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Quoth is taking a poetry class
Quoth
the RavenMiami, FL FOR REALRegistered User regular
the RavenMiami, FL FOR REALRegistered User regular
Oh yes, that is what Quoth is doing. And not just any class. A crazy sort of class that is making her do things. Weird things.
HELP.
So yeah, I'm going to post this stuff here and then you can tell me how to make it better if you like. You can also do your own versions of the bizarre exercises we are being made to do. Fun! Interactive! WEIRD.
Let's begin.
HELP.
So yeah, I'm going to post this stuff here and then you can tell me how to make it better if you like. You can also do your own versions of the bizarre exercises we are being made to do. Fun! Interactive! WEIRD.
Let's begin.
Quoth on
“Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt.”
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Posts
Mass Observation is a crazy thing that some dudes came up with in the UK in 1937. For more information, check out the Wikipedia article.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hit up your local movie theater and watch about 15 minutes of as many movies as you can, taking copious notes about whatever strikes your fancy. The picture. The sound. The people in the theater. The theater itself. It's all fair game. Then, take your notes and make a poem. It can be as cohesive or stilted as you like.
If you don't want to theater hop because it makes you nervous, do the same thing but with movies you already own or random selections from your Netflix cue.
Here is my poem for this assignment:
Low murmur of people shopping at an open air market
Selling food from baskets
Man and woman sit at separate tables
Waiter asks for her order in Italian
Two o'clock light blue shirt sunglasses
Sipping espresso from white ceramic cups
Hide the crazies through the appetizers
Tan line on his finger where his ring should be
Everything is wrong with this picture
Should have gotten Debbie a gift for her birthday
Sometimes things are not worth the money
She wasn't your type enjoy your freedom
Fat pedaling hooker looking bitch
Pig faced gimpy limping mama
Tired of thinking about how it's supposed to go
Life is in session says an infomercial
You set my lips on fire says the song
Romance is complicated and messy and missed opportunities
Night outside, wet streets, man walks slowly
Leaves drift to the ground
A city of roofs seen from above
Standing on a balcony in the dark with lit windows twinkling behind
Wake up gun in hand heavy breathing
Book of butterflies open on chest
Orgasms last longer than his relationships
A beautiful woman walks in and pushes through beaded curtains
Dark birds against a dark blue sky
Pick up brown box filled with packing peanuts and cardboard tube
Inside, a gun in pieces
Reassembled with quiet click click click
Stare down at weapon on table
Look up at woman in lingerie red light
Thick lips gold hoop earrings
Purple eyeshadow
Slow disassembly of clothing
Presentation of breasts
Gorgeous cervical mucus
Wading into pool naked breasts floating pale skin freckled face
Bleached blond and dyed red hair but no way to see
whether the carpet matches the drapes
Back arched mouth twisting
Words words words
Establish a safe word
Music bounces and twangs in time with motion
What's wrong with his sperm
Nothing
Killer sperm
Interrupted by soldiers in green fatigues
Clowns, monkeys in red hats
Angry man yelling about coco fields unplanted
Not the usual gardener
let in any Mexican with garden tools
Scarred skin tattoos thick banded muscles
Shooting blood spurting
Knife flashing flipped end over end into neck
hip throw woman almost taken soldiers killed
White clothes bathed in red blood
Out in a field he asked if she wanted to have sex and she said yes
He said she was so pretty
She said yes she liked it
That's enough
Didn't grow up in Minnesota dreaming of putting an ad for a sperm donor on Craigslist
Catch a taxi, see you later
Don't forget to smile
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As for improvement, I guess the poem didn't have a mood? I was likely correct for your activity, just watching stuff, but I like a poem with some emotion behind it.
~
I'd like to join you in this Quoth, at least for today, since I just had a day with a friend of mine and we went to see two movies. I hope that fits the criteria.
I'mma just write one up now, I work best in one go I think.
Cinema
A murmuring of dust clung electric throbs from behind a projection screen
as my hand touches your knee, your own presses my shoulder
we begin to be a terrible audience.
