Pedagogy Forum Week 2

Well, with two full weeks of journaling behind me I thought now would a prime moment to ponder my journaling experience thus far. 

For me, writing has always been an astoundingly daunting act. There is something about looking at a blank page that literally causes me to exhibit strange and irrational behavior. At my desk, I may become slightly uncomfortable and will perhaps seek out a more satisfying chair or pillow. Then, there is a pretty good chance I may notice a book out of place on the shelf or a record I forgot to put back into the sleeve. And after I do some sweeping or dishwashing or other household chores a cold beer sounds like just what I need transition from housework back into writing. And so after my third beer is when the distractions begin to really work their magic. As you can see, the act of writing has turned into a fight between myself and...well, my self.

This daily journalling, I think, is slowly helping me overcome these difficulties. I am noticing the language that surrounds me and my life and when I'm not writing I constantly tease out possibilties in my mind and think of different techniques to explore. I feel the pressure is off here in journal land and it feels damn good.

Classmate Response Week 2

This is a response to Billy's most recent "improv" entry:

Billy, I love how you have essentially created a conversation with Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty." Your "riff" stands out to me because it issues a compelling shift from both the perspective and tonality of Justice's poem. "Men at Forty" centers around these metaphors of aging, regret and memory. With your "Men at Twenty-Five" you have reversed these elements. Justice's poem gathers its momentum and impact from the symbolization of the past, in yours you really utilize this same effect but aim it towards the "weight" of the future.  "their faces,haggard/ by the weight of decades"--I especially admire this great line.

Great stuff, Billy. Can't wait to read more.

Junkyard Quote 4, Week 2

"do you think Greece would help if we took Turkey from the rear?" -Jason Willett, aural sage.

Sign Inventory Week 2

"Facing It"
Yusef Komunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against the morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the boob trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.


Sign Inventory

* Three instances of high specificity occur in this otherwise rather "non-specific" poem. Ex. "Vietnam Veterans Memorial, " "58,022" and "Andrew Johnson."

* The action of the poem seems to occur entirely in a reflection.

*The poem utilizes short, enjambed lines occuring within a single block of text. Almost "list-like."

*The poem repeats certain colors throughout the poem. "Black" occurs three times, "white"- twice, and "red" once.

*The poem seems constructed around a notion of 'erasure'- for instance- the opening line of the poem is "my black face fades." The poem ends: "a woman's trying to erase names."

* The naming of Andrew Johnson seems a strange, important choice here. Although a common name, it's a loaded one to boot.  Trail of Tears????

*At about halfway through the poem, the rather "grounded" language takes off into more metaphorical and symbolic language. This is marked with the image of "Brushstrokes" and a "red bird's wings cutting accross my stare."

Free Write Week 2

Breakfast is over, and now some unlucky bastard is sitting on the fender of a late starting dawn.

I'll tell you what I mean:

It was us in a log cabin in Oregon in the late nineteenth century. It was September and there were a few traces of summer left, you're in bed, just given birth and I'm not much of a midwife. On weekends I smoke a pipe and drink rosepetal wine out of a jelly jar and say things like "it's getting dangerous to be poor in this country!" as I wash the stagecoach.

But its 11:18am on a twenty-first century Friday. Last night I heard someone yell something about "staying gold" or "laying cold" into a french dictaphone that hadn't worked since the late 1980s.

Junkyard quotes 2-3, Week 2

"DO NOTTATTO PACK BELONGINGS
Time is precious. Save your life first. Take your room spoon out of door lock,
have locked if exporting urgently, you can return room again perhaps, keep calm, it is
scared to be of no help."--From a Chinese emergency hotel binder.


"chrome things never change..."  -Gary Wilson

Improv week 2

 John Ashberry 

"As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat"

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free. 

Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight

Filters down, a little at a time,

Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,

As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree...

So this was all, but obscurely

I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages

Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.

New sentences were starting up. But the summer

Was well along, not yet past the mid-point

But full and dark with the promise of that fullness, 

That time when one can no longer wander aaway

And even the least attentive fall silent

To watch the thing that is prepared to happen. 

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

Did they notice me, this time, as I am,

Or is it postponed again? The children

Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift 

Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate

As limpid, dense twilight comes. 

Only in that tooting of a horn

Down there, for a moment, I thought

The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated, 

Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade

That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly, 

Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact. 

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?

They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun

Longer that the sphinx, and are non the wiser for it. 

Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door

But it was only her come to ask once more

If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't. 

The night sheen takes over. a moon of cistercian pallor

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed, 

Finally involved with the business of darkness. 

And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth, 

The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons

Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower 

Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night. 

The summer demands and takes away too much, 

But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes. 

 ______________________________________________________________

"As One Forded The Pale Vapor" 

I tried each method, but only a few would seem nameable or real. 

Once,  I was that standing in a room where fantasy

Struggles around, in baby-steps, 

Holding out for something to happen. Soft phrases were interpreted,

As the sun blurred the beery pre-dusk...

So that was it, but uncertainly 

I saw the sphere of a new planet 

That all through last year kept quiet.

New thought explains this. But the year 

Was good and long, and summer had not yet past

But instead sulked with the design of that expanse,

Once you can no longer wander

And even your children are perceptive

Ready for each and every system.

A moment of reality shakes you

And you continue delirious: is this me?

Can they conceive of me, once, this time,

Or will it be delayed again? The lakes

Still mechanized, the skies become diluted 

With restlessness in the noontime haze, then descends

As crystallized, thick night approaches.

Only once in that tactful darkness 

Down there, for a minute, I dreamt 

That the event became real, calculated, 

Its reasons connected in a sentence, a configuration

That comprehends a universe, now, but slowly

Even slowly, but with dilated jurisdiction and subtlety.

The motive behind those mossgrown ruins?

They are weathered marbled robes. You have crept 

Long and blue, and feel like some misplaced poacher. 

Welcome. And I thought I felt slattern and waxen,

But it was only the damp midnight come to ask 

If I was here to gather some strange report. 

The night retraces its steps. A welded moon 

Looks like an enormous turtle going to the river, nameless, 

Finally concerned with the brickwork of sleep. 

And a whine rattles from the forgotten things on earth, 

Rubble, twisted steel, old conduits and sheets of newsprint 

In agonizing fields somewhere, and all the smaller 

Translations of rivers canceled beneath the muted landscape. 

The dawn addresses our theory of rivers,
But at night, drunkenly, stumbles homeward.

Calisthenics Week 2

American side, I was the world's worst.
The gold magnetic sand,
as a way of emphasizing a pop-culture phenomenon
was more like a barrel of prayers that began
by looking for peaches.
The closest large city was foggia
transference is, then, an illusion.
The carcasses were there wrapped in tinfoil
to rest by a field of grass.
The belief in Bigfoot signifies a hyped contemporary.
This delicate little Aeolin harp that nature has set at the entrance.
He had left the party without a word. What was I buying?
I believe worthwhile things can't be justified.
I reach for my mug to warm my hands on it.
The granville arms was somewhat lacking in heat.

___________________________________________________________________________________

American side, I was the world's worst.
The gold magnetic sand was
a barrel of prayers that began by looking for peaches.

The closest large city was Foggia
the carcasses wrapped in tinfoil
rest by a field of grass.

Transference is an illusion.

Junkyard Quote 1, Week 2

"this is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps."   ---hilarious TV edit of a famous scene in The Big Lebowski. The original-- "this is what happens when you f__ and stranger in the a___.

Junkyard Quotes 3-4, Week 1

"in speckled speculation.."    --this popped into my head while driving home from the university this morning.

"The kleenex exposition of 1988 brought us many new avenues of discourse. New forms of sorrow for discerning Asian dissidents and fawning leather articulators." -- some words I collected from old newspaper clippings....

Pedagogy Forum, Week 1

In my last post, I referred to an idea Richard Hugo presents in The Triggering Town. Hugo encourages his students to switch their allegiance away from the triggering subject and instead focus upon the words themselves. In a sense, embrace your linguistic and aesthetic predispositions, or "obsessions" and to work within them.

Now, that being said: the writing workshop can work in a somewhat opposing direction. In Chad Davidson and Greg Fraser's manual, Writing Poetry, they warn that "the biggest danger in critiquing poems resides in affective reasoning and 'just becausing'" (89). In Michael's journal he simply created a list of words that he felt attracted to for unknown reasons. I think that this "submission to obsession" works well in many cases and I think is essential to the writing process. However, in the workshop if one were to simply reject the quality of a poem using simple "just because" reasoning, I think the workshop essentially ceases to work effectively.  In other words--and to borrow from Writing Poetry again--workshopping should act towards "forming meanings with the text, of helping to create significance rather than passively waiting for it to be delivered." We cannot escape our own aesthetic obsessions, but a workshop, I think, should help form meanings that are multiple and various--to expand meaning rather than to confine it.

