Creative Life: A Love Note For a Waning Moon

My mom in the arms of her mom. 1930.

I'm thinking of my mom today. Her baby sister died last week. Due to COVID, a memorial service will not occur until an as-yet-undetermined date.

My mom's closest brother - her confidant - died a couple of years ago, maybe less. She and her brother could talk about things my mom didn't want to talk about with her adult kids. My mom misses him terribly.

My mom isn't one to express her fears too much. She doesn't like to show her soft underbelly to others. From her mother, she learned the gruff family motto: "Never show the white feather."

The first time my mom faced cancer, which resulted in surgery and chemo, I pointed out, so helpfully, that there were cancer support groups at the hospital. She could talk with other people who walked in the same shoes as she, deriving strength and solace from each other. "Pfft," she sniffed in some disdain. "Why would I want to do that?"

A couple of years ago, my mom had no choice but to enter a hospital and then a rehab facility for a time. Which she loathed.

Sometimes I spent the night with her at the hospital or, later, at the rehab center. On several occasions, my mom said to me, "Come lay down beside me on the bed."  I did so, and I wrapped my arm around her torso, and I laid my head near her shoulder, knowing this was a rare privilege, indeed. Mostly, we just lay quietly, maybe while watching a TV show. I cherish those times.

Her light wanes.

I think of a poem I wrote at a past Tumblewords Project workshop. The leader that day, a poet named Rios de La Luz, walked us through a writing model called "corporeal writing," in which we focus on a part of our body, and how our bodies hold memories. One of the poems I wrote that day arose from childhood body-memories of how my mom would comfort me when I was ill.


As I Die

When I die.
No. As I die,
I want this:

The hand of a lover
On my brow,
Lightly.

Skimming slowly up my forehead,
Across the border of my hair
Atop the remnant of my infantile fontanel.

Pausing there, then
Sliding down the
Silkiness of my hair.

And again.
And again.

Like my mother did
When I was a toddler,
Maybe feverish or maybe
Just settling into a warm sleep.

Like I did for my daughter
As she leaned into me,
Pressed against my belly and my breast,
The rhythmic smoothing of her brow

Up and over,
Up and over.

Like past lovers did for me
As we lay in bed, under covers,
Quiet, thinking of nothing.
Sensing only, that tender instructive
Smoothing of my brow.

Up and over,
Up and over.

"This," I always thought,
"Is how I want it to be as I die."




I hope it's like this for my mom, when that time comes.




Related posts: Travels With Carol

Loose End from El Paso: Tumblewords Project: Erasure

Returning to El Paso from Juarez. November 2016.

One year ago today, February 2019, I attended the Tumblewords Project led by Gustavo Enriquez. I remembered him from a previous workshop, on corporeal poetry, I believe, in which his poem about a part of his body blew me away with its fresh creativity.

So on this day, Gustavo walked us through erasure poetry, which was new to me. It also goes by blackout poetry.

Gustavo distributed several stacks of magazines and old books around the horseshoe of workshop writers, inviting each of us to select a few pages from this or that, and then to black out what we didn't want from a text, leaving visible a poem. 

I mined two pieces from the ore.


It's Not Personal

The birds,
They see the wind.
That wind means no harm.

The earth turns.

Life intends to not cause pain.

The storm come and it pass.

The sun shines.


After the Storm

Up early.

The sun, drink.

Ready for

Recovering

Recovering

From failure.

We,

We,

We,

In the rainbow, sat quiet in the brightness

Purring to

Sleep.





P.S. Talking about erasure reminds me of a witty, biting, sometimes hilarious book by the same name, written by Percival Everett.

El Paso 2019: The Tumblewords Project: A Brief Love

James Drake, Falling Birds, El Paso Art Museum, Texas. November 2016.

Born in 1995, founded by Donna Snyder, the Tumblewords Project is a writing workshop that occurs every Saturday at the Memorial Park branch of the El Paso Library. Each week, a workshop leader suggests writing prompts to the participants; the prompts usually follow a theme the leader chooses for the session. Everyone is enthusiastically welcomed. If you're just passing through El Paso and happen to be in town on a Saturday afternoon, go! 

My related posts here.


