Random Freewrite 2: Week of 2/21/11

Trolley and the Ghouls

(Edited, prose version)

Only trolleys promised the ghouls, at night shut down from human touch, a free ride through the town and unregulated belly fills. They run silent from curtained crypts and sewer lanes, the ghouls, somewhat discombobulated. They discard the wilting peel of twice stretched dust in sunset hues and sift through firefly sieves butter-melting soft into the gibbous waning murk. They sweep at last against the lacquered frame of the trolley car, small eager bumps up the patterned steps into the air-fresh and cushioned cab.

With garbled growling, the engine spits on, coaxed by papers weighing coin. Inside the box, light flicks on, fluorescent sunlight without scorn. Disjointed clapping off and on. The ghouls unwind cheerfully as the trolley cab lurches forward on long-forgotten sidewinding tracks through backwoods streets and depot lanes. They jostle on, the trolley and the ghouls, who stretch and stretch resplendently under the fluorescent flecks. From gangling gnarls of fading whine--vague as April morning mist--they bloom to lucid joyous shifts of wail, no longer mist but structured bits of startling brawn, with face and fist and hair like twine.

Now through winding coffin lanes, they rove, where their cousin air weavers rush to and fro, and perchance too late to slow, making circus eyes and circus mouth to see the ghouls alive, up close. They gather ash and scatter dust, from moon's first yawn to moon's last gust. The trolley putters on till night concedes to dawn, when ghouls scatter back to curtained crypts and sewer lanes and trolley yields back to human will. For moon makes more soup than sun, and wails more kin than whine. So trolleys promise ghouls the night, to come to life, to wail in coffin lanes, to harvest the ghosts of the circus-brained, who pass from ash to ash again under the trolley wheels and return to form at night again, as ghouls to join the reaper's throng.

(This still needs a lot of work, clearly. I think it would be better as a short story than a poem or brief prose piece.)

Random Freewrite 1: Week of 2/21/11

Antoine Dodson Doodles in Art Class

(Edited Version)

Today was either cataclysmic or divine. My portrait mugs the Internet, and I reap the pixilation of my face. I’m an overblown meme, a bias breeder. Enunciation spins too fluently, twisting like honey off thorns. Precarious and out of bounds--they say--unaccountable to any dictionary of common cadence. Effeminate, I’m called. Hollywood’s old Sissy back in prime time luminosity. Woman-ish. Sexless sap’s pockmarked sketch, two-toned like an asymmetrical exhibit in a Top Model menagerie, cut loose for time, spectacle and confused design. Boneless face in bent motif. Backdraft hair. Intrepid teeth. A freefall crack binge high collage of limp wrists and neutered face. Biceps curving outside male intent, lips flailing loose of God’s blueprint--they say--like National Enquirer fathers giving milk. Ungainly gesticulations, maiming my father’s configuration. Flapping too much, too slack--they say--freefalling off my mother’s blush. Sexless sap’s self-portrait of gender bent in crayon-wobbled lines. Effeminate, I’m called. I’ve no textbook for a face but pockmarks, flail and gender print like leotards across tongue and dick. Effeminate, I lack title and precision--they say--and action figured me to familiar edge. Effeminate man--they say. Sissy fetters and muscle fail. Instant laugh and sharp recoil. But effeminate is not my name for me.

Paint me a face, Rembrandt, and interpret my cacophony.

Classmate Response: Week of 2/21/11

Surangi Perera: Antoine Dodson Poem


I thought it was a bold choice to write from the perpetrator's perspective. There is a lot of musicality to the phrasing which I particularly enjoyed, and some startling imagery, unexpected despite knowing this was the would-be-rapist's voice, that added enormous punch to the poem. The awareness that the narrator had in his fateful influence over Dodson's life was a fantastic end, just beautifully done. My critique would be that perhaps you could fit more context into the break between the narrator running for his life and the onrush of the news media and the narrator's reflection on Dodson, after the line that ends with "leaving my signature behind." Perhaps another line or two at the beginning or else a title referencing the fact that the perp is the narrator, would help to give the reader more context as well. Since I know the story, it works wonderfully for me, but someone who doesn't know the story might not get the same impact. Good job!

