Week #6--My Response to Casey's Improv 1

Casey,

This piece melds the physical and the spiritual in an appealing way with the phrase "some quite stretchy state of being." I also like "mentally malleable" and "souls embracing." I think the draft's structure is a little quirky, but I realize you are riffing off of "Betrayal." I'm not sure you need "I believe," and "embraced" works better in the last line than the second. Perhaps change it to 'encountered' or 'enjoyed.' I think you could expand this draft and create something even more interesting. It certainly shows potential!

Week #6--Junkyard Quotes

“You totes gel on that boy, yo.”

Tavi Gevenson of Rookie Magazine giving an example of present-day ‘teen-speak’ on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” 10/1/11 (No translation given).

“. . . our true natures are just droplets of divine love.” Kirtan artist, Jai Uttal, quoted in Yoga Magazine by writer, Anna Dubrovsky.

“Have you had your brandwashing today?”

Slogan on Today Show segment where friends sell brand items to friends.

“The right note, played at the wrong time, is a wrong note.”

Mikeysfunnies.com

Week #6--My Response to Sydney's Free Write--Week Five

This revision really does read much better, Sydney, and as Emmanuel says, makes more sense. I think your changes have made the sensory aspects even more delectable, and the speaker's jealous innuendo adds an emotional complement. I see an opportunity to implement a few end rhymes, if you are interested in doing that:

Crowded musk,
sweat rolled in summer dust,
damp earth and the harsh seeds
of the Silk Road--cardamom,
coriander, star of anise.

I see additional possibilities in "school" and "girl," "red," "thread," and "breath," "now" and "mouths." One benefit of this would be to employ harder consonant sounds at the end of the lines, but it reads nicely just as it is. Very nice, indeed!

Week #6—Free Entry

 

Sign Inventory

Keep door closed

No shirt—no shoes—no service

No food allowed

Please use other door

All deliveries at rear

No smoking

Caution

Slow

Yield

Stop

Wet Floor

Blind drive

Bridge ices in winter

Neighborhood watch

Hospital

Church

City center

Roundabout.

Do Not Enter

Deer crossing

Watch for Children

Falling rocks

Dead End

Open

Closed

Turn cell phones off

Private

Be back at ?

Drive-thru

Keep out

Keep off grass

Pay here

Correct change only

Start

Save as

Don’t save

Restart

Turn off

Log in

Sign out

End Program

Week #6—Sign Inventory

Reality Demands

            by Wislawa Szymborska

Narrative monologue in first person plural voice

Abstractions in “Reality,” “Life,” “Everything,” “Nothing,” “Good Humor man,” “terrifying world,” “times of crisis,” and “moral.”

Eight stanzas with lines of five/eleven/five/nine/seven/nine/three/four

Rich in place names

Specificity in landmarks and details of a location, but also in sixth stanza with Nature references

Seventeen lines of enjambment out of fifty-three.

No rhyme scheme, but similar rhythmic sounds in Borodino, Kosovo, and Jericho, Bilá Hora and Chaeronea, Verdun and Actium, Hiroshima and Maciejowice’s, battlefields and battlegrounds.

Philosophical tone

Internal rhymes in “moving” and “blooming,” “eye” and “lion,” “Everything…Nothing”; “quite nicely,” “pours” and “moored,” “stands” and “man,” “hats” and “that.”

Repetition in “going on…going on,” “Hiroshima…Hiroshima,” “those…those,” “all…all,” “flows…flows,” “a few…a few.”

Alliteration in “continues at Cannae”; “station…square”; “paint on park…Pearl…passes”; “approaching atmospheric”; “dance on their sunlit decks”; “stone still stands”; “producing many products”; “waking up worthwhile”; “grass is green”; “those we remember and those that”; “fir forests”; “gray gravel”; “crisis, you can cower”; “the wind rips hats from unwitting heads, and we.”

Assonance in “world” and “devoid”; “case” and “grass”; “tragic” and “passes”;

Week #6—Improv #2

If I Became a Stone

                        By So Chong-Ju

If I became

a stone

stone would become

lotus

lotus,

lake

and if I became

a lake

lake would become

lotus

lotus,

Stone.

If You Should Go Away

                        by Pauline Rodwell

If you should

go away

away must be

far

far,

near

and if you should

be near

near must be

far

far,

Away.

Week #6—Improv #1

A riff off of Yannis Ritsos’ “Penelope’s Despair”

 (See Week #5—Sign Inventory)

Odysseus’ Dismay

Was this the woman sequestered in his mind’s eye

for the last two decades?

Her glossy long locks drabbed with wisps of gray—

her once bulbous breasts now sunken like abandoned ships

on the reefs of her eroded ribs, her sleepy, gap-toothed smile

a forced apposition to her knitted brow.

Was this the same house they had shared—

where they now warily scored the distance between them?

He gazed at her over the fastidious greens and browns

of her hand-looped rugs, freshly crimsoned

from the imprudent imposters who had fatally presumed him

dead or deadbeat,

scanned her quaint collection of hand-thrown pots and jars

askew in their arched alcoves along the Great Hall,

and marked her wedding gift to him of a bow and quiver

of arrows dangling impotently above the entryway.

And who was that impatient youth standing beside her?

It was difficult, but not impossible, for him to recall

the day he had left her weeping—the vigor of a different

manner of conquest pumping through his veins.

Should he risk explaining everything to her now—

the Sirens? Calypso? and those insidious sea tides
that betrayed time after time?

Perhaps he would wait until after dinner,

until after they had drunk some wine and lain together,

until they had slumbered, until dawn if necessary,

until it all felt familiar again.