One of my workshop efforts below. Writer and artist, Sandra Torrez, led the day's work, offering Edgar Allen Poe as our inspiration.



A Brief Love

I'll look at you
While you sleep.

I'll touch your sternum, press
Down with the pad of a finger

Like a push of life.

I'll find your pulse, rest
My finger there, and linger,
To absorb your beat.

I'll leave you then.
Push out into
The cold and
Not look back

Because I gotta go.

St. Louis: 100 Boots Poetry

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Through an El Paso writer, I learned about the 100 Boots Poetry Series at St. Louis' Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The intel hit me just in time to attend the final event in this year's series.

Layli Long Soldier, 100 Boots Poetry Series, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

The final event highlighted poets Layli Long Soldier and Douglas Kearney, authors of Whereas and Buck Studies respectively.

Douglas Kearney, 100 Boots Poetry Series, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

I'll return to the poets, but first some remarks on the Pulitzer Arts Foundation interior design.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. April 2018.

Clean, industrial. Hard, but softened by colors. Strong, but giving way to the art it holds.

My notes on Ms. Long Soldier

Soft speaking, nighttime-soothing voice, unhurried pace.

"My belief is not a legend." Referencing how Native beliefs about how we all came about are as legitimate - as real - as Biblical (and other) beliefs about how we all came about.

A student asked her once what to write about, and she replied: "Whatever is or was missing in one's life - and start there."


My notes on Mr. Kearney

Smooth voice
Sings a song poem like drum beats
Many voices like changing radio stations frequently
I think of Tourette's Syndrome, his sounds, voices, movements


I've discovered that, as with songs, I often hear the sounds of poetry, but not so much the words. This was the case with Ms. Long Soldier and Mr. Kearney.

This is neither a reflection on the poets nor on me as a listener.


To meet two writers new to me, to hear their words from their mouths, and to enter into the space of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation building .... I am one lucky goose. 

Creative Life: On Cold and Flame

Runge Nature Center, Jefferson City, Missouri. December 2006.

Wintry in Missouri.

My hands are cold, but another's vengeance drip, drip, drips a molten sludge of thick poison into my gullet, seeking to liquidate my spirit.

My hands are cold, but my gut twists from a dull, yellow ember of acid fear that seeks to burn.

My hands are cold, but my heart constricts from a subterranean rage that seeks to consume it.


Come soon, spring.

Icy serviceberry, Jefferson City, Missouri. December 2006.

El Paso: The Tumblewords Project: Sounds

Flashing clouds, Sunset Heights, El Paso, Texas. August 2017.

August 2017

Born in 1995, founded by Donna Snyder, the Tumblewords Project is a writing workshop that occurs every Saturday at the Memorial Park branch of the El Paso Library. Each week, a workshop leader suggests writing prompts to the participants; the prompts usually follow a theme the leader chooses for the session. Everyone is enthusiastically welcomed. If you're just passing through El Paso and happen to be in town on a Saturday afternoon, go! 

My related posts here.


Below are two of my poetic attempts in response to the writing prompts that one week's leader gave us. Gosh, I wish I were more meticulous about writing dates and workshop leaders in my notes. I am embarrassed at the oversight. 


Outside My Window at Night

Train. Two blasts.
Mockingbird. Sweet syrup song.
Dogs. Bark Bark Bark Bark.


I Am the Center of the Universe

I moan in the pain.
A rosebush leaps from the ground to see what is happening.
Which is as it should be.
When I am in pain, it is about me and me and me. 

Clouds gather and darken and
Shed angry tears and
Shout epithets and shoot spears of
Shocking lasers.
All in alliance with me, my pain.

The wind, my El Paso sister,
Calls at my windows and door,
Swirling and screaming and
Sissing at my sorrow.
The unfairness of it all!
She agrees. 

The soil of the earth
Arcs up and around in 
Twists of infantile fury to 
Show its 
Fealty to my woes. 

The stars refuse to come out at night.
The moon grants only a slice of light.
The sun pulls his cover over.
All eclipse to
Signify their
Loyalty to me and my
Moan. 



Flashing clouds and barking dogs here:

El Paso: The Tumblewords Project: In Which I Am Introduced to Outlaw Poetry

Graffiti, mural, Tbilisi, Caucasus Georgia. May 2012.

