fallen verses

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is a splash of colour
(black)
on scraps of dirty paper
(suddenly valueless, green, 155.956 × 66.294 mm
when we give up the ridiculous imperial measurements
distributed with foreign government and unrepresented
taxation, which, it seems, we also need to
give up)
saying "thanks for being around.

"Thanks for being
constant as the cloud of
crows at stirling castle
or the voice in Ted Haggard’s head
(he calls it "God," but whatever).
Thanks for lasting
the same 65 million
as dinosaur bones
and not being calcified.

"Thanks for being
the bass line when I
was playing lead
and embellishing the melody
when I couldn’t strum
anything other than
c – c – c – c."

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is my map of you
and where your bones move
softly through your muscles
and skin into my skin
and muscles and bones
so we vibrate at the same pitch
which is the pitch of grass
growing in a summer afternoon
reaching for the sun.
Shhhhh… Listen closely.

A response to Nathan’s Collaborative prompt #59 where poets donated titles and those titles have been used as the basis for the text of other poems. I didn’t use them all, I slashed them to pieces and added in more words, but I think that’s the joy of these prompts that we start with complete (or nearly) texts and disassemble and re-create in the writing process.  Definitely, if you have not, check out the other responses to this prompt over at Read Write Poem.

This is me not working on my NaNoWriMo project. Video from here about this. Usual caveat that if you see a gray bar, click it.

It didn’t take too much of that talk for me to understand it and realize I’ve been doing it wrong in a lot of my creative endeavors recently. In writing, or in my oft-neglected visual media, I get very goal-focused. I spend too much time thinking about the end product and I miss out on a lot of the things that makes creativity and art so wonderful which is the surprise that comes of it.

I haven’t been participating in many of the read write prompts for a while, but Nathan’s prompt and Dana’s Read Write Word were excellent prompts for me and, I think, are some of the better pieces I’ve written recently. Why? Why were those good but the image prompts escaping me? Why is Read Write Word 2 not as inspiring?

I think it has to do with being in that second form of play: building. The original prompts had so much to start with it was very neat to me to start pulling them apart and putting them back together. The first Wordle had thirty words, which I used only a portion of. The other prompts become more like the first type of play, the exploration. With so few options at our disposal, it becomes more about how many things can be done with a paper clip. And that is a situation where having knowledge gets in the way. If you don’t know what a paper-clip is, there’s no preconception, there’s nothing telling you can’t be… um… something else. Once you know, just by looking at it you wouldn’t see it as an element of wire sculpture, but once you’re holding them and molding them and twisting them together, you can build the new ideas that you would never have thought of.

Which is not to say that any type of creativity is better than any other. Seems to me they all fit different style and suit different purposes. But as a creative individual (or someone pretentious enough to cal myself one) all of these things are aspects. Some aspects may be strengths and things I should develop. Some things are weaknesses and should be avoided or worked on.

This NaNoWriMo experience is teaching me many things. I do not work as well from a blank page as I do from a full one, even if the full one is full of random nonsense things. When I was younger I used to draw (poorly). Then, I was more of a LEGO kid. It suited me better having chaos as a starting point than openness, I guess. Anyway, what are your thoughts on playing as artists and wordsmiths? How do we take those styles of play and put them into our writing practices?

Hobbyhorse, Hobbyhorse (A Paradelle)

Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
The scribed truths in this letter barred,
Every recharter formerly allowed by preaching.

Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Turbo flooding sent up the inbox. The records imperfect.
Chain of results. Of the falsifier.

What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
A called guide is replying sportingly to what refund?
Astraddle dismay, he is offered a had hobbyhorse

The recharter is astraddle a barred dismay.
The hobbyhorse guide is called, allowed by
Imperfect truths formerly in the inbox of preaching.
This letter turbo-scribed is a what? Results falsifier.
Every chain had records replying to flooding
Sportingly sent, the refund he offered up of the A.

The Read Write Prompt for this week was to use echolalia as the “hinge” of the poem. The wikipedia description of immediate echolalia seemed suggestive of certain poetic uses of repetition and it occurred to me the paradelle, as a form, seemed kind of echolalaic (anyone?). And, because I like to surprise myself when I write, I headed to WatchOut4Snakes and used their random word generator to get some “seed” words. Anyway, other people’s variously echolalaic or ekphrastic poems will be shared here.

Briefly, regarding the paradelle, they are tough. Not so much to write (unlike, say, a sonnet), but to write well.

