Critical Commentary (Week 6)

With each passing visit from a poet, I'm starting to learn more about the creative process after college. How work gets created, how someone could start to enter this world and be received. I guess I didn't really know how to ask such questions like "Is it possible to have poetry that's also oral be included in this journal?" Or how to go about including performance poetry into a a journal, as stupid as those sound in my head, I can't think but ask because on a deeper level of poetry. There are people like myself who probably want to be included into a journal but haven't received training and the understanding of form and for those who have, who do we go to? Learning from people who have practiced form is cool, but poet-wise who has proficiency in both worlds (if they are separate or just intertwined at the pen) and how do they practice. If there isn't such an avenue is it possible to open one up, scary thought I guess. This wasn't to say that I didn't take something from the conversation we had today with Mr Veach, just something that was sitting in my mind after we finished discussion.

Improv. 5 (Week 5) The sonnet

I decided to make this the start of my sonnet since I never wrote one before. Haven't gotten the framework or meter down yet just working at the bare-bones of making 14 lines. rough draft.

Choir Director


She's the creation of Mary pre-Jesus.
Weights of poison butterflies scales in the pits
of your stomach when she leaves. Her laugh was
the sweet mosaic of two rain showers on opposite
ends of the earth tapping the concrete in unison.
Could you have unshakable faith in that?  Is that
too sacrilegious of the person whose voice makes
knees buckle. How an artery the size of a Volkswagen
is pinched with pinpricks that leak reasons to restore faith.
She’s as beautiful as 6 willows branches all lifting their heads
from prayer in unison.

Improv. 4 (Week 5)

Raggedy lights stooping over the street, afraid.
Gardens of pavement and unsafe flower beds.

The rosemary was glaring at my scent, the lavender
 wanted to scream. At the mailbox I saw a postcard

“dear john, your test results are back,“Mary, he doesn’t want u”
and my favorite summer time nothings “baby ill love you

till the end of time , please forgive me”. I just stride
under the street light and scatted with a cat, we flipped

tunes about fish bones and letters, about how we want to curl
after we “catch the mouse” and just lick paws.

Improv. 3 (Week 5) "The Pastoral"

Just going for practice with the pastoral.

Other than the sound of shoes pounding the pavement smudged
with oil stains. It was quiet. The street lamps littered
between every third house. I haven't been here in a while.
I never listened for this other world where fire hydrants
are encrusted with rust and leaves slide down sewage drains
with no regrets. Places where deers can bound across roads
faster than drivers can react. Where it smells like grain. Grain
and dirt stirred in the pit of the plains while grasshoppers fiddle
the sun's eulogy. Somewhere in all of this is me, The world
didn't work at times. Crushed pack of new ports were the remains
You'd hear on daily news. Sound of dog's drool on the wind.

Improv. 2 (Week 5) "Those Winter Sundays" Robert Hayden

A little practice with the stanza form, seeing if shape could change or shift meaning.

A pen cracked over countryside cement,

Initialed in velvet, stuffed with old oxygen

The kind that carries spit over time. I hate 
ink. Smells of pigments choking walls.

Drops of ink creeping through cracks,
Creeks were our forgotten steps. Or maybe 
places where your cane catches a breath.

My bed was the guest room,
Though we never broke bread,

Chopped it up, or was waiting to cut.

Improv. 1 (Week 5)

I wanted to do practice with non-rhyming couplets for this improv just to get a feel if it will delay meaning of a line.

Punctuated product of arteries
brought up to get shot like

Teenagers in backwater countries.
I wanna flow like that.

Let the pangs of my voice run
rhythm to blue screams weaving

through cracks in the pavement.
Flow is hard to come by out here,

Like water, the nape of my tongue
is basking for oxygen rich flow.

Like batches of skin grazing against
sand and stone. I wanna be a tape deck
when i grow up.