Born in 1995, founded by Donna Snyder, the Tumblewords Project is a writing workshop that occurs every Saturday at the Memorial Park branch of the El Paso Library. Each week, a workshop leader suggests writing prompts to the participants; the prompts usually follow a theme the leader chooses for the session. Everyone is enthusiastically welcomed. If you're just passing through El Paso and happen to be in town on a Saturday afternoon, go! 

My related posts here.

Chauncey Low, a wildly talented writer in the Tumblewords Project, led the workshop one Saturday.

I can't speak for the others in our group, but for me, he cracked open a smudgy window to let me peer into a hidden room.

The Underground Art Scene

First up was a tiny treatise by poet and performer, Penny Arcade, from the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry:

The underground is inviolate. It is not a street, a neighborhood or a certain city. It is a metaphysical space located where bohemia intersects with the demi-monde. Not everyone from bohemia can descend into the underground just as not everyone in the demi-monde can find their way to either bohemia or the underground.

If you do not have a functioning criminal class in your art scene you have academia and while academia is a reflection of the art world it can never be the art world.

The Lower East Side of New York used to be filled with poets, writers, actors, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, junkies, whores and weirdos. Now it's filled with college students pretending to be poets, writers, musicians, actors, photographers, filmmakers, junkies, whores and weirdos, in other words the ten most popular kids from every high school in the world are now living in downtown New York. Those are the people who most of us who ran away to New York came here to get away from! Nobody who was popular in high school can ever be hip. It's not possible. If you were popular in high school, that was your peak. Be satisfied.

Am I Mad At You?

Then there was an outrageously wicked, terrible-licious, no-boundaries poem by Vampyre Mike Kassel:

Am I mad at you?
Of course I’m not mad, whatever gave you that idea?
Just because I’m sitting here pushing pins
Into a little wax doll
With a lock of your hair in it?
Just because I burned the panties you left here
And buried the ashes
At the crossroads at midnight?
Just because I sent the nude pictures we took of you
To Cattle Breeders Digest?
Just because I welded the doors of your car shut?

I’m not mad, whatever gave you that idea?
Just because I wrote your name and address
On the men’s room wall
Of every biker’s bar from here to Bakersfield?
Just because I made three hundred copies
Of your apartment key
And handed them out
To every junkie and wino in the Tenderloin?
Just because I switched your birth-control pills for Ex-Lax,
Spiked your shampoo with Nair,
And hid an electric cattle prod inside your favorite dildo?
Just because I pitchforked your mother,
Got your kid sister ten-dollar tricks,
And strung out your cat on speed?

No, I’m not mad.
And, by the way,
Have you got a dollar?


.... which Chauncey followed with his own, equally wicked version.


Note: The book, New American Underground Poetry, Volume 1, includes several of Mr. Kassel's poems.

Then we workshop acolytes took a turn at dysfunction. Here's mine, taking a more passive-aggressive tack:

Pistachio Ice Cream

Did I remember to bring you your pistachio ice cream? 

Of course, I did. 
Why are you using that accusatory tone? 

I bought it and I paid for it and I personally witnessed the cashier putting it into my reusable bag, 
You know the one, that lavender and green one?
Oh, you've never seen that bag? 
Well, it's my favorite. 
You never notice anything I like. 

I put it on the passenger seat right next to me. 

It was such a fine day and I rolled the windows down. 
And so I was driving home and I stopped at a red light.
I had my favorite song on, 
You know the one.
Oh you don't? 
Well that figures.

All of a sudden,
A hand from nowhere
Reached in and took the bag!

With your pistachio ice cream in it.


The Real Me

Chauncey presented us with a poem by another contributor to the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Kathi Georges (now using Kat Georges). Title: The Real Me.

I am laughing at myself because The Real Me is so in-your-face (ahem) that I feel sheepish about posting it here. It startles, but then one - "one" being a woman, specifically - gets it, and says, "Yeah." At least metaphorically.

But you can read it over here, where Chicano Poet has shared it without any bashfulness.

In addition to being a poet, Kat Georges is the co-founder of an independent publishing business called Three Rooms Press.


Art or Commitment? 

Chauncey also re-introduced me to Bob Flanagan, the artist who nailed his penis to a board.