An Interlude:
A sharp old pain crawls through metatarsal bones, 3rd, 4th, 5th and then receeds into numbness. My eyes flick to grey old men in the front row, peering like magpies.
We talk of glaring plot holes and of the sexual orientation of imagined cats
we talk of grizzled cliches back from forgotten wars and of shadows cast against cave walls
and togethor we discover the obvious.
An Interlude:
I cast my gaze to another, I half-smile and she completely grins with sharp, white teeth. I turn my head and steal your fingers from the pick-n-mix we snuck in.
Love then, is all around us in this theater, flowing back like echo
amplified by a screen that stretches pictures in motion
and given to us to give out freely.
At last we go and we sit by a glimmering sunset-water fountain,
it is enough, this fountain
this you,
even this me.
I'll post the next exercise now. Been trying to figure out how to get my offering online somehow to share.
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Go to this website. Watch a couple of the poems. Many are NSFW so don't do it at work. If you do, it is not my fault when filthy words appear on your screen to the sounds of energetic jazz. Finished? Dazed and confused? Me, too.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to produce something like that in PowerPoint. You can add pictures if you want, or only use pictures. Make weird animations. Music or no music. The only limit is yourself! And PowerPoint's annoying habit of timing things differently on different computers.
My feeble attempt (links to a file).
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I am clapping so
politely
right now.
I honestly don't know why, but I don't have power point on my computer. I might make something on a pals lap top later.
After seeing it on three computers, I can only conclude that the program has its own whims as to what will be timed how. So weird.
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Its a story rather than a poem I think, its the dream I had last night.
edit: Bleh, can't export it correctly, I don't do computers, here, have a PDF version, I actually prefer it I think. Humph.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/sch7svvpug5tpwq/dreampig.pdf
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Interesting! Like a dog!
Erm, I mean thanks for reading Quoth. Those pigeons were jus' looking down on me you know? Damned winged rats.
Looking forward to your next project, I might quit clogging up your thread though if you like.
My professor really loves PowerPoint. And movies! So we are combining the two into a giant exercise in splitting your brain in half.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to choose a scene (or multiple scenes, if they're short) from a movie and create a PowerPoint to play next to it at the same time. The idea is to create meaning via juxtaposition. You can more or less comment on the action in the scene, the characters, the visuals, or you can take it in a completely different direction and do something only tangentially or thematically related. WORDS ONLY: no adding images to your project. Sound is negotiable.
Because we had issues with PowerPoint timing in the last exercise, we're having to do this manually so I'll be posting just a PDF this time. As soon as I upload it. Which will be soon.
Meanwhile, here is my text, to be played alongside scenes from Being John Malkovich:
Self, too, is a construct, inconstant and immaterial, the story of who he is and why. He is kind because he gave money to the homeless man in a wheelchair under the overpass. He is thoughtful because he held the door open for the old woman pushing a cart full of groceries. He is polite and prudent because he waits for everyone to exit the crowded elevator before he follows. He is important because he is famous and everyone wants to know him, to be him, if only for a little while.
The fanatic narcissist is paranoid, with delusions of omnipotence. Insignificant as a single ant amid a colony of thousands, a drop of rain singled out for passage, then robbed of its temporary individuality by a puddle, the fanatic seeks self-esteem through grandiose fantasy. If others will not recognize his worth, he must become someone else who is already worshipped.
Where is the mind located? Is it within the body, a physical point or process, the hard pit at the center of a fleshy peach? Or is it external, existing independent of mere electrical impulses, slave to stimuli beyond its control? Can it be found in an office in New York City with low ceilings and dim fluorescent lights?
Primordial narcissism begins in the womb, with the id before the ego has formed. It begins with the anus, the intestine, the esophagus, instinctual responses of absorption and assimilation and self-preservation. The infant is unaware that other people exist except as extensions of his need. He rages against the birthing of the light.