Reading Response 2: Week of 2/21/11

Word of Mouth

Philip Booth

"Evening"

I'm consistently drawn to the sparse poems more than to the wordy poems, and this was one of my favorites so far. I think what jumps out at me the most is the impact of the line breaks. It reminds me of what was said in class, how each line should be able to stand on its own. I love that some poems are formed so that not only do the lines as written hold narrative meaning, but how they break offers an additional, isolated interpretation. Sometimes, just with the placement of the line break, two lines that create a single sentence might have three different meanings: the original sentence, then the two lines as they break. Like Booth's lines here:

Except for having to finish the postcard he's almost

written his mother, the boy is happy. Watching him

pour more ketchup onto his salad, his father

invents another new face. The boy grins.

I just adore that in too many ways. The last line has an infectious charm by itself, and in context, it has another level of humor, pathos and deeper meaning. It reminds me of what Professor Ellison said to me once after class. I had mentioned that I feel comfortable writing from a "snapshot" point of view, one moment in time, and she reminded me that we should keep the outer edges of that snapshot in mind, so that even if the picture is a still shot, the content is alive. In a nutshell, that's how these line breaks work for me. The snapshots and the living image all work beautifully, both independently and together.

Reading Response 1: Week of 2/21/11

Writing Poetry

Chapter 11: Subject

Probably the thing I seem to struggle with the most in my own poetry is being abstract. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to find myself latching onto defamiliarization in an effort to keep the poetry fresh, and in doing so, I end up being too abstract even though I am using more concrete words than not. What I'm discovering is that being specific is not always only about the words you choose, but how you use those words and into what context you put those words. "Subject" helped me see how an odd subject (like Bigfoot) could be treated in an understated fashion to deliver even more impact than had it been given all the bells and whistles that naturally seem drawn to such a fanciful topic. Magical realism seems to end up delivering the magical quality of the content without sacrificing anything to defamiliarization for the sake of the odd phrasing itself. Instead, the more blasé the delivery of the fantastical, the more emphasis seems to be granted to the fantastical element itself and less (comparatively) on the poet's voice. My poem "Game" and the one about the ghouls, in particular, suffer from my habitual misread of this element. The analysis of the different Death poems, as well as the Batman poem, helped me to see how I can use symbolism in context without being either too abstract or too prosey, and, more importantly, how I can ease understatement into the phrases I use to deliver the most impact for the given fantastical subject matter. As I lean towards genre writing, not only in my poetry but primarily in my prose, this will be a particularly helpful lesson to return to from time to time.

Junkyard Quotes: Week of 2/21/11

I was reading some of Jimmie Durham's poetry over the weekend, and I have some other junkyard quotes from earlier in the week, but I wanted to devote this post to him. I love his phrasing.

1.

"At the festival of remembering the dead, even armadillos and subway victims may dance in the sky."

2.

"Indian people still speak English as a second language, even if we no longer speak our own languages. That is the true meaning of illiteracy in a class society; one is not in control of the language one speaks."

3.

"Looking at old photographs of Geronimo,
I always get the feeling that he was going to shoot
the photographer."

4.

"The Indians of Brazil say that at first the duck
Was afraid of the river, and had a canoe made of clay.
But when the canoe was dissolved and he found
Himself in the river, he discovered he loved it."

5.

There is a drawing by Jimmie Durham in his book Columbus Day of a bird, and the description reads, "A loon calling stars down on his back." It's taken from a line in his poem, "A Woman Gave Me a Red Star to Wear on My Headband." He takes something very abstract and makes a gorgeous phrase out of it, a picture I can clearly see in my head even without the drawing.