Bob Flanagan, who died in 1996 from cystic fibrosis, used intentional pain to master the involuntary pain associated with his physical disease.

Here is Mr. Flanagan singing an explanatory song that he put to the melody of Mary Poppins' Supercalifragilistic:

He frequently pauses to clear phlegm while singing the song.

So the unoriginal question: Is public self-harming, such as when Mr. Flanagan nailed his penis to a board, art? Or is it self-harm that is a function of a mental illness, like cutting, and which calls for an intervention?

Maybe it's the intention that pertains? I have proclaimed this as art, therefore it is art. Versus I am hurting myself because I am in pain and I don't know what else to do.

Or maybe it isn't the performance of the act that is questionable, but the decision to make it public and call it art that presents the puzzle. Can one defecate in public and call it art?

Damned if I know.

El Paso: The Tumblewords Project: Illusions, Delusions, and Acceptance

Highway 371, Navajo Nation, New Mexico. May 2013.

Born in 1995, founded by Donna Snyder, the Tumblewords Project is a writing workshop that occurs every Saturday at the Memorial Park branch of the El Paso Library. Each week, a workshop leader suggests writing prompts to the participants; the prompts usually follow a theme the leader chooses for the session. Everyone is enthusiastically welcomed. If you're just passing through El Paso and happen to be in town on a Saturday afternoon, go! 

My related posts here.



Below is my output (since edited) from one Saturday. The binding threads are illusion, delusion, and acceptance.

Highway 371, Navajo Nation, New Mexico. May 2013.

Loess

We were pretty smug
In our specialness,
Our quick wit,
Our close-knittedness,
Our uniqueness among the rest.

Handsome and pretty, they said.
Smart as whips, they said.
Ready, always, to advise, solicited or no.
Analytically confident about others' lives.

Such good mothers, good fathers,
Good siblings, good children,
Good wives, good husbands.

Shimmering heads atop a grassy hill,
Breeze ruffling through thick hair.
Eyes alert, clear, penetrating the valley
Below.

We stood atop a grassy hill
Of loess.
We thought our foundation firm.
But it was just windblown dust.

Fresh and faded, Carencro, Louisiana. February 2015.

Evidence

I look in the mirror.

The evidence is there,
Undeniable.
I'm a woman of a certain age.

Not always fair, how it turns out. But
Inevitable.
No use to rage.

Radical acceptance? .. to flaunt the
Inevitable!
The silver bespeaks a sage?

I see the not-so-beautiful parts,
Undeniable.
But I am here, so smile, girl.

Accept.


Not untrue

I won't not tell you
If you don't ask me

But if you ask me
I'll not not misinform you
Of how it might be if
I were like this and
You were like that

Or maybe I mean
If I weren't who I am and
You weren't who you are

Can we agree not to talk at all
And
Just dance?

El Paso: The Tumblewords Project: Introduction and Smeltertown

The Tumblewords Project didn't hit my radar until June. A pity.  Because with my very first mid-day Saturday attendance at the weekly writing group, I lamented silently, "Why didn't I discover this before?!"

It only got my attention the first time because of the magic words Smeltertown. Where did I even see the phrase in connection with Tumblewords? The library? Social media? An upcoming-events email? No idea.

I first learned about Smeltertown when I took the guided hike up Mt Cristo Rey. Then I saw an announcement about a photographer with an exhibit of her photos at Smeltertown, but because of a scheduling conflict, I couldn't go. So when I saw the third reference to Smeltertown, I had to check it out.

This article isn't about Smeltertown; it's about the Tumblewords Project. But the leader for this particular Saturday's meeting - Carolyn Rhea Drapes - took us, in our imagination, to the Smeltertown of her youth. Like: 

• "La Smelta."
• "Every morning abuela would hang her canary cages on the branches of the cottonwood tree." 
• Tiny houses as big as an efficiency apartment. 
• Some people had electric, water and gas. 
• For a long time, had communal toilets. 
• "Everything felt caked in sulfur." 
•  "Those yellow smells had no chance of entering [abuela's] kitchen."