A narcissist sees no boundary between himself and others. He gazes into the pool of the world and is reflected by a billion fleshy mirrors. His voice fills every mouth. His repeated name strikes the walls of the echo chamber in which he resides, roiling like fish in an ever-tightening net until the cacophony demands a choice: self-awareness or suicide.
If the mind and body are separate, what of the will? The actor who plays himself still plays a role. It is his self as perceived and written by another, to be viewed by still others, deconstructed and reconstructed like a poem translated into another language and then translated again. It is as true as the reflection of a photograph. The puppet still dances at the end of his strings; cut them and he will not walk away under his own power.
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So we had to read this crazy book by David Sudnow called Talk's Body. It was basically about how... never mind, I can't explain it briefly, let me try to get some thoughts down. He talked about how playing music is a process that can't be separated into discrete physical and mental components because every "part" is really a fluid and inseparable facet of the whole. He explains that the body which speaks the language of music naturally positions itself to act and react in certain ways, and that in a group setting, every glance and gesture is also part of this language and process but not in a cognitive sort of way. He extrapolates this to language and writing and speaking as well.
One non-musical analogy is the idea of, say, doing a cartwheel. I can sit here and try to analyze the different movements required and how my brain tells each body part to perform its own specific action within the overall action, but Sudnow would say that there is no conscious work going on. He would say that my body knows how to do cartwheels because it has done them and that in trying to break down the process and label parts I am creating a false diagram of that very process. He seems to be arguing that language is often flawed and limiting with regards to this kind of analysis.
As you can tell, I am very confused.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to observe some mundane daily activity and try to sort of microanalyze it. Think of life as improvisational jazz and notice how even something routine can become different when outside factors butt in, or how the routine may not be as repetitive as you think.
My poem:
Two cats in the bedroom. One
sits on the bed, watches you undress
while one slides a curved tongue
between its toes, claws extended.
Your husband is away on business
for a week. One cat lifts a leg
straight over its head to wash
pink privates, one closes
green eyes. You are naked now.
One cat twitches its whip-thin tail.
One sandpaper-slicks fur,
each strand striped brown, orange,
solid white on the soft belly.
You haven’t tanned in months.
Your belly, too, is softening.
You throw your dirty clothes
into the hamper and yawn.
Two cats freeze,
swivel their heads in unison,
ears perked at a sound
you can’t hear. Your breath stops.
Their pupils dilate, black as bullets
in the handgun your father wishes
you would buy for nights like this. You
bathe quickly, door locked. You
crawl into bed with the cats,
who curl up on your legs and sleep.
You leave the light on, count
backwards from a hundred
over and over as you listen
unwillingly to the silence
that suffuses your room, try
to smother consciousness
with your husband’s cold pillow.
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We read a pretty neat book of poetry by Frances Chung called Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple. Many of the poems are short single-image pieces, while others are long descriptive observations of persons, places or things. You can read a few of her pieces here and Google Books has what seems like a bunch of the book here.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write the following:
1) Three one-line or one-sentence poems.
2) Two "sign" poems (find a sign that seems to have greater significance than its mere words)
3) Two haiku
4) One pantoum
I have written all of these but I'll only post a couple since this is so ridiculous:
I
My mother and grandmother fight
about the appropriate width for a scarf until
my grandmother unravels
all she has knitted.
II
The neighbor gives my grandmother
a tree clipping to plant
and my mother yells at her to be careful,
snatches the branch,
stabs herself with a thorn.
III
We taste two microwave tamales
to see which brand my grandmother prefers
but both are the same to me,
mashed corn with bits of ham,
and she eats them with ketchup anyway.
Untitled Haiku
Shadowy palm trees
Reflected in wet sidewalk
Step on concrete sky
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That's pretty good, I enjoyed it.