Classmate Response Week 1

I'm writing in response to Michael Brown's "Free Write" entry for week one.

For Michael's "free entry," he chose to create a list of words that he felt--with "no particular reason why"--predisposed to and then wrote a short poem hinged upon those words. After reading this in Michael's journal I immediately thought of what Richard Hugo writes early on in The Triggering Town.

He writes: "Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost [...] It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential" (14).

I think truth of the matter is that we all have these sort of unknown "obsessions"--certain aesthetic predispositions or lexical inclinations that are inescapable.  I find it really interesting that the excavation and interrogation of these "obsessions" unmask these almost hidden triggering subjects.

Junkyard Quotes Week 1

"He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." -- James Joyce, Ulysses. 

 

Improv Week 1

In an effort to kick off and really get rolling with this blog thing, I thought I'd try "improv"-ing  a children's poem by Shel Silverstein for fun (indeed, it was).

"Where the Sidewalk Ends"
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.


                                                                                                                                                                            
  "Where Resolution Ends"

There is a place where resolution ends 

Right before accordance begins, 

And there, bored salesmen sift through the various seasons 

And reconstruct imperfect definitions 

And there, confidence hides from decisions 

To rest from her concept of time.

Let us leave this place where skyscrapers push against last year 

And next Wednesday steadily gets out of hand. 

Past those particular avenues when our stories sounded somehow more clear  

We shall walk with a walk that is abstract and unfamiliar

And watch civilization slowly become less sincere

To a some place in an unknown county. 

Yes we will walk within this single implication,

troubled by a newly fashioned and finite boundary

For the river, is a device, and the river, it surrounds

A place where colors are characterized by their blindness.

 

Sign Inventory Week 1

 "One Art"
Elizabeth Bishop
 

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

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

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

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

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


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

 Sign List

* In regards to form, the poem is sort of cloaked by the villanelle. Initially, the poem appears to be a clear attempt at the form, yet it also employs minor variations that declassify it.

* The poem begins with a devotion to candid, proselike language and increasingly becomes obscure. Ex. the first two stanzas' literal meaning seems rather clear. By stanza three, the direct language gives way to language that's increasingly figurative. 

* Mimicking this increasing employment of figurative language, the poem's rhyming also seems increasingly fractured and or strained. Example: "faster" and "last, or" and "gesture"

* The speaker seems concerned with both the loss of time and the loss of space. For example, the speaker urges the reader to "accept" the loss of an "hour badly spent," and recalls losing "my mother's watch." The speaker encourages the reader to practice losing "faster." Additionally, the speaker is concerned with the loss of space, or perhaps distance: along with urging the reader to practice losing "faster," the speaker is insistent upon "losing farther." Recalling the loss of a house, the speaker then lists the losses of "two cities," "some realms," "two rivers," "a continent" and even "where it was you meant to travel."

* The poem seems to revolve around the idea of ownership in interesting ways. For example: the speaker loses " my mother's watch," "my last, or/ next-to-last, of three loved houses" and "some realms I owned."

* The poem hinges itself around continual negation: " the art of losing ISN'T hard to master" "their loss is NO disaster" "NONE of these will bring disaster" "WASN'T a disaster" "I SHAN'T have lied" "Wasn't a disaster" "the art of losing''s NOT too hard to master"

* At several instances the speaker directly speaks to the reader in a conversational manner: stanzas two and three and the final stanza.

Calisthenics Week 1

"Five Ways of Avoiding a Marriage"

The lullaby wave of fingernails on a window
still reflects the ash--the split whimpers
of walnuts, dried peaches, your face.
We walk barren, as if glass.

Free Entry Week 1

He was somewhere once.
A rooftop. Looking out.
Saw lots of mountains. And a sky.
He saw lots of things.
What else? Birds? Sunrise?
A low-hanging cloud.

But, that's not where he was.
He was home. In bed.
That's where he is now. Thinking of the time.
Now he's got it:
He was sitting on the mantle with a small piece of twine--roped around his tooth--
feeling something like an echo. His parents were drinking coffee and smiling. They had on bathrobes.
Slowly forgetting things. 

Junkyard Quotes Entry 1, Week 1

Scrapped Band Name Ideas:

Dangerous Gardening
The Black-Dot Maybes
 Planet of the Tapes
June Moons
Real as Rainbows