need to close the door to say 'fuck.'" - overheard in the hallway

"Sweet-Tooth Laura" - also written on the board in class, wondered if this could be used in conjunction with a poem like the one we workshopped for Ashley on prostitutes just because that's what it instantly made me think of.

"WARNING! Female sexuality" - written on the board in Studies in Women's Lit

"For 15 years I had a house. I had the house, but really it had me." - Kathy Fagan at her reading

Free Entry 1, Week 10

I never mastered the art of holding an umbrella:
tilting it back, against the right shoulder
is fashionable but impractical in the case
of actual rain. Leaning it forward, brim
lower than brow, inhibits forward vision,
not to mention waxes rude to those who
I might pass, avoiding the grassy mud.
Holding it upright seems most practical,
though that offers its own difficulties
and perversions to our uniquely human hands:
to hold it on the left side, or the right?
To push it high above the scalp or pull down
in a grandmother's good-girl pat?
To lean the handle against the mple,
or push it out in any of the three dimensions
but still close enough to keep you dry.
Not bone dry because bones aren't dry,
at least not until they're bare, without
the gigantic organ holding them in
their rightful places to force us to walk
in the rain with our umbrellas.
My lover once told me that we're all just
mobile skeletons with brains, which
I told him was gross. When he had his
eye surgery, he begged to show me that
video of the laster penetrating his cornea
while he laid, unmoving, beneath the gaze
of the light shaped like an umbrella.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 9

"The tongue of a blue whale weighs
as much as an elephant,"
but nothing weighs as much as a blue
whale that has swallowed ten ships,
including that rusted plank that became
of Odysseus's ship and men, trying like
a child rushing through hard water
to return to Ithaca.
What if no one was waiting when he got
back to that island of which he was once
king, no one in all of the palace or town
below it to greet him with a hero's
welcome, especially not the son he
abandoned, whose own sailings took
him to the city of Sparta, where the 300--
or was it 30,000--tried yet again to defeat
their common enemy. No enemy is common.
They all take what is not theirs and streak
the sky with wedded bands of smoke and fire
that pound onto the ground with the force
of the elephants that Hannibal rode into
his greatest battles, winning with their
might. But he may not have won if the
enemy, the uncommon enemy, had ridden
on blue whales, whose tongues weigh
as much as an elephant.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 9

"It is late on the evening of September 25, 2006,"
and tambourines beat less loudly against my skull then,
making real music to dance to rather than pounding like
my mother's heavy footsteps above my basement room.
Can you hear me now, or was that Are You There, God;
It's me, Margaret, a novel I once taught to our
Christian Fellowship Club when it was my turn to preach,
a feat not unlike a woman wearing pants or unfastening
her hair to dare speak all the details of rebellion
that Margaret Atwood taught us in our formative years:
those of early college, when, as child-adults, we hung
against the dripping words of writers like our own
Bible, one without scripture but shouting sarcasm in
the fisted hands of Margaret Atwood herself.
Is Margaret Atwood the same who wrote to God all those
years ago, those years before impressionism overtook my
mind and turned me against men like Offred's mother,
when my eyes so easily turned to the Man for his answer
to every question that anyone could have asked aloud?
Imagine how different such a book would read now:
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret Atwood

Free Entry 2, Week 9

This is an exercise in found poetry, which I always enjoy. These are status updates from Facebook that I thought I might be able to tie together someday!

It's easy when you listen to the g'd up sound,
and I'm marinating in the sweet, sweet southern moon:
Mexico for the week.
Your face smells pretty good this morning; I have
eighth notes in me. Unfortunately, all of my keys
now rest at the bottom of Lake Harding.
No espresso today--dreamt the cops were after us
for a pool violation. Tomorrow comes today, so
join the war!
We managed to get kicked off of the college campus
twice and even receive a permanent ban, but don't
hit the slammer too hard!
Am I flaky, honestly? "She's the lady in red when
everybody else is wearing tan" is catchy.
You continue to wow me with your lack of ego
and excess of talent; I got what I wanted
and now I go to bed, contemplating the mysteries
of the universe and the dynamics of grilled cheese.
I can't wait to go scavenging through antiques.

Free Entry 1, Week 9

He sang Ohhhhh-ohhhh, De-e-eath while she
went down in the river to pray, without an inclination
as to whom the crown might belong once they reached
the end of that long, winded highway that neither really
cared to travel: one a treasure trove of marketable madness
sent to his speaker like a hawk to a flame with banjos bopping
in the background to his once playful now solemn tune,
the other a baby dressed in white but sullen beneath
with browns and reds of demons that danced around her,
all the while she singing how she'll fly away, oh glory.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the sinner
praise God while he lives in glory down here on earth?
and what makes the righteous so assured of their righteousness
other than a spinning spine beneath the skin that whistles
"You're right, you're right"? All others are gone
in the cotton and the corn, as they say.

Junkyard Quote 5, Week 9

"Kurt is falling apart from the inside out." - said last night when Mike noticed how tattered my purse of Kurt Cobain is getting. If I use this, I would like to use it perhaps not with him (because that would be some serious baggage to pack into a poem) but maybe with a made-up character and use it literally rather than figuratively.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 9

"Talking pigs at the slaughterhouse." - Dr. Hipchen in reference to the fast-talking debaters.

"ketchuping eggs" - said last night in class, and I think I have to use it somewhere because it grossed me out so much.

"It is what it is because it is what it is." - Sandra Bullock in 28 Days explaining what a tautology is.

"We're going to remember this night." - Dr. Davidson last night, though I want to use it in reference to the marching sorority girls in the hallway, not necessarily just by itself.