In addition to the Chung poems noted above, we read Thoreau's essay "Walking" because the teacher felt that they were interesting to juxtapose. One thing that Thoreau argues is essentially that people cannot be truly creative in a big city, which is pretty amusing when you read it alongside a book of poetry written in and about Chinatown. Nonetheless, it does encourage the reader to be open to new experiences, to be willfully ignorant about certain things in order to avoid sucking the life out of them. The kinds of immersion and observation described are immensely useful to poets, in my humble estimation.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a two-page poem about walking. It doesn't necessarily have to describe the act itself, but can detail things observed while walking. I suppose it might also be somehow contemplative, like the narrator goes for a walk to think about certain things.
My poem:
In the hot city, nobody walks
without a purpose.
The sun at its zenith splits
the sky in two. Midday
is an illusion, a white cusp
that separates past
from future. The present
sliced too thin to perceive,
one step on the sidewalk
gone before the next has begun,
impossible to see as
each discrete frame of a film.
Time trails behind the cars,
acrid exhaust lingers, mingles,
disperses in a gust of wind.
Men and women sweat
seconds after they exit
air-conditioned offices.
Legs bound by pencil skirts end
in thick wedge sandals,
sky-scraping stilettos,
strides tight and toe-first,
new world foot binding.
Gray and navy suit pants stroll
one hand in a pocket, the other
wreathed in cigarette smoke,
clutching a Blackberry,
telling a story in gestures.
Palm trees drop thin-skinned red fruit,
pits gnarled and thick as walnuts
litter the iron grating beneath
but no birds stoop to peck at them.
Every animal with sense crouches
somewhere shaded, on cold earth
under close crowded leaves.
Joggers run laps around a building,
drenched and panting, eyes
veiled in visions of lean muscle
flexed under taut skin.
The air thickens,
moisture teases with hints of rain
belied by a bare blue bowl above.
Smell the restaurant grease traps
at the high-priced mall.
Ventilation systems purge
clouds of calamari deep fried
with a side of marinara sauce,
thick tuna slices blackened
outside, perfectly pink inside,
burgers on onion rolls,
ravioli stuffed with crab meat,
veal so tender it could
love you sweet, never let you go.
Garlic, thyme, basil, dill,
cumin like a dark lady kissed
under a desert moon, red
pepper’s stealthy heat,
rosemary for remembrance.
In the center promenade
fountains shoot cold geysers skyward,
catch the returning water
in tiled stone basins.
Bistro tables with black seats wait
for backsides to bake, some
occupied by mothers who match
Kate Spade purses to shoes,
Dolce and Gabbana, Prada, strollers
that cost more than the barista
makes in a week frothing milk.
Tourists tote bagged purchases,
avoid the eyes of the office
drones, gatherers, hunters
who steal a quick bite
before the whistle blows again.
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quoth i have very much enjoyed reading your thread so far. i suppose i should contribute my own abominations. i'm not saying you make abominations, yours are danged good.
The brilliance of stars
numbed by the haze of Los Angeles
is the thing I miss the least about that godforsaken
place; which means that
now I must have nearly forgotten you.
As the wind passes through the
grass the lights from the house
illuminate Gunner as his startled hoofbeats
tattoo the darkness beyond.
There is an iron horseshoe over
my doorway that once
was on the hoof of one
of my grandfather's workhorses.
2)
I'm saving
groundwater
by watering
my yard with
reclaimed water
DO NOT DRINK FROM THE IRRIGATION SYSTEM
hungry veteran
will work
for food
god bless
3)
batteries can die
even in comfortable
cryogenic sleep
listening to
younger men dying on skype
slowly by starcraft
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In something short like, say, that first poem, I usually approach it as a means of controlling pacing more than anything else. You can also create new meanings and readings, or surprises.
So you can go at it like:
This slows down the reading so that more attention is paid to each unit of thought, and when you break on "thing I miss / the least" you're sort of tricking the reader into thinking you miss something, then revealing you don't. You basically want to look at your lines and think about how you can give them extra layers of meaning by breaking them in different places. Don't be lazy! Use your brain, I know you can.
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Wait. No.
Seriously, Quoth, I applaud you.
particular like your haiku Quoth
I've got a terrible poem in a notebook somewhere where I tried to invoke the reflections of trees on wet ground. Was written in fall, so they were naked claws as opposed to palm trees. Also was not as well done as this.