###

Tumblewords describes its process thus:

The format involves preliminary announcements, the presenter speaking for maybe ten minutes, writing on the spot, and then going around the room and each participant reading aloud. We like to have three rounds of writing and reading aloud, but depending on the number of participants who show up any one workshop, there may only be time for two rounds or even one. Presenters are given free range to present however or whatever they want, as long as the primary amount of time is allocated to writing and reading aloud. Some presenters read the works of writers they revere, show slides of their art work or the art of others, bring in visual art, play or perform music, or read their own work. The participants are free to write in whatever form or on whatever topic they choose, notwithstanding the topic of presentation.

Some rules:

• You write and you share what you write. 
• No whining about the quality of your work; at most you can say: "This is shit." But then you gotta read it aloud anyway. 
• No critiques.

The goal is to write. Simple as that. 

Donna Snyder is the founder and matriarch of the group - it's a remarkable feat to have nurtured a writing group since its birth in 1995. A succinct synopsis about Donna: " ... a lawyer by profession, an activist by inclination and a poet by compulsion, has an extensive list of published work to her credit ... "

I always feel welcomed and supported at the workshops.

And holy moly, there is huge talent in that library room every Saturday!

###

Getting back to this day's work, as led by Carolyn Rhea Drapes: 

From Carolyn's sharing about Smeltertown, the canaries in the cottonwood tree pricked my senses.

In two writing sprints, I created the following (since edited): 

First sprint:

In the time of the killing in the lushness, the richness of Rwanda, did the birds continue to sing? 

Is it true that the foreign tamarisks crowd and kill the native cottonwoods, usurping their space and water like they say they do? 

Of what use is this man-made border over which the giant Christ looks with his arms outstretched, which separates sisters, but which birds and tamarisks and cottonwoods flaunt with impunity?
 

Mt. Cristo Rey, El Paso, Texas. October 2016.

Of what use is this wall that hems El Paso, choked like the Rio Grande, cobbled and parched? 

Does the big Christ not shake his head in bemusement when he looks at the rusty wall that separates the sisters he made? 

US border between El Paso and Juarez. November 2016.

Some of abuela's canaries died and they were not replaced. 

####

Portal, Arizona. March 2013.

Second sprint: 

Outside the red library in Portal, New Mexico, bird feeders hang from leafy cottonwoods. Books in a cart enjoy the air outside. It is fine to sit in the shade of the cottonwoods and listen to the birds sing.

El Paso: The Life Force of Mare Advertencia Lirika

Mare Advertencia Lirika, Cafe Mayapan, El Paso, Texas. March 2017.

South Louisiana introduced me to spoken word in a splashy way, via poets with a gift for visceral writing and performance talents.

Being an introverted sort, it knocked me out to see and hear how these artists put their naked selves out there with their creativity.

Mare Advertencia Lirika, Cafe Mayapan, El Paso, Texas. March 2017.

When I saw an upcoming event for a free poetry workshop in El Paso, it was a must-go for me. The workshop title: Poetry and Resistance.

The workshop introduced to me Mare Advertencia Lirika, the workshop leader.

Because the workshop was mostly in Spanish, I didn't follow all of Mare's words - maybe most, even - but I followed enough to know I was in a room with a woman whose life force is galvanic.

Mare Advertencia Lirika, Cafe Mayapan, El Paso, Texas. March 2017.

Mare lives in the city of Oaxaca in Oaxaca state, Mexico. Her family is Zapotec, an indigenous Mexican ethnic group. 

Below is a half-hour documentary about Mare, "When a Woman Comes Forward" (with English subtitles). Mare shares her philosophy about how hip hop gives a voice, not just to individuals, but to the community.

Mare is for speaking out. Her 2013 video (with English subtitles), "What Are You Waiting For (To Tell Your Truth)?"  is a call to action to all women:

"We are the majority only when it comes to statistics."

"Our voice has been taken by other mouths."


Mare is a hip hop artist, a poet, a singer, a human rights activist. In her work, she flashes an unblinking, brilliant light on inconsistencies between the so-called "respect" for women and oppressing them. One graphic illustration is how she notes the societal furtiveness with which girls and women experience menstruation and menstrual blood, but the cavalier display of the blood of murdered women.

Below is a video in which Mare shares the evolution of her creative and social activist evolution in Oaxaca:

Mare is a woman of power. I feel so lucky to have been able to attend her workshop.