Strategy Response, Week 8

In Natasha Trethewey's poem "Miscegenation," she not only reflects the mixing of races that is prominent in her book Native Guard but also mixes several different subjects into one poem, exemplifying the title itself and very skillfully tying several seemingly unrelated subjects together. Throughout the short fourteen-line poem, Trethewey mentions race relations, state laws, several states and countries, religion, language, and holidays. This poem is a perfect example of Hugo's concept of getting off subject, as it has a feel that seems almost like stream-of-consciousness in that she relates all of these subjects to one another by simply writing and letting the words take her where they will, and they eventually take her through all of those subjects and back to where she began. It is interesting that she makes it look effortless to write such an easy stream-of-consciousness that flows from one seemingly-unrelated idea to the next and is a technique that I know that I and many of my classmates strive for.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 8

"Before the war, they were happy," he said while looking
up the word for happy in the dictionary that he always kept
on the bedside table. "The jazz war, that is." Clarification
was necessary, so that we as the munchkins of his Oz wouldn't
confuse the fake war with the real one. That war we saw on TV,
he would tell us, wasn't real, just a big play being put on
by the government who would try to keep us down. No, the real
war was fought on the streets of New Orleans when he was a boy,
just older than we were as he told us this story.
Trumpets and drums would litter the streets like the fliers
that shouted COME TO JAZZ-FEST 1924! SIDNEY BECHET ONE NIGHT ONLY!
But men in their long white coats, carrying their Bibles called
it music meant to summon Satan from Hell to take the city down
for his demons to play with, and so the war began.
"Wasn't no blood," he reminded us. "Just ink, and lotsa' it,
thrown on sheet music by the master hisself against the faces
a' the unforgiving church."
We sat on our knees and listened, holding our hands up to our ears
in an attempt to imitate his hearing device, and because I so closely
watched his lips as they made the motions for playing a saxophone,
I never did find out how that war ended.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 8

"I was asleep while you were dying"
and dreamed that we took a vacation to Hawaii,
lying supine on the grainy beach while eternally-
tanned surfers glided in to greet us with leis
and "He Mele No Haole," even though we looked
much darker than they did.
I wasn't sitting on ice in the fridge anymore,
holding the compress against your side while
the inconstant heat sputtered and coughed
as though dying right along with you.
When I heard the siren, I imagined it was a chief
or priestess calling us to the festival with a shell
in hand and children just like the ones we always
meant to have, but never really did.
While you died, I slept, and picked us up to place
us in the place we should have been all along.

Free Entry 2, Week 8

I know that Psych comes on at 10:00
and that Caprica premiered on a Wednesday,
but mark their words, they'll never show
another CSI again. We'll believe that
when we see it.

Belk's had a 2-day sale just after Christmas,
but Toys-R-Us's "Big Blowout Sale" lasted all
week; children need more time to shop than
adults, or so the constant commericals
tell us.

Some new video game hit the shelves just in time
for the New Year, but Best Buy could not live up
to their advertisements for the best buys for your
significant other: they didn't have Harry Potter
and the Half-Blood Prince before Christmas.

We're supposed to watch the shows and mark their
DLSV, guarding the public against what they should
never have to know or see. But all we remember
from our hours of watching sitcoms and dramas
is who had a sale and what time it came on.

Free Entry 1, Week 8

A knife punched the side of his stomach where normally
only pushpins do their work against the softer lining
of a used-to-be-strong digestive system. Nothing too unusual,
not exceptionally out of the ordinary for a man on disability
with only a wife at home to press her cold hands against
the quiet, softening pain: like tenderizing meat, his stomach.
The sun went down to white covering everything outside his
window, frosted like his favorite cereal, which in this case
was not so "Grrrrrreat." No food or shelter in such cold;
perhaps his own case would turn cold like his favorite TV show
and his name would appear among the cast, their hands on
their hearts as they salute the man he used to be, but can't
be anymore, due only in part to that knife that won't leave.
My husband is dying! he hears her shout to no one; the line
of the phone was cut centuries ago, just like the broken heat.
Baby, she whispers, hoping he'll open his eyes. The amb-a-lance
is outside, but we gotta walk to it. You gotta get up now.
He shakes his head, swatting the vultures already flying above him
and praying that they'll wait to start feasting on
his already twisted, knotted flesh that lays against bone.
He watched light turn ribbons over the snow, like he saw his daughter
do that one time when she was five, dancing in the front yard with her
purple ribbon-dance-kit, smiling as she flipped it into shapes
that she thought would catch the eye of a potential suitor, a mating
dance. He blew the ribbon southward and leaned his head back, gripping
the knife still sitting in his side and tearing it from its perch.
They killed my husband, was the last thing he heard.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 8

"The thought of drinking anything white disgusts me." - Mike when asked why he doesn't like milk.

"Walking into the debate tournament is like walking into Dante's inferno." - Dr. Hipchen before the Write-A-Thon last weekend.

"I know that Psych comes on at 10:00, and that Caprica premiered on a Wednesday." - Susan, another intern in my department, talking about what she remembers from commericals that she screens.

"I can't be associated with anything that could potentially be a disaster." - guest speaker at intern seminar.

"1-Minute Weight Loss Tricks!" - the title of a Yahoo!News article that I saw on their front page. (A little too difficult to believe)

Junkyard Quote 6, Week 7

"I'm going to steal your Bones." - my boss at Turner saying to the other intern that she's going to steal the DVD of the show Bones that she was working on and let her do another show.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 7

"If I get nervous, I hold on to Jesus." - Kate Gervais talking about the rosary on her rearview mirror.

"...for some antihistamine reason." - Dr. Lipoma recovering from illness.

"I loved [Mel Gibson] so very much before he went quite mad." - Dr. Lipoma (for no real reason).

"Once she finds out that we have no power, we're fucked." - Tony Soprano talking to his wife about their daughter.

