more napowrimo #1

I'm doing NaPoWriMo too! Second year. I'm hoping it's something I'll continue.

Also, with this poem, I had to look up who Carl Solomon was. He's fascinating and I totally recommend just finding something online about him and reading it. With the poem, I'd definitely like to edit it and maybe expand more. But take a look!

Anyways. Here we go!

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the songs...

Reasons Why - Nickel Creek
October Road - James Taylor
Cal Solomon Blues - Dear and the Headlights
Movie Theme - Beck
Letter to My Son - Bloc Party

the poem:

there are reasons why he never wrote to you,
you have to know that.
why the postman never traveled through some snowy rural town
or down an october road on the east coast,
or wherever he disappeared to,
with a letter in hand.
no, he didn't write, but you have to know
that there were always reasons why
and you never understood
until a few years passed by
and you were older, wanted to be called Cal,
Cal Solomon Blues,
because everything changed when you learned of his death.
You wouldn't admit it, but you knew those blues well
like the familiarity of some movie theme
or that folk song your mother would sing in the kitchen.

after your stay in the institution,
you scrambled through her attic months later,
only hoping to find a box of molding cardboard
in your father's handwriting
labeled: "letters to my son"

NaPoWriMo #1

I am going to try to do NaPoWriMo - http://readwritepoem.org/ - and write a poem a day this month. I might not always follow their prompts. Today's involved incorporating random song titles into a poem. Shuffle gave me:
One Pure Thought - Hot Chip
Nevertheless - Christine Fellows
Destination: Overdrive - Chromeo
Chrissy Kiss The Corpse - Of Montreal
Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand

Here's what I came up with:

Kiss The Corpse

She had given up the idea that one pure thought could save him.
Given up on salvation, resurrection. Instead, she opted for
a tarry mascara halo around each blue eye,
a waxy smear of red on each pursed lip.

Nevertheless, she didn’t do it out of cynicism.
She did it because we are already close to death.
We are each tumbling towards the same destination,
the boy in the coffin just traveled in overdrive.

She couldn’t take him out of the church, where she knew
he wasn’t happy. She couldn’t take him out to that diner
they liked, to the world of spilled strawberry milkshakes
and the blood of rare hamburgers.

She didn’t do it for shock. She did it
because she couldn’t save him.
She left a red smear on his blue lips.

Orion

Here's the newest poem I have going, in honor of my favorite constellation. Let me know if the repetition gets distracting (especially the "you"s). I find repetition irresistible and sometimes need help recognizing when it's ineffective. Also, some of the lines are a little too long for this format - there are 4 lines per stanza.

Orion

Who were you that the virgin loved? Who taught her to abandon
the night-chilled grass and dew between her toes? You were warm
and she learned the taste of sweat. The salt that lingered on the tip of her tongue
was no immortal taste. You always hunted in the sun.

Her brother disapproved, as brothers always do. I think it was his jealousy
he saw when you rose from the sea. That’s what he dared her
to shoot. When she found you washed up on the shore, your body
had stiffened and your hands were frozen into fists.

For pity you were jeweled into the sky, to burn cold and white.
She was given a belt she could never unbuckle,
an outline of you she could barely see, and never touch.
She began to love the moon for its closeness to you.

The sisters thought they could escape your hunt if
they turned to doves or stars. But you and they
are frozen mid-chase, and she is forever forced to watch you.
She barely recognizes you; she never saw you hold still.

The dawn (another lover) erases you, wraps you
in light that, like a smallpox sprinkled blanket,
was never intended to warm you. She does not want anyone
to see you like this, cold and empty.

Who were you? A man, just a man. Taller than most, with broader
shoulders. Your warm breath and whiskers scratched
the nape of her neck. You are no longer anything
but a sketch of a man, etched for pity into the sky.

Let's Continue To Destroy the Box

This piece is about in the fast paced world, we digest images. A lot of images. Many of these images are in the form of graphics. A visual representation expressing a certain of a brand industry or popular culture product. Graphics although great, tend to hide information. They are pure images that express only the ideal condition. A McDonald's logo is a symmetrical bright fun form. However what it doesn't show is the grease stains, the uniforms (both executive and behind the counter) the people, and the process. It is a designed image by a graphic designer with a bias agenda. That agenda is simply McDonald's is classic, American, and delicious. Now to take it to another level, words do the same thing. The word house does not look like a house, it just represents the physical form. The word house itself is a graphic and a sentence is a collection of graphics to form information. This explores the ideas of what is a graphic? What is a word? How do we communicate with each other and what does a sign, text message, or a car logo say about the individual, the group, and society?

This continues to explore "destroying the box." The process of destroying creates new conditions and redefines the old conditions. This is the mentality I feel we need to move forward, not just in art, but in all aspects of culture. We have to start redefining conditions. What is abstract? Don't paint abstract, redefine abstract in your own terms. What is marriage? Is it between two people or four people? Originality is just reinventing past conditions and applying them to the present.

However the new conditions will create a new box that will contain its own laws. It is the responsibility of people to maintain the box, but when they need to adjust, they cannot be afraid to change and even become what they destroyed in the first place. Everything is expandable.

Magnum Opus of Awkwardness and Sadness

These are the development and completion of a fractal flower. Now that I have this iteration of the flower I can fold it one more time and have two versions of it. I don't know if I could physically draw a third fold at this scale.







Directly underneath is a drawing I did at a party last weekend. I liked it enough to continue working on it. The drawing below that is after working on correcting some of the mistakes on her face (I drew it a couple more times but they're not shown here). Her face still needs a little more work. When I have everything that I want in place I am going to enlarge it at kinkos and draw it from the larger version using ink and small water colour brushes. Her hair is going to be made of an ink wash.







Directly above are plans for the final version of the flower which will go around her head. The large circular pattern will be made more even and the line weights adjusted. Each of the circles inside of the radial flower will be filled with a fractal flower.

This is what I've been working on for the past week. (Although I drew the fractal flower a while ago so that doesn't count.) I think I need to learn how to write about these things in an exciting manner.

Visual Response

So in the spirit of collaboration, I thought I would visually respond to Lauren's poem. This illustration is the first reaction I had to the piece. I liked the temperature of the piece. I felt cold while reading it. I looked at the nightingale as hope. I think we visualize hope in the many forms of institutions (such as college), friends, parties, presidents, so it's subjective. We control our hope and what we want it or ourselves to be. I mean I could be COMPLETELY wrong about the whole nightingale thing, but art is made to be adapted and the author will never fully be able to control what the reader interprets it as. One reader, one hope, one idea.

nightingale.

In my communications class (The Documentary Form), as we were watching a propaganda film, I started writing. It mainly comes from this one line I've been mulling over: "I often wonder about her drunk father." Heavy, I know. But I like it a lot, so here's a bit of a free write, a starting point. Err...let me know stuff? Hah, I'm not one to share a lot of poetry, even if it's fiction like this, but here you go.

* * *

That afternoon under snow cloud mirrors
the sparrow and the nightingale fly,
feeling the light wet of snowflakes dribble between feathers,
and from the pavement below, she watched them flit
in and out of the marble clouds.

I often wonder about her drunk father
on nights where I can't sleep,
standing at the kitchen sink in half darkness,
watching him shovel snow mounds from their driveway,
seeing the steaming condensation from his breath glow amber.
His ill fitted hat.
Glass stained eyes.
It's easy to forget you were once a boy, a child.

The next afternoon she stands outside on a cleared patch of driveway,
eyes skyward.
How she wished she was a nightingale.