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Question 8

How do you jumpstart the creative process?

Source Code 5

The eleven words in Open 5 come from "A Step Away From Them" by Frank O'hara which begins, "It's my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs."

Tornado in East Los Angeles (Black Roses)

I haven't mentioned my job on this blog so I thought I'd do that today. I work for Writers in the Schools (WITS). We teach creative writing to children. Most of them are the so-called inner city kids. Many of these kids live in poverty, but they have a gift for telling their own stories. Here's one example:

Tornado in East Los Angeles (Black Roses)

I see the black round sky.
I feel scared.
I think it is going to happen.
It sounds like the wind when you cover your ears with your hands.
It smells like dark roses, blowing with the tornado.
I touch it, but I don’t feel it.
All I feel is air.
I feel air going slow through my hands.
The taste I taste in my mouth is dark berries.
I look at it but all I see in the sky is black.
It forms black roses.

Samantha, 3rd Grade

I think the work I do with WITS informs my sense of poetry in a number of ways. First, I think children often capture a particular, unique vision in their language, and I get regular dosages of that originality. It's originality that just happens so that the striving for originality leaves no trace. Second, I think that my job gives me a sense that poetry is not an elite establishment, but that it's there for pretty much everybody.

Open 5

Here are eleven new words for you to play with today.   

papaya
clicks
torso
flipping
lunch
tear
hum-colored
pocket
toothpick
12:40
poems

If they capture your imagination, add your writing in the comments section below.

Source Code 4

The eleven words given in Open 4 come from a poem called "The Age of the Velocipede" by Lisa Jarnot. It appears in her second book, Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001).

Selah

Selah, a book of poems by Joshua Corey, reverberates in your ears like bellsong. The biblical title refers to Corey's lyrical use of silence within these contemporary psalms. We hear the knell of these words and learn or are reminded about how the depths of loss can take us spiraling.

The arc of the book follows a mother' illness, death, and rest. Rather than tell the story, though, the poems guide us through the experience of the experience. Mythology offers passage. In "Real Prognosis," we are ushered in and shown the view out the hospital window:

beyond the elms a horizon
and beyond that a rocky beach
and beyond beach the theory of the day
is: drowning, daily engulfment in things....

The later poems resonate with the kind of acceptance that is possible, consolation.

After a time I
cleared some space.
After a fashion her
gone was gone.

And then there's transcendance, such as in "Notes for the New Creation," in which "What we've survived shall enter/ and kingdom be a nightlit pier." Selah pushes on the language of the lyric, and the music continues on in your ear long after the music ends.

Question 7

What specific names of flowers have you used in your writing? Are there any types that you would probably never use? Such as, petunia? Be honest.

Question 6

Here's a question about music. Lately what do you like to listen to while you're writing?

Source Code 3

Okay, this is the easiest one so far. The eleven words in Open 3 come from the Emily Dickinson poem that begins,

I started Early-- Took my Dog--
And visited the Sea--

Several of you recognized the source. It's the poem (Johnson edition #520) with the famous phrase, "The Mermaids in the Basement" in it.

Open 4

See if anything comes of these eleven words. And let us know. Here's the list: pizza, side street, rain, eyeballs, Ezra Pound, crowded, killed, slightly, radio, tiny, and circus. That's your mission, if you choose to accept it. And have a happy new year!

Aggregate of Disturbances

Michele Glazer's second book, Aggregate of Disturbances, makes us take a closer look, a deeper breath. Reading her poems is something like eating peanut butter straight out of the jar. These poems emit a viscous music.

Through the poems in this book, Glazer delves into the stuff of elegy--death, dying, love, loss, and grieving. The eye of these poems operates with great thrum, noting the grit of reality. The poems recognize the failure that living brings on us and the jitteriness of our attempts to adhere to one another.

More about Berryman

Thanks for the interesting comments on John Berryman. Re: the observations by Christa and Jeff, I guess the photo (taken by my father) that I posted with A Berryman House provides a sense of desolation, devastation?

Jeff's analogy of the Turner painting is interesting in many ways. I'm thinking about the idea of this landscape and it's inversion, an ocean. JB's father committed suicide in Oklahoma in a desolate area such as the one in this picture; Berryman's own suicide involved death by water, albeit frozen. A kind of yin and yang of father/son suicide. Perhaps this is what Jeff was thinking too, and I'm simply unpacking his metaphor.

I remember reading about father/son suicides in relation to JB in my studies. For one thing, the sons of suicidal men have a much higher risk of dying that way too. It's been a while, but something by A. Alvarez, perhaps it was a chapter of The Savage God, rumbles around in my head as feeling important. In Paul Mariani's Berryman biography, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, the specters of alcoholism and manic depression appeared in the foreground, not the background, of the picture he paints.

In The Dream Songs, Berryman is often in elegy mode, both directly for his father and for dozens of male writers, some seen as father figures and others as peers. In #145, he writes,

I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong
& so undone. I've always tried. I--I'm
trying to forgive
whose frantic passage, when he could not live
an instant longer, in the summer dawn
left Henry to live on.

There were so many suicides in that generation of poets. There's a point in Brett Millier's biography of Elizabeth Bishop in which apparently Bishop survived so many suicidal friends, she found it overwhelming. And who can blame her?

Open 3

Take these eleven words, spokes on a wheel:

ankle
dandelion
overflow
dog
solid
sea
eat
hands
early
town
silver

Let us know what comes out of them.

Source Code 2

Okay. The eleven words (mustard, curve, traffic, etc.) provided in the writing prompt, Open 2, come from the first two sections (I think it was the first two) of The Bridge by Hart Crane.

A Berryman House

Here's my true confession for today. Way back when--almost 20 years ago--I admit that as a student I wrote some sonnets. That is what students do, right? Recently one called "A Berryman House" was published in an online journal.

It's strange to see your older work getting published. My friend Cynie Cory published American Girl recently, and she told me it felt uncomfortable to her because the poems in the book were so different from what she's writing now. Although I never write sonnets now and haven't done so for a long time, for some reason it doesn't bother me. Perhaps it's arrogance on my part or some sense that my poems are separate from me, a derivative of my past. Maybe if my publication were a book rather than one poem on a web site, it would register differently in me? Hard to say....

Berryman's Dream Songs made a huge impact on me as I began writing poems. I inhabited those poems for many years. I dreamt; I sang. I Henryed. So maybe that is why the publication of my not-brand-new poem seems fine with me. It's not that I like these messages from my past or dislike them either. They just are.

From Dream Song #114:

Mr Past being no friends of mine,
all them around: Sir Future Dubious,
calamitous & grand:
I can no foothood here; wherefore I pines
for Dr Present, who won't thrive to us
hand over neither hand

from them blue depths nor choppering down skies....

--John Berryman

Question 5

Tell us about the first writer or artist whose work comes to mind when you think of motionlessness.

Source Code 1

The eleven words listed in writing prompt Open 1 come from the newest issue (#10) of Delmar Magazine edited by Jeff Hamilton.

Open 2

Here are eleven words.  See what you can make with them.

mustard
humpty-dumpty
space
iron
doze
shingles
green
parcel
curve
traffic
half-heard

Using alternate forms of these words is a-okay.  Share your poem in the comment section.