"In the early days of Facebook" - a student in Satan Comedy class.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 6

1. "architecture of the dead" - Dr. Erben discussing the work of H.D. Thoreau

2. "cup o' gum" - overheard in Grammar class

3. "They took the itchy stitches out of my butt" - medical show

4. "World's Dumbest Lovers" - topic of Valentine's Day episode of The Smoking Gun

5. "Men are mysogenistic man-pigs" - Savannah Smith discussing the topic of one of her Fall 2009 final papers

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 6

"Dear Reader"
What could I write that you have not already heard
in some form or another, though perhaps not in my
own personal words that slip "trippingly off the tongue,"
as Hamlet might inquire of an actor?

Perhaps you are an actor with your curtain rising and
never falling on the words of greater speakers than
those I could possibly give you to read or admire
in the light of the sound stage behind the director's
ever-watching, wary, leaning eye.

Perhaps you are the director, leering at that light
and willing it to drop as you would have it, though
you know that you can never be like Shakespeare,
and most certainly not like Hamlet. He was too much
your superior and mine to warrant a real consideration.
Or so the canon will eventually say.

Perhaps you are Hamlet, playing upon your own life's stage
as though maddened like a horror film supervillain trapped
by the hero behind a stage of faulty wiring and sparked
electrical outlets. Maybe, despite all your efforts to make
a show of insanity, your mind really has gone the way of the
flattened hills that used to be your hometown, your castle,
your never-ending reading adventure.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 6

"People want four things."
But Larwrence E. Man wants sixteen,
while Mary W. Man wants only two.
Whose most lighted-from-inside skeleton
can swipe like a hammer through any one
person's streaming arms?
They reach like his son reached for
the only baseball he owned, playing
with the only father he owned, whose
glove obscured the only hand he owned.
She only reads stories by authors
whose names begin with D, though the
one and only Dostoyevsky still favors
her when she flips his pages like the
hairs of her only daughter, upon
the pillow of the only other bed
in the only other bedroom in the house.

Strategy Response, Week 6

In his poem "Simon Peter," John Poch interestingly incorporates both poetic and Biblical elements. Though classical in the sense that the Bible is written in verse, contemporary poetry often eschews religious meaning in any of its subjects, particularly such drastic topics as Poch takes on in this poem. Not only does the poem consider ramifications and rewards of Christianity, but it does so from the first-person voice of one of Christ's apostles, Simon Peter.

The poem is separated into two sections, the first depicting the night that Jesus was captured by the Romans and brought to trial. As Jesus predicted, Simon Peter denies him three times before the rooster crows. The second part shows Peter's reaction upon hearing from Mary Magdalene that Jesus has risen again, this time his emotion both starkly different and yet oddly similar. For example, in the first section, the "I" (presumed to be Simon Peter in the context of the poem) denies his association with Christ and even makes light of the fact that the men with whom he speaks mistake him for an apostle. He stays and jokes with them until dawn, when he hears the rooster crow, at which time the imagery gives the reader the distinct feeling of regret: "We gossiped till the cock crowed, / his head a small volcano raised to mock stone." Peter expresses initial levity in speaking with the men who accused him, but as soon as he hears the rooster, he imagines its destructiveness and the implications of his denial of Christ. Likewise, the second section expresses his joy upon realizing that Jesus has resurrected, and yet a similar tone of darkness hangs over the poem, as the very first line expresses doubt: "Who could believe a woman's word, perfumed / in death?" He does, however, come to believe Mary and runs to the grave, where he finds no body. Believing someone has stolen his master, he sneaks away to weep and upon seeing Jesus later that evening sneaks away again to the sea, where so many of his lessons were learned. Again, despite Peter's joy at Christ's return, the poem ends very somberly: "The fire before me, the netted fish / behind. I'm carried where I will not wish."

Therefore, John Poch incorporates poetic and Christian ideas very well into his poem "Simon Peter" and even expresses the sincerety with which his apostles worshipped him through the first-person voice of Simon Peter himself and two very significant Biblical moments in the fisherman's life. The poem also does not ultimately decide for or against religion, as it expresses in both sections joy and regret in terms of belief in Jesus. Interesting that a contemporary poet could so easily mesh two seemingly opposite themes.

Free Entry 2, Week 6

Bristles fall into my eyes as I lie supine
on what used to be a bed but now resembles
a garden of rotting vegetables, while above
drums beat metronomically at my ceiling light,
wishing that they could breathe through like
the wind instruments do, so well.

A chair rocks while the bed squeals and howls
and begs for the deaf people to cease their
fighting against its face, gasping for breath
just as they do, once in a while.

I close my eyes against the purple speckles
that usually indicate sickness but now only
mean that I have missed out on something,
something above me that whistles to the tune
of some unknown Disney song, and diamond
mines don't, more often than not.

Three more squeaks penetrate my wall before one
last groan of the bedsheets and carpets to the
music that they thought they made, but only the
real saxophonists do, at all.

Free Entry 1, Week 6

You look like a centaur, but not the good kind:
the kind that opens its hips like a tulip with nothing
left to eat. And no second legs follow you, only
the tulugaq that whistles as if it knows you crush
the steady sleepers beneath your once-hooves, now toes.
Horns do not spear your scalp like a real mythic
or a foreign dove that caws against the wooden mountain
in the far right corner of my eye.
You look like a centaur, but not the good kind:
the kind that wishes it were more than just a horse.

Free Entry 2, Week 5

Driving through Nebraska I let my eyes wander
but not like little boys let their eyes drift
to their developing classmates' chests.
No, my eyes watch the passing cars as if I were
playing my own private game of Frogger until
I catch one with particular interest.
The car in front of me, a Ford something, plays
a Vegas-style Elvis imitation on its back,
one black metallic side lifted just slightly above
the other, as if to say, "Thank you very much."
The next-door neighbors play guitar and sing
backup for the drifting car while their children
perform the Atlantan version of hip-hop: krunk,
or so I'm told.

