Improv. 3 (week 1)

This time, I decided to take another crack at the exercise we did in class on iambic trimeter and try to get a better feel for identifying what words are stressed and unstressed. Although I decided to put it in the form of a Dear reader piece to see if it could be applied there.

Dear teenaged girls,

You write about the boys with scars
littered in their jeans.
How the stands of slyness glisten
off your sleeves in true fashion.
What do some girls call it?
Swooning over his sweat,
Or pouring over her lip pout.
You, who carry the birth of civilization,
Faint over six packs polished
by the middle of old rain.
The way the dew slides between
Each vein of the shadow oh his hair.
Bad boy slicked across his cheeks,
But irresponsible lover rides
over the ridges of your tongue.
How some stutter Be Mine as
clumps of rose petals shatter
under the weight of meekness.
Where are you?

Improv. 2 (week 1)

This time, I decided to try to improv off of Claude McKay's The Tropics of New York because when I read it, It stuck out due to not only his use of imagery about his home, but the form of the piece which is to be noted as a stanza. I took note of how this poem seemed to use Iambic Pentameter and thought maybe i could try to come up with something in my improv. My improv I'm going to try for iambic quadrameter because form is really where i tend to struggle.

Speak about the crumbs of the man, 

strains in his wrist solemnly sliding

to his small apartment in the cracks.

Reveal the grains of sand lodged

in a woman with furred tongue, 

etched echoes in her chest bellowing

coughing spurts of rose petals. 

Write the candle, slowly glossing
flames licking the edges of its cage.
Small flakes of confetti snow that take root (I might have hit five on this one instead of four?)
at the bottom of a globe without being woken,
shaken ready to rise like the glimpse of the sun
on opposite gazes of the earth.

Improv. 1 (week 1)

This is a practiced attempt at an improv of the poem by Theodore Roethke we did in class on Wednesday "My Papa's Waltz". Man this was harder than I thought it would be...

Running down the street
Dodging cracks and shots
By street lights hoisting
Two "eighties" and captured bugs.

Sneaker laces pounding the concrete (I think this might be three, anybody want to help me??)
In unison with fading hums.
The idea of night snaking
Through cracks in the pavement.

Corners skipped over as the sun
squeezed through tree branches.
Home is 4 blocks away.

Junkyard Quote 2 (Week 1)

a brinicle, is caused by cold, sinking brine, which is more dense than the rest of the sea water. When salt-rich water leaks out of sea ice, it sinks into the sea and can occasionally create an eerie finger of ice. Brinicles are found in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

The sentence is sketchy in its details but the picture (which I've attached as well) is well worth a thousand words.

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Junkyard Quote 1 (Week 1)

 “A writer who doesn’t spend time in second hand bookshops is like a whore who doesn’t like to wear sexy clothes… You can still function, but you aren’t a lot of fun.”
—      Thoughts on writing as a career:
          Tumblr user Tarnished soul


I thought this stuck out, cause why not? Books are a writer's second life in a sense, the life not live etc etc.