Laughing in the Wind
after Rosetti

Still no one has seen the wind.
In these sepia photos the night
sky is the color of espresso.
Spring rains can be warm and gentle.
No one has really seen those either.

Still, no one has seen the wind.
Science, however, turns with the answer:
smoke. A trick that works in tunnels
but autumn remains stubbornly
unconvinced. Fire is too terrible.

Unless it is the incandescent burn
of passionate eyes. There is
velocity when falling,
even when falling in love.

The wind itself remains silent.
The wind itself explores all surfaces.
Realize, however, that the wind
is, itself, something to be explored.
Like silence. Like love.

Dana challenged us with a collection of words. Since I am never one to ignore a dropped gauntlet (er.. except the 30-40 prompts I didn’t do), I used that list as the basis. It took a few iterations before I found something that started working for me, and that is what remains above.

I didn’t use it, but in the wordle image the phrase “science turning tricksy” stood out to me. But it’s tricky like a mischevous god not tricksy like a con man. At least not true science, but you know what they say about true scotsmen.

Actually, being a pretty damn strict materialist / rationalist, I have enormous respect for science and the paradigm it works under. I don’t think it’s tricksy at all. I think Art is tricksy as all get out. And that is o.k. too.

A Pin Worked Loose

Tatterdemalion slink into depleted villas,
each step chasing memories deeper into
these antiquated courtyards.

Here are artifacts which nobody recognizes.
They remain untouched. Visitors, focused inward,
do not notice them. They tarnish, fade, rust.

Outside, civil guards scream obscenities.
Someone has posted Lorca’s broadsides
believing both duende and Andalusia are omnipresent.

Somewhere else, meditation resurfaces a lost “I.”
In that same place a girl is born. An old woman dies.
Later, the process is repeated. And again. And again.

In an open notebook are words brilliant but forgettable-
tenuously held together scraps called verses.
The page is a pin worked loose- the center holds,
but a breeze carries the frayed edges out of sight.

It seems such a waste to let those words stand alone on this page. Especially when so many of them will be repeated from piece to piece, each a playful rehuffling of context and content.

Tatterdemalion is a word I have only encountered previously in a Terry Brooks novel: Knight of the Word. It was a magic creature, animated by the spirit of a dead child, built of scraps. Similar to its real definition in an essence. Tatters, the ends, fading, decay. I also think it echoes the essence of this excercise. We all started with scraps and are putting them together.

Most of my poetry is written in a first-person perspective. I edited to remove the “I” from this poem. It seemed, to me, the “I” was too strong an identity for the poem to hold. The “I” was too complete. So I deleted it.

I’m curious to see so many other takes on this arrangement of words. See both what words get used most often and how their meanings change from place to place.

Additional information: I wrote the majority of this poem while listening to James Blunt’s album Back to Bedlam. Judge as you will.

Check out everyone else’s responses at Read Write Poem while you’re at it!

The first collaborative prompt has been updated with phase two! Nathan asked us to come up with some words, and now we see what they all are without having to scroll. Yay!

And Dana has given us  a new prompt: the Read Write Word. (Hilarity ensues?)

Remains
For Sue

As if the wife
of a terrible king,
we file past
in the obligatory line
of a state funeral.

The beheading was not
in lieu of divorce
or to birth a republic
but the result
of the decay and
calcification
of your carcass.

Do you see us,
the common people,
as we shuffle around
your dais?

Do you see us
as the littlest ones
shriek in terror
and hide behind
the never quite
fashionable slacks
of their chaperones?

You do not
because your casket
is bulletproof
and transparent
and just on the balcony-
there.

If only the Soviets
had gotten hold of you
before the first
flaking scales fell
and like Lenin
you were taken
for a special bath
and your terrible
countenance
gazed complete.

Would there be
the wrinkled lip
and sneer proving
you are kin to Ozymandias?
Certainly we look
upon you and despair;
though what works…
what works…

Hm. Well, I call it a poem, and since the definition of poetry is so vague, what I say goes, at least on this corner of the internet. I must be among the few people not fascinated by dinosaurs. I mean, sure, they are old… and big… but so what? Are they interesting? I guess so, but come on, Jurassic Park was all about Samuel L. Jackson. “Hold on to your butts.” Now I’m rambling and soon, I foresee, it will become (more) incoherent. If you didn’t come from there, go to Read Write Poem and see the dinosaur poems by other poets. Oh, and since there may be people unfamiliar, Sue is the T-Rex skeleton at the Field Museum in Chicago. Just in case.