Improv/Imitation 1 & 2, Week 5

"When I was born, everybody died."
Fuck them anyway, I motioned with a too obscure
finger pointed toward the stars and stripes mobile
above a fiery crib that played pinesome notes
upon my still soft and bald scalp.
Twist and turn around the whistling spark
that springs to speak its comfort while only
I really understand his language,
the language of heartiness, or perhaps no one
is allowed to have that since King Richard
the Lionhearted. Maybe he was the last one.
I'm reminded of an empty library tale, a story
that was meant to inspire a moral of split sides
and lack of Odyssean humors.

"Yesterday was the last day / we would bow to pray."
They don't believe in God anymore, and why should they
when the ground between left and right and north and west
splits like spun sugar in a cheap Hollywood thriller
starring Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy.
They knew it the best, I suppose.
Someone sang "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie" while
I skirted the seat over by the football field.
But that's too precious.

Junkyard Quote 6, Week 5

This word was begging to be put in my journal! I read it in a Yahoo! News article this morning:

brachydactyly

It apparently is the scientific name for a condition in which a person has an overly large or clubbed thumb, and the word itself is just too much fun to say and read to not make into a Junkyard Quote!

Strategy Response, Week 5

In Chapter 11 of Writing Poetry, the writers discuss Emily Dickinson's American Romantic poem, generally referred to by its first line: "Because I could not stop for Death." In this section, the text discusses the ways in which one might write a typically fantastical subject in a very common manner. Utilizing Dickinson's poem, we find that she indeed treats Death with an almost loving tone, calling this personified version of a tragic event "kind" (2) and "Civil" (8) while he rides in a carriage with her. Even as contemporary readers more than a hundred years later, we find such a drastically opposite-to-general representation of Death backwards and romantic (in terms of both "loving" and "of the Romantic Movement").

Dickinson goes on to describe the scenes that she and Death pass, all equally romantic images, before she slips into the present and remembers the quickness with which the previous scenes passed (9-24). Classically, images of "Recess" (10), "Fields of Gazing Grain" (11), and "the Setting Sun" (12) represent still more romantic settings for two lovers to convene over, while a classic trope of love includes time passing quickly (as evidenced in aubades). Therefore, Dickinson uses many common elements of a love poem and of the American Romanticist Movement to express Death in a distinctly different way from most before her, revealing him to be not merely a "person" but also loving rather than demonic.

Free Entry 1, Week 5

Cate Blanchett did Bob Dylan
better than Bob Dylan did Bob Dylan,
her masucilinely flat hair springing
sharply to life beneath a faux guitar
while tapping fingers split its side.
Side like a sewing pattern, brown
and dotted and transparent beneath her
already under-sunlit, scarred skin.
He had nothing on that shit, they'll say
when pushing their screens up to deadened
bedstands with books piled as legs,
Tom lisping a suffering "S" underneath
the pick made out of Cate's comb.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 5

"People are sheep and cops are the shepherds." - Mike in reference to his dad's job as a policeman.

"That car is doing a cheap Elvis imitation." - on the way to Atlanta

"McItaly" - Yahoo!News article

"Where are they now? A look back at some high-profile criminal cases" - title of article in Rome News-Tribune; sounded more comical than official.

"If The Sandlot got a gritty reboot, it'd be Reservoir Dogs." - Cracked.com

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 4

"Dear Manic Depression,"
thank you for visiting me last Tuesday.
I sat with sedated toes pushing against
the leg press your sister Guilt bought for me,
while I slept with Stress curled on my stomach,
and then you thrust my door open just in time
to slap my cheek and race my heart against
the hurrying clock for need to finish
my paperwork.

Free Entry 1, Week 4

A sun-bleached bone dipped in black ink shifts
like dirty plates along a silver counter,
while orange water slips from forehead to chin
on the Venetian Lagoon.

Forgers founder against the constant heat:
fire where all the trees and shrubs burned out
a long time ago, without the screaming faces
that clawed for their shade.

A tower porters over the rotted wisteria,
no longer fed from fractured cloudy windows
and grinning eyelashes upon wrinkled knees;
bone less skin.

Junkyard Quotes 2-5, Week 4

"phantasmagoria" - in reference to an article in Women's Lit

"Whitman is Jesus and Emerson is God." - Tara Prouty when discussing Song of Myself

"Cate Blanchett did Bob Dylan better than Bob Dylan did Bob Dylan." - Kate Gervais

"synesthesia" - a word I already knew but discovered today is an actual mental disorder as well as a literary tool!

Junkyard Quote 1, Week 4

"Darn your massive buttocks, being so close to your toes with no break." - said by Trista yesterday before class when talking about the lack of punctuation in our memorization for the week!

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 3

"What have you done, Cornelius?"
I gave you morning melody in the radio
with nothing left but static, dead air.
So far, sleep with open hands begging
for vanilla lotion without sniffling
like I assume man did when he discovered
rocks were for throwing, not eating.
You look at the fire burning down Mattie's
house and wish you had discovered it:
fire, not the burning rubble of a barter.
Your classmates will call you Lou,
just like the neighbors insist to do;
perhaps I should have called you that
instead of Louisianne or Louis.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 3

"When we met, he was old",
a pencil shaving cut across his withered cheek
while the tips of red erasers whistle slowly.
Mitch Albom wrote about a green, scaly monster
in his own closet, but it hides more than he
creaks open the tiny door to look for clothes.
Fingertips and tips of fingernails tap tip-toes
across the flat part of my neck:
the meaning of the word "flatter," I believe.
Or is it "falter?"
I open my palm; there should be a fan between
my fingers so that mice would sing and knit
a dress while I whistle and bay at the sun.
He finds a book instead, littered with words
and marked for execution with a purple E on its chest,
the author's name scratched out with a green pen
and crushed beneath a new label:
HE WAS OLD.