With thanks to the folks who contributed to her presence, which included Fronterizas en Resistencia (Border Women in Resistence) and Café Mayapan.

The Creative Life: Cinquain #5

Baratashvili, Tbilisi, Caucasus Georgia. May 2012.

Breaking a few cinquain rules here.

Baby
Tucked in, hidden
Sleeping, startling, waking
She cries when giants come near her
Belly
Soft, unhardened
Stretching, tight'ning, taut'ning
To be a trampoline and push
Back

Related posts:

The Creative Life: The Cinquain
The Creative Life: Cinquain #2
The Creative Life: Cinquain #3
The Creative Life: Cinquain #4

The Creative Life: Cinquain #3

Pink Schoolhouse Gallery, near Taos, New Mexico. October 2007.

Belly
Tightened, frightened
Clenching, calling, keening
Come to me, pick me up, hold me
Baby

Related posts: 

The Creative Life: Cinquain #2
The Creative Life: The Cinquain

El Paso: Writers Resist

Benjamin Alire Saenz, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

January 2017


I'll confess. I saw Benjamin Alire Saenz' name on the Writers Resist flyer and that was all it took.  He is my literary cultural interpreter for El Paso. I would be there as a literary groupie.

But the Writers Resist event also promised a warm, lit shelter in advance of the cold front approaching America on January 20.

The Writers Resist event, in alliance with others around the country, ignited from a social media post by poet Erin Bilieu, when she wrote:  "We will not give in to despair. We will come together and actively help make the world we want to live in. We are bowed, but we are not broken."

The El Paso Library's Main Branch was the venue of El Paso's Writers Resist.

Dr. Rosa Alcalá - poet, literary translator, and UTEP faculty member - facilitated.

Dr. Rosa Alcalá, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Writers read their own works or those of others, and two writers sang iconic folk songs.

Mike Duncan's throaty cover of a Bob Dylan song (A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall) was a highlight:

Daniel Chacón's story of what he brought to a cultural-diversity potluck delighted, both for its charm and its message:

And, of course, Benjamin Alire Saenz' soft-spoken but strong love song, as son to mother, to the river, and to all of humanity:

Writers who performed included: 

Rosa Alcalá
Bobby Byrd

Bobby Byrd, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Andrea Beltran
Daniel Chacón

Daniel Chacón, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Sasha Pimental
Robert Gunn 

Robert Gunn, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Roberto Santos

Roberto Santos, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Robin Scofield

Robin Scofield, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Jeff Sirkin
Kathy Staudt

Kathy Staudt, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

Lex Williford

Lex Williford, Writers Resist, El Paso, Texas. January 2017.

My regrets to the writers whose names I didn't catch.

Writers Resist has moved from a one-day protest to a standing one - in the centuries-old tradition of artist protests in all lands, against tyranny of the spirit or the flesh.

The Creative Life: Cinquain #2

Can't see
Entombed, afraid
Bumbling, fumbling, stumbling
I feel for the switch and turn on
The light.

Related posts

The Creative Life: The Cinquain

The Creative Life: The Cinquain

Numbers. September 2010.

In my little black-and-white composition book was a scribble about cinquains.

A cinquain is a poem with five lines, non-rhyming, in which:

• Line 1 has 2 syllables
• Line 2 has 4 syllables
• Line 3 has 6 syllables
• Line 4 has 8 syllables
• Line 5 has 2 syllables

From WriteShop:

Typically, a cinquain follows this sequence:

• Line A: One vague or general one-word subject or topic
• Line B: Two vivid adjectives that describe the topic
• Line C: Three interesting -ing action verbs that fit the topic
• Line D: Four-word phrase that captures feeling about the topic
• Line E: A very specific term that explains Line A

Examples, both from WriteShop:

Insect
Hidden, hungry
Preening, searching, stalking
Waits as if praying
Mantis

Planet
Graceful, ringed
Spinning, whirling, twirling
Dances with neighbor Jupiter
Saturn

My experiment

Feardom

Effluent, dark

Arching Searching Grasping

Reaches to suck me down but. No.

Freedom

Log bridge over mineral spring, Borjomi, Georgia (Caucasus). April 2012.

Creative Life: Very Bad Writing

 

My dwindling stock of beloved sci-fi, Alamogordo, New Mexico. February 2013.