And Horseshoe, loved
Was thinking of writing a SC2 poem but couldn't figure how. You managed extremely well.
I had the pleasure of once again reading On the Nature of Things (aka On the Nature of the Universe) by Lucretius. It's an "epic" poem that is pretty much as the title implies; it lays out the way that the world works through the lens of Epicurean, atomistic philosophy. It starts with the idea that everything is made up of irreducibly tiny things called atoms and then explains how they form compounds, interact with each other and basically create all the natural phenomena that people usually ascribed to the gods.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to select one of the following options and write a poem about it.
1) An atomistic look at some event, phenomenon, location, etc.
2) A description of something imperceptible
3) There are places in the Lucretius poem that have gaps where the text is missing; fill the gaps
I did #2:
“Ahora créo en Dios.”
Your husband, stuck in a cave for two months
under two thousand feet of rock,
is finally in a rescue capsule
being pulled to the surface so slowly and
all you can do is stare at the ropes while around you
everyone cheers, sings, raises the Chilean flag,
someone tries to hand you a cup of coffee
but you don’t see it, it isn’t there,
your body forgets how to breathe,
you are alone with a pulley and a hole in the ground,
your husband who escaped death once
huddles in the dark like a fetus
about to be born again into the light,
your arms outstretched like a midwife’s
to catch him.
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Shy smile gentle touch
a delicate press of lips;
A new love blossoms
EDIT: Also sorry if my poem doesn't match the activity. I didn't know where else to post it, and I didn't want ot start a whole new thread.
The midwife/fetus image is the strongest part of this poem. The rope then, of course, becomes the umbilical cord that the husband depends on, then severs from.
Some areas to revise would be places my ex-Prof. would call "shortcuts". "Your body forgets to breathe" is a shortcut because it is telling us (the reader) without showing us. He would circle it or cross it out.
I really like this line just because it's a line I never thought I would read: What do you think of that as the first line? It's concrete, gives the reader the setting, and still leaves the reader interested to read on.
[INSERT TRANSITION THAT MOVES FROM QUOTH TO MYDCMBR]
The poem is short, and the strength (and weakness) of a short poem is it needs to be absolutely fantastically perfect. Where are some places you think you could develop in the poem?
I'm thinking using some figurative language to help the reader visualize what you visualize. Shy smile, what is a shy smile? How could you describe it the way you perceive it? What is a gentle touch? The last two lines work off the whole flower/love/lips/vagina cliche, but I think they are still more powerful than your first line because I am able to connect this idea of a flower to lips, perhaps kissing and parting.
the taxes of heat
are taken from every transaction
they fade slowly away and we are left wanting
suffering in every spark
three marks, four truths
the path to the great zero
I totally see where you are coming from with the visualization critique. I didn't really take into consideration that since it was a personal experience, I can easily "see" what I am saying, where someone else would not.
Thank you.
On the heels of having to read a really annoying book, we delved into an awesome one: Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression. It's about a cool tribe in Papua New Guinea and how their poetics and song forms are integrated into their lives and driven/influenced by their relationship with nature, especially birds. Their songs are typically intended to take the listener on a mental journey of the physical landscape around where they live, and ideally to make the listener cry. Integrated into all the songs is the use of onomatopoeia, specifically representations of bird songs that have particular cultural meanings. See, they think their dead ancestors turn into birds, so as far as they're concerned the birds have their own language and are chattering away at each other just like people--because they used to be people.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a poem that attempts to create a picture of your landscape that uses bird song. If you don't have a lot of birds around, you can use other noises instead. It's easy to focus on visuals in poetry, but sounds can also be compelling.
My attempt:
black birds churr-churrup-chee
in branches pruned to survive
hurricane winds
not beside our house
but in front
tree drops red leaves on asphalt
not in front but behind
red fence
tchicking at children in the park beyond
overhead flapped wings
return from power lines
chirra-chee chirra-chee
here i am
chee-chee-chee
where are you
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