Strategy Response 1, Week 3

Adrian Matejka's poem "Do the Right Thing" presents its reader with a seemingly-easy juxtaposition of poetics and pop culture, a very difficult task in post-modern poetry, as pop culture generally finds itself in opposition to poetics rather than in dialogue, as this poem presents. Matejka inserts references to Spike Lee as well as the famous director's films, particularly Do the Right Thing and suggests the hesitation with which Lee granted an autograph. In tandem with references to recent films and contemporary directors, Matejka adds slang speech that might not otherwise be considered poetic. For instance, in the sixth stanza, he writes Lee saying, "Why you care? You / ain't even black." To which an audience member replies, "Damn, Spike. That ain't / right." These simple dialects of English, considered far outside the standard, add a particular feel to the poem, giving it "edge," if you will, and allowing the reader to perceive Lee's anger, the audience's insistence, and the speaker's humiliation.

Free Entry 2, Week 3

I walk the wisteria brick of Pennhurst School
and smell the smoky air for the pink dentist chair
where inmate-students lost their meat-crunchings.
Smog only resides in the cracks of bartered bricks
between the walls of painted faces and blinking
lights, where filmy spider skins dangle finally.
"No such thing as growth," they said, while bumps
and creaks calligraph red streaks against their irises
whose final muddy knoll marks millions of spiny,
smoky stackhouses in the otherwise dark hallway.
I find the spindle where my mother rang her wool
like a pianist might twinge a dusty corner harp;
no blood from a dainty finger against the tip
and no fingerprints in the fourteen layers of dust:
skin flakes and mold against settled, dry air
in the quiet room with the upturned leather desks.

Free Entry 1, Week 3

What does it mean to "un"? She un-does a button, but he's un-friendly. "Un" once was but is no longer; so is un-writing the same as erasing? Little girls un-friend one another like oysters' harvesting seasons, a click of the virtual button un-doing hundreds of hours of un-manning their current crushes and un-learning last year's geometry lesson. But to what un-remarkable brick wall does that click lead? Spectators find themselves un-interested.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 3

Burp out an email. - Mike discussing an automated email

The road has carpet. - a friend mentioning rugs thrown on the road

Anthology of Bread - the title of an album from the '70s

I pretended to be a person. - an actor discussing his process

Between the firehouse and the towers was the whole world. - a documentary filmed on 9/11

Free Entry 3, Week 2

This poem actually came from our class exercise on writing as an observer on a train. I wanted to type up and work with some of the language from that exercise!

The leathery woman's baggy jade baubles
swing violently with every braking shove,
knowing they went out of style sixty years ago.
A man, his skin too taut over his jagged face,
stares at his own eyes, not noticing the chain gang
of gothic heroes and mad men thumping
restlessly through the gray grass fields
overgrown with browning dandelions.
The overseer never moves his dark sunglasses
but to give his speckled mutt water
from the tin cantina.
The little boy across the aisle teases
his too-light eyes through his still-lighter
eyelashes to look at the prisoners
between pages in his Mickey Mouse coloring book.
He scribbles curls outside the lines,
giving Mickey a purple afro.

Strategy Response 1, Week 2

Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" exemplifies our reading this week in terms of power struggle within poetry. This poem presents a literal power struggle between the speaker and his most recent wife, who he describes as "too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere." He goes on to explain that she was too kind to other men, not giving him the respect and admiration that he deserved as her husband. As the reader goes through the poem, however, he/she notices the interesting double-talk of the Duke that causes doubt in his rationale. For example, he says, "Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, / Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without / Much the same smile?" By his own proclamation, she did give him smiles and adoration, but he perceived the same attitude toward all other people, suggesting to him that she offers the same amount of love for her husband that she does to any other single person. The reader finds it obvious again that he ranks himself above all others as he astonishedly remarks that "She thanked men - good! but thanked / Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked / My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / With anybody's gift." Indeed, he considers simply his marrying her the greatest gift she could possibly receive and thinks all others much less, though she gave them equal thanks.

Despite his reasoning, however, the reader considers the internal suggestions of her being kind and loving toward all not as impudence or ungratefulness for the Duke but rather a natural kindess, and for that kindness the Duke disposed of her in an undisclosed (but certainly not humane) way and quickly moves on to another, more suitable bride. Therefore, the audience witnesses the power struggle between the Duke and his Duchess even just in the words of one, as he mentions his difficulty in reigning her into serving him only. Interesting that Browning is able to represent such a distinct power play in giving even only one side of the story!

Free Entry 2, Week 2

"What do you wish?" centers a diagram
on the newly-repainted cracked stones.
A speckeld glass silken veneer covers
the open-fisted wheezing facade,
while the blackened spittle clings, cleanly bordering
its rite without the janitor
and his bubbly beer bucket.
"I wish they'd stop painting over our wishes,"
hunches in its curvature, fetal against its mother.
No texture, stony words.

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 2

"If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him."

I don't bother to tell him about the rolling bull
that would otherwise run him over on that hill
around which he sleeps at noontime.
That hill sparks a China doll, flaming upon
the hearth of sunken treasure: no one writes
down what it means to them when they hear
that song, no one reads the words of others
written on papier mache musical boxes
with dancing ballerinas skipping and breaking
their fragile ankles upon the moors of Hip-Hop.
They forget on purpopse and pretend to fall
just to please their whipping bull.

Free Entry 1, Week 2

In my town, everyone uses the same dominatrix.
She has no leather anymore, having shredded it all
for the last customer, whose fetish means knives
with their blades of grass cutting into her tender feet.
I passed by her yesterday and saw only the old woman
sitting on the porch with her rocker bent sideways
and her eyes staring at the moulding, considering,
perhaps, the necessity of maintaining a home for a woman
of little repute. Mary has no imitation of fallen sin,
suggesting that God marked her face like Cain, the first
murderer just as she represents the first shade under
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Eve tempts
Adam, but he does not resist. Who, then, takes the blame?
Everyone uses the same dominatrix in my town;
but no one speaks the shotgun phrase of freakish pleasure,
only glancing from time to time to the front porch
of a lonely old woman with no more leather
and pointing with a finger that will later
be in her mouth.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 2

"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive."