This past year I've tried to up my writing game by participating in some writing groups. The seed for this was planted in South Louisiana by an interconnected group of people and events, specifically: 

• Patrice Melnick, the facilitator of Music & Mic and Festival of Words
• Dennis Ward
• Sha'condria iCon Sibley
• Kristina PlatinumVoice Marshall
• PoeticSoul aka Alex Johnson, facilitator of Lyrically Inclined
•  Agnes C.

Each of the above wowed me in some way with their creativity in the spoken or written word, or in their advocacy for local artistry.


Dennis, Agnes, John R., and I engaged in a brief writers' group before I left South Louisiana. What a warm hum of energy that was. PoeticSoul's Lyrically Inclined presented a writer's workshop one night.

At the writer's group, the Lyrically Inclined workshop, the monthly Music & Mic, and Festival of Words, I heard works that sparked whatever neurons govern illumination of what can be done to express ideas with words, body language, and tone of voice.

In Colorado, I sought writers' groups despite only being there for a month, and was pleased to attend two or three sessions of a group in Longmont.

Apparently, rubbing shoulders with writers can be a good thing for one's own practice. I will do more shoulder rubbing.

But this post is about bad writing.

Many years ago, I entered the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Very Bad Writing contest (a la Bulwer-Lytton; said contest now defunct, I believe) with this:

But before his soaring mind fully registered what his myopic eyes saw, which, when the spectacle did register, would change both his life and that of the world's in one crashing, careening, chaotic moment, he, Ned Richardson, thought back to the previous moon-gilt night when he shared an exotic Tibetan repast with his exotically beautiful and ravishing accountant, Monica Greenwell, she of the astonishingly glossy raven tresses and red rocky mountain high-heeled shoes with that loamy-Ieathery-powdery scent that Ned loved to pull into his quivering nostrils as he ran his noble probiscus caressingly along the length of them, causing those silken caverns to flare like the wings of a majestic skate from the ocean's azure depths in complete, remorseless ecstasy. 

"Oh, what a feeling!" Ned thought dreamily, as he jumped out of sheer joie de vivre, which was fortuitous, since by doing so he scarcely missed placing one of his well-formed and stylishly clad feet into the warmish effluvia of a be-ribboned, snorting shi-tsu that now was maliciously occupied in pulling at the neon shoestrings of its hennaed mistress, all the while yip-yapping in bored agitation, finally causing that hapless matron to fall heavily to her Cabbage Patch-dimpled knees with a "whumpf!" on the winter-pocked sidewalk. A ululating wail emerged slowly, opulently from the woman's throat and through her lipsticked mouth and out into the startled air and up and up, scraping across the inscrutable faces of the hulking urban edifices.

This siren's call, rather than jolting Ned from his delicious reverie, merely insinuated itself into his mind's meanderings; the almost melodic cry gently pulled him out of Monica's wondrous stilettos and into the sweet beckoning of an ambulance's song, offering the promise of lucrative lawsuits on behalf of the metropolis' modern-day gladiators within those strobe-lighted chariots of mercy. "Ah, but life is good," thought Ned - just one more glorious courtroom victory, his law firm's senior partner, Richard "Bob" Aldeburgh, had vowed, and Ned would get to do the firm's next TV commercial. 

Ned pictured himself leaning casually yet powerfully against a massive desk (mahogany? teak?), surrounded by dark paneled walls and shelves lined with heavy tomes. A green-shaded banker's lamp would add the final touch of elegant, Old Guard ambiance. Should he fold his arms across his chest as he spoke sonorously and with quiet authority? Or hold a heavy law book in one hand and his glasses in another, perhaps using the latter hand to emphasize his mellifluous words? 

And then, finally, Ned really saw what was before him. And his brain screeched to a halt, as a train does when suddenly presented with an obstacle on the track: a steel-melting, spark-flying, screaming stop.


"Will they never learn from their mistakes?!" cried Ned in an anguished sob. And he crumpled into a broken heap as the red-swirled billboard proclaimed its message: "Coca Cola --- New Formula!"


Goddammit - so many years and it is still such gloriously good bad shit. I shoulda won. But I didn't even get an honorable mention. Was it the shoes?