Critical Commentary (Week 5)

This week's critical commentary, I wanted to dive deeper into the context we posed last class about clarity vs obscurity and sound vs sense. At first, hearing it in terms of my workshop piece I couldn't really formulate an understanding about it, but now just looking at my piece gives me a greater depth. Sonically, The texture of what was being said was smooth, almost an alluring sense of bringing the listener into the scene, which is nice, but I'd rather let the writing do that and let the performance give way to a deeper context not found in constantly reading what is on the page. As for the draft itself, while it may have had some strong points, the emergence of form would really give my piece a structure that would lend itself to better understanding of what is taking place within the piece. Possibly taking note of my peers use of how they structure their lines to get many possible ideas on revising will help in the long run, for performance as well as generation of lines. 

Junkyard Quote 2 (Week 5)

"God answers knee mail only." Church sign

“It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.”

—	Charles Bukowski

 -Its an alarming image if only for the fact of where can an unspoken word possibly go, back into the recesses of the mind or stuck in throat tissue.

Junkyard Quote 1 (Week 5)

"We are 10lb brains piloting slab of meat." tumblr user Prehistorian

"An obese night sky." My friend alysia

Improv 5 (Week 4)

Just practice this time, nothing airy, just practicing how a piece could look on the page like "exercitia Spiritualia" Geoffrey Brock not the rhyme but just pleasing to the eyes.

Two plains, 

Two struggles for period of hours. 

A pencil, 

A medium used to collide and collapse.

Go to the great plain page.

The second, 

the second piece is those who have accepted it. 

Sucked and spurred 

graphite until 

regurgitated its own version of the creative war. 

The war of squishy people. 

Improv 4 (Week 4)

This week is just a bunch of the secondhand thoughts from improv 3 of week 4. I decided to keep pushing after I made that free write in order to see if i could do more with form. since the focus is form i figured if i just brought in a burst of thoughts and add form to them maybe i could see how the practice interweaves with the piece. Less sense might make me see how the form works. Meter is iambic trimiter.

I wonder do caterpillars
know there referenced to love.
About how cocoons swallow
whole forests to sprout
wings. Maybe trees wanna
fly. I'd love taking root
with you. Just playing sentry,
looking for cracks in the sky
to shatter fog,
break new eggs of sunlight
through.

Improv 3 (Week 4)

I was reading Babette Deutsch's "Urban Pastoral" and i was intrigued by how the writer presented this almost rural view of the city and I wanted to try and unpack this line " a dream of summer's: gaiety in repose,Lazily festive as poster holiday." No form as of yet, just messing around with context.

The sun rises,
surges like phoenix
flowers jutting against soil
with petals that shudder
against wind kisses.
They die slowly as
The sun crept behind water.
Taking salty, sure kisses
one gape at a time.
Yet, bursted
at a new day.
I never was tall enough
to jump past the smoke.

Improv 2 (Week 4)

This week is just a bunch of thoughts, since the focus is form i figured if i just brought in a burst of thoughts and add form to them maybe i could see how the practice interweaves with the piece. Less sense might make me see how the form works. Meter is iambic trimiter.

Live life verseless
now, its more verses
that surface under duress
when not spitting
soliloquies fluently.
I could cry right now,
rip the paint off walls
with the skin of teeth.
Eyes be burning through
stress.Why dumbledore
die tho? Is love a bee
sting in the lungs.
Swollen capillaries.

Improv 1 (Week 4)

I decided to more practice with form based on Gwendolyn Brooks We real cool.. Her repetition of the we strikes a resounding rhythm throughout the piece so i wanted to try something similar with a piece describing a set of phrases if that makes sense. Or rather the title leads into the poem. Meter is iambic tetrameter since i tend to struggle with that.

Promise Me

Nothing serious, ambiguous.

Undersides of puddles birthed

From last week’s backwash. Tips of 

words grafted from skin of tongues.   (hmmmm frontal substitution)

Not the dam, but splinters lodged

Into wood from used pencils

in painting. Shoestrings to lace up insides

Of bursting arteries. Flash 

drives that go down on me, (iffy about this line, clarification?)

papers stained with water, just papers.