Her hair should be gold,
but sitting in a chair upon the window
of an intently towering wall
she falls into disrepair.
Wisteria climb up the path to where
a shack rests, dilapidated and dull.
Whose mark upon that wall can the duchess
speak like glass and painted crystal;
a voice no more like a water wheel
but rather a spark of grinding glass.
Once more I put the groiund glass in
his saline and put my hands together
in a mock representation of the God
he doesn't believe in.
My only stuffed animal rests on the edge
of my once silk bed, an unfortunate
side effect of the medication.
I see nothing there; a black dot
where I knew that my face should have sat.
But only that blackened princess gathers
her flowers and pretends to jive
in a kingdom that doesn't really exist.

Junkyard Quotes 5-10, Week 2

I had the wonderful opportunity today to spend a few hours this morning with several members of the Creative Writing Guild. Thanks mostly to Kimberly Smith, I was granted a lot of fantastic junkyard quotes throughout our adventures in the MLK Day Parade!

"We got a lot of band-age." - Dr. Hipchen in reference to the four high school bands marching today.

"Wolfie is like that one Kennedy they never told anyboyd about." - Kimberly when Wolfie appeared.

"One dried up sperm found one wrinkled egg, and that's how I got here." - Kimberly

"I wish I had a donkey. I would kiss it." - Kimberly

The final quote from Kimberly will be written phonetically, as I believe that carries importance: "Ah support eatin' 'n' readin'."

My last junkyard quote for the day actually came from an Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction class I took last semester. Two of the students in the class realized that the knew the same woman who works as a dominatrix. Upon that realization, Dr. Umminger said, "In my town, everybody uses the same dominatrix."

Junkyard Quote 4, Week 2

Almost as soon as I clicked the "Publish" button on my last post, I discovered a new junkyard quote that I wanted to use! Naturally, I have lost the love I used to have for "American Idol." Therefore, I only watch the auditions of every season, since they are, after all, the best part! Tonight they just so happened to be in Atlanta, and the last man to audition was a 62-year-old veteran who sang a rap he made up that basically went, "Pants on da ground! You look like a fool wit yo' pants on da ground!" And, though I must admit my part in laughing at his attempt to woo the judges, his performance almost immediately made me think of Philip Levine's poem "They Feed They Lion." Maybe there's potential in this man's unique language!

Junkyard Quotes 2 & 3, Week 2

The first of my junkyard quotes for this post came from my first class of the day: Studies in Grammar. Though it is a phrase I've heard many times (and often considering my major), I never really thought about just how interesting it sounds until today when Dr. Newton said "word order." He said it so quickly that I had to replay in my head what he'd said and finally discovered the phrase. Because he said it so quickly, I heard not what the words meant but how they sounded together, and I really loved it!

The second quote for today I actually found written on the women's bathroom wall on the first floor of Pafford. In one stall, a girl wrote, "What do you wish?" There were several answers written around this question, some faded from where the maintenance employees had painted over the writing. But above all of this writing, someone had posted in black magic marker, "I wish they'd stop painting over our wishes." I would love to use this idea in a poem, though I would have to change some of the abstractions and perhaps the wording of the sentence, so it made me consider writing a poem of bathroom graffiti.

Junkyard Quote 1, Week 2

My first junkyard quote of the week came to me thanks to Dr. Emily Hipchen. We were having our first Creative Writing Guild meeting of the Spring Semester when Larriesha got up. As she slid along the whiteboard, the markers made a sound that seemed like she sneezed. Dr. Hipchen said "Bless you." Larriesha then corrected her saying it was just her sliding across the board. "Oh," Dr. Hipchen said. "Well then, bless your butt."

Free Entry 3, Week 1

Action

He sat behind the camera,
to its side, whispering
intently to its operator
and pressing against his steady hands.
"Action," he shouts, galvanizing
the limp puppets in front of him
to act out their scene.
As they bend--45 degrees,
not 90 as Roberto Benigni suggested--
he turns to me and whispers again,
"I always wanted to say that."
Did you? I wonder without speaking,
watching as he jumps
like a child anticipating candy.
Up and down, side to side,
quickly and without a breath.
So often has he told me
that he always wanted to say that.
So why not simply say it?
Why not say the phrase
that everyone always wants to say?
What does everyone always want to say?
Is it "Action"?
So say "Action"
or even "action."
What he really means
is that he always wanted to say
that and have it mean something;
say it as an order and have it obeyed.
Is that what everyone wants
when they always want to say "Action"?

Improv/Imitation 2, Week 1

Stanza 1 of I am Still Thinking about this Crow by Ahmad Shamlu

I am still thinking
about this crow
that with its pair of black scissors -
by two brist swishing sounds -
cut an aslant arc
on the matte paper of the sky
over the toasted wheat farms
of the Yush valley;
I am still thinking
about this crow
that facing the nearby mountains
said something -
with its lung's dry cawing -
that the mountains echoed it, baffled,
for such a long time
in their rocky heads.


Throat Contractions

This word hooks onto my throat,
stinging and picking no matter how I swallow -
lluh, I lisp with a trained tongue -
while my companion stares into the distance.
This word that so scratches
at the inside of my neck demands
to be set free, to climb out from my esophagus
to my lips, where it finally can be uttered.
It arises more and more quickly now, faster
like a contraction -
though what results from this pressure
is not a child, but a harpie -
a can of worms, as some might say.
More and more often I attempt
to say this word, and yet the clock
ticks "no, no, no."

Junkyard Quotes 4 & 5, Week 1

I've recently become enthralled in the show "Lockup" on MSNBC. On the most recent episode that I watched, there were two phrases I wanted to remember: one for its rhyme and humor, and the other for its irony.

The first phrase refers to a program within the prison that they were examining in which the prisoners basically go through rehab. The ones who are addicted to drugs and decide that they would like to better themselves go into a prison-sponsored program to get rid of their addiction. The officers who ran the program called it Hug-A-Thug.

The second phrase interested me because of the way it was written. At San Quentin Penitentiary, the television show briefly examined death row. At this particular institution, the officers referred to death row as "Condemned Row," and while that may not be necessarily unusual in terms of language, it was written in a font identical to typical gang tattoos, the curved, almost calligraphic letters and all capitalized. Therefore, its irony interested me more than necessarily its innovation.

Improv/Imitation 1, Week 1

Paramour by Angie Estes
An adverb by way of
love, what's par for
l'amour is par
for the course. Say
you're out for dinner one evening
with Yves, and you think of
the phrase evening
of life. Who doesn't want
to be called something
other than the name
we're given: the cow we call
boeuf or beef when eaten, the house
when it's lived in,
home, and then one we
go home withj, love.
Lysippus, the Greek
sculptor, used to say
that his predecessors made men
as they really were, but he made them as
they appeared to be, just as Picasso
replied to those who claimed Stein
did not look like the portrait
he made: she will. What makes
the wine the wine, is it the grape
or the terroir, terror or
terrain? You think Burgundy
evening, assigned
age of light, first
sign of winter, art of
decay: assignage, the art of curing
cheese, fromage, what the French call
feet of the angels.

Semantics
No one gives the Spanish credit
for lisping their words like children:
cero, thero, cielo, thielo.
Imagine a dinner with Antonio Banderas,
speaking in his native language from
Andaluthia, Ethpana, a sound like a flute.
He flutters his 'r's, his 'l's, and bids
you to do the same; your voice sounds harsh,
unforgiving and brazen in its stinging 's's.
No one gives the Spanish credit
for speaking more clearly than the Mexicans,
only the Spanish themselves, beating
grammar books over the slang-speaking Southerners.
But perhaps that difference gives neither the edge,
as it were, but rather gives them a common
marker to talk about.
I don't want to speak to you, you slasher
of what was once a language of tingling tongues.
Well, I would rather not hear your lisp,
your arrogant usage of vocabulary.
I would much rather listen to the singing
of Colombian Juanes than mark your high-nosed
palabras. Palabrath.

Stragey Response 1, Week 1

Though I've read through the entire book Writing Poetry before, I read it this time through the lens of a more practiced writer rather than a student just beginning to write in a class setting. I paid special attention this time to the section on "Juggling," a skill I never learned to master and yet always wanted to learn to do. It always seemed to me that Juggling as successfully as Adam Zagajewski was something only seasoned poets could do, and so I would probably do well to stay away from its intricacies. Even though I'm sure it's probably true that a more practiced poet can perform the act of Juggling within his or her poetry with more precision than I could, that is one thing that I would love to perfect this semester. I would love to learn how to write a poem that discusses two or three or even four different things at once, that (at first) seem unrelated and then suddenly merge into one another in a way that makes me step back from the work and say, "Wow! I didn't mean to say that! How interesting!" Juggling is one specific tactic that I very sincerely plan to work on throughout the semester!

Free Entry 2, Week 1

When criminals move, what are their criteria?
Does crime matter to people who themselves execute
modes of murderous, rebellious, unnatural law?
The typical person wouldn't relocate willingly
to a place like Detroit, or Los Angeles, or Chicago
would they? Or would they?
What if I were a criminal, say, a bank robber?
Say I have committed unspeakable crimes against tellers,
ATMs, the people who so innocently wanted to deposit a check.
Would it matter to me, then, if I were to use that stolen
money to move someplace grander, the level of crime?
I suppose it would.
I would want quiet suburbia, all the more unsuspecting
for me to continue my life of crime in an otherwise calm setting.

Free Entry 1, Week 1

Reflections on Crimson

Crimson slips like molasses in my throat;
I close my eyes and breathe the word, see it float
just above my head.
Sweet like chocolate but the stick of molten tar,
I must click my tongue to say, "Crimson."

Who was it that said "Cellar Door" is the most lovely?
Well, I first heard it from Drew Barrymore,
and though the word does melt off of the tongue
I sound "Crimson" as my "barbaric yawp,"
brushing its meaning out of my eyes and cupping my ears to the sound.

Junkyard Quote 3, Week 1

The other day I went to the movie theatre where I used to work. It was one of my last days of Winter Break, so I wanted to go see something fun and say goodbye to everyone who I wouldn't see for another few months. Arriving a half hour early for Up in the Air, I stayed around the box office, talking to some of the managers and employees. Before the movies started, a group of four teenagers walked in, one of whom was wearing a T-shirt and shorts in the freezing weather. "Do you think she's retarded?" one of the managers asked, staring as she held her arms around her in the chill. "I think these people probably picked her up and said 'Hey, you don't look that homeless,'" the teenager at the box office replied. Perhaps a bit insensitive, but a funny and interesting quote, nonetheless!

Introductory Poems 1-8, Week 1

My Russian History

You crouch, Ana, impenetrable as the photo in Grandma’s trunk,
a tattered, gray cave rock opposite the jewels in your corset.
You Romanov with your blue-blood grin in black and white,
I slash flesh like a jewel too; a Medusa smiling my stony snakes.

Look at me, Nicholas; look at me, Tsarina—
I porter and break before the burning palace.
I taste the soldiers near me: Red saccharine like Eden-fruit
but White as airy as unbuttered bread.

The rubies of my eyes roll back, let me groan
in my sapphires—like Alexei’s eyes laze turquoise—
Lazy turquoise.

Daughters, I share only these brazen stones: Olga and Maria.
The guards carry themselves and their French right into the twentieth century
with too much of that Je ne sais quoi and chests like young girls.


Ars Poetica

A sandstorm shoves the Chinese temple,
lifting the worshippers from the clipped stones
and reuniting them with the ancestors
to whom they bow their smaller heads.

A falling star paints blue streaks upon canvas
that the wind and earth crashed to create,
dashing between columns and teasing the sand
that howls and knocks to erase his work.

The star glides among the mossy stones
and lets his tail splatter a path behind him.
“What shall I make of this?” he asks the incense
that sifts through his icy legs.

Only the purple fumes know what sacrifice
the silenced but still-stony elders demand.


Party Crashers

Snow lurches in front of the windshield,
huffing and groaning to attract the car’s snoozing inhabitants:
A man and a woman, fingers laced over the black leather gear shift
sleep against the blue sanguine splatters on the windows.

He had to have his black leather interior, the bare trees
imagine the woman say as a slow grin touches her cheek.
It was a couple hundred extra, but you only live once, right?

The trees cross their limbs at these leaf-fallen people:
two phones ringing out of earshot,
resting so soundly where even the birds left months ago.

Nests without nesters, hollows without knots,
but two saggy-eyed humans nap, satisfying
the Lennie Smallian white compact Honda Civic.


Sirens

“Love” scrapes metallic oxygen down
my parched throat, dry as sweat on the sea;
phrases like “I feel x” and “tell me y”
tingle like the swollen after-sting of a bee
on the hands I raise to the mountains.

My concrete shoes ground me like my parents
that time I said “damn” in my neo-teenager tongue,
but Echo calls to the Narcissus in my mirror, singing
“All God needs is gravity to hold me down.”

God-send, I should have been a Greek artist
with admission to the elusive yellow muses,
gospel singers to the little “g” gods.
My own voice lures the artist to his death
upon the rocks, in a sea of torrential words.


Specificity

Remember the last week of December,
the last days of fall semester screaming ahead
of us as we prayed for the release of our senior-itis,
we stretched a path back from Christmas-nodding
without sitting for the amniotic flood of a new year?

The world spun without us, leaving responsibility
in its wake that flailed like squid tentacles.
We traced the North Georgia State fair with our toes
and pressed a hard mark to the ground in each space
behind us, wishing only to be as flies to any surface.

Our barely post-pubescent roommates, eyes bloodshot
by the beer we gave them too knowingly,
lilted around the stranger fluorescents like sheet music
to an angry director, thrashing his arms for emphasis.
They grabbed the rifles as trees to their tire swings
and shot at the plastic ducks, quacking innocently.


In Pictures

Silver paper planes float overhead,
whose holding cells break and fire
like lightning from the iron rod.
Why does the falling star gravitate
toward the choral pocket?

The poly-cotton sings about catching
every beam of light it attempts
and offers up its pretty without effort;
while children bid come the rosy rings
without knowing what that means.

Black come back; black lacks
light when white only strikes
the singers who try in vain to touch.
White lights on the washed walls
of our folly-filled classroom.

Could a cowboy really rope the moon,
why not a cowgirl with her braids
flying like doves in the lack of light:
black to white, she rides with the moon
and stars in her saddlebags?


Working at the Carmike Cinemas

I’ve been here many times before,
But I forgot the punch-line just like I always do.
Kids run through the archway
While the box-office homeless man
Performs a tracheotomy on himself.
A dog dances as the zoo sings around him;
That isn’t the film I came to see.
In the glass tree-house beside me,
Demons play with fire and poke inflammatory pistons
At Aeneas and Sybil.
Give me the Trinity of corn with
Snake saliva dripping marigold
And pebbles of melted snow,
But not in my voice.


To Robert Frost

An island anchors, flanked by two cities: a refuge but not exactly an oasis.
Where palm trees should stand protectively over a pearlescent pond
Instead flowers loiter amongst filthy lawn furniture and a ramshackle lean-to.
That shack looms magnificent and rustic over holiday-specific decorations,
Cozied and cozened behind a thin chorus-line of trees like a prisoner behind bars:
Visible in patches, simultaneously shiver- and smile-inducing.

Janus tends to this plot of land, this doorway, this gateway:
One face stares at Canton while the other dreams of the fictional town of White.
“Where do you live?” the Eastern face poses to the other, seeing only her road.
The Western face sighs. “The town between Nowhere and Nothing,” he says.
“What do you see?” East wants to know everything about West,
But West sees Nothing, understands Nothing. He wants only to know about East.

A single house sits on the road between Canton and White,
Holding its stance like a fortress protecting the liminal aura of the place.
The old and the new, ancient and modern knot together at this one spot
Where not even gods can decode the hieroglyphs of past and future.
West is the Ghost of Wisdom Past; East is the Spirit of Future Urbanity,
And the future of the driver depends on the direction he travels.

Junkyard Quotes 1 & 2, Week 1

A few days ago I had dinner with my boyfriend and his family at their home. In the tradition the five of us had formed over the months of meals, we went to the living room afterward for a movie. First, though, Mike's father wanted to watch a little news. There I encountered my first junkyard quote! The news headline read: "Standard Bar Fight".

We, of course, started debating the characteristics of a standard and non-standard bar fight, before discovering there had been a fight at a bar called Standard. How disappointing! And yet no less interesting for a junkyard quote!

Another interesting phrase that I will add to this first post of junkyard quotes comes once again from my ever-insightful and always unintentionally locquacious boyfriend. Upon seeing a tattooed skeleton on "Ripley's Believe It or Not," he questioned, "Can you tattoo a corpse?" Despite the two tattoos I proudly own, that is one question I do not know the answer to and that will make for some interesting additions to poetry later!