Non-Linear Growth Zone

i like chris' idea from the comment on the post below. so whenever a poem inspiration comes to us, we should post it, and then people could respond if inspired.


(from a google search for "linear thought bad"):

"Non-linear writing, he says, is nearly the entire history of writing before Nietzsche. Linear thought is a reduction of history, just one way that this style of writing exaggerates reality. We can see how Nietzsche’s monologue style of writing would be preferred, since it is more faithful to exposing the prejudice of linear-writing. Monologues are part of the “de-sedimenting” of linear-writing. We are re-reading the past according to a “different organization of space.” Science, it must be noted, is inherently linear, stuffy, and prejudiced. Scientific writing has its own “onto-theology” and its style of writing itself says a great deal about how it views reality. This incompetence of science is likewise an incompetence of philosophy. Derrida says, “Because we are beginning write differently, we must begin to re-read differently.” Science, like declarative and omni-expounding writing styles, is thus an “infinitst theology,” which are “always logocentric.” The suggestion is that scientific-writing would be more faithful to reality if it were more ”Nietzschean”, although Derrida does not explicitly say this. And Derrida is calling for an end to these more false styles of writing, which is why he uses apocalyptic words like “eschatological” and so on."

my assignment: mock spoken word poem

pending of chris' completion of his own assignment, here's another idea to work on :)
write a mock spoken word poem. guildelines included but not required or limited to:
a spoken-wordish rhythm
overtly sexual metaphors or references
overtly sexual metaphors or references related to nature
some kind of liberal agenda or point (this could be taking the opposite political direction in your mock poem)
some description of how big your dreams/mouth/etc are

again, these are just ideas for your mock spoken word poem. i guess the key is that it can be read like a spoken word piece.

my attempt

Sunset Magazine, cover story "Backyard Zen: the Happy Gardener in You"

carrot seeds

trowel

orange Crocs

"The Joy Of Gardening," hardcover

foam kneepads

sun hat

sunblock, s.p.f. 30

heavy gloves

Aspirin, 50 ct.

carrot seeds

carrot seeds

carrot seeds

Aspirin, 50 ct.

"Definitive Guide to Garden Pests," 3rd edition, paperback

chicken wire, 20 yds.

3' wooden stakes, 4

carrot seeds

"Gardening for Dummies"

chicken wire, 80 yds.

3' wooden stakes, 20

burlap sacks, 100

garden hoe

scuffle hoe

shovel

soil thermometer

hand pruners

bow rake

blue Crocs

fertilizer, organic, 50 lbs.

sunglasses

carrot seeds

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" DVD

pliers

steel wire, 100 ft.

rat poison, 1 box

weed killer, 1 liter

RETURN ITEM: "Rabbit-Proof Fence" DVD

carrot seeds

rat poison, 24 boxes

weed killer, 2 gallons with hand pump

carrot seeds

DIRECT PAY CONTRACTOR SERVICE: Andy's Rodent Control

sunblock, s.p.f. 50

Yard-Master 40hp 3-in-1 ride-on mower

tiller attachment for Yard-Master 40hp 3-in-1 ride-on mower

pollen masks, box of 10

pruning saw

weed killer, 2 gallons with hand pump

weed killer, 2 gallons with hand pump

weed killer, 2 gallons with hand pump

carrots

this was hard. i pondered it for days. result:

A Week in Receipts

loaf of wonder bread, wheat
bag of hot cheetos
bagel bites
frozen pizza
can of sprite
castrol motor oil
tampons
lottery ticket

string cheese, five sticks
milk
loaf of wonder bread, wheat
lean cuisine microwave dinner
dove shampoo
lottery ticket

champagne, 24 bottles

flip flops
surf board wax
sun tan lotion
travel neck-support pillow
postage stamps
"aloha, hawaii" postcards

ferrari logo keychain
leopard print car seat covers
automobile-fitted sub-woofers
sirius satellite radio
GPS navigation unit

i-phone

diamond ring
diamond earings
victoria's secret catalougue
Absolutely Givenchy perfume
curtains, purple, seven sets
silk king-sized comforter and sheets, lavender

bag of hot cheetos
bagel bites
string cheese, five sticks
can of sprite

ASSIGNMENT THREE

Write a receipt poem.

This may be out of order for me to do (since all of the assignment twos are not in), but I have never been a patient person (which may seem quite hypocritical after my comment about the "well..." post), and yesterday I found a funny receipt that reminded me of one of the better poems I have ever heard live.

http://indiefeedpp.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=241771# (click on the "pod" button at the top and download the .mp3, ignore the babble at the end)
(Or just click here)

I was tempted to write a receipt poem myself and pass of the idea as my own, but the little voice in my head said it would be disengenuous (the voice does not know how to spell, it is only a voice after all), so I figured I would send this out as inspiration and put forth a call for imitation.

(more parenthesis)

(chris)

New uses of my free time

A number of phrases:

1) "the caprices of the 405."

The first thing that came to mind when I saw this assignment was this simple phrase I saw in a book of essays I was reading a week ago. One of these essays was about how a kid from Inglewood had to catch a bus to get to a good school on the other end of L.A. I love the phrase because it very succinctly puts how a citizen can view something partially of his own creation as capricious. Quality.

2) related phrases: "the luxuriant growth of objects" and "America's remarkable ability to sustain demand"

These come from a couple of economics texts that I have been reading, and the assumptions behind these two phrases are incredible. The first makes huge (but realistic) assumptions about the things that underpin our economic growth, and the second, speaks of our supposed savior from a horrible recession. They just reminded me that the way in which so many people write about our world is frightening.... I will refrain from any further ranting at this point (it very much digresses from poetry).

3) Actual poetry. Perhaps my favorite poem of all time:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Brian, I am pretty sure I have sent this to you before, but I supposed I would put it out again, as it still sums up many of my ponderings about mankind. So many great little adjectives in there, perhaps a few too many, but I still love it.

well

looks like we've dropped to a 50% response rate... :(

Ecca, what do you want to do next?

Apocalypse

I'll go with one word that I really like, and then a couple of related passages.

Apocalypse comes directly from the Greek word apokalupsis, and literally means revelation, usually in reference to a final day of judgment. An "apocalypse" is a revelation at the end of the world, or a prophecy of such a revelation. In popular usage, though, apocalypse usually takes on a simpler meaning: "the end of the world as we know it."

The word we should be using is eschaton, which really does mean "the end of the world" or "climax of history" or "the day on which the apocalypse occurs" or "the day at the end of time." The complete phrase is apokalupsis eschaton, "the revelation at the end of an age."

Pretty cool, right?

Here's my favorite part: apokalupsis comes from the Greek verb apokalyptein, "to uncover or unveil." And (according to Wikipedia) the most literal translation of apokalupsis is not "the revelation," but "the lifting of the veil."

So when we talk about the apocalypse, the end of the world, we're talking about the lifting of the veil. Isn't that poetic?

Yeah, it's only because we swapped apokalupsis for eschaton that we have this poetic mistranslation, but still, it's a description with some merit: when this age (say the age of humans, or the age of life on earth) ends, it's the lifting of the veil - the end of an illusion or the waking from a dream.

That's probably a lot more etymology than anyone wants, so how about some cool apocalyptic passages:

These two are from The Road, a new post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy. The two characters, a father and his young son, are just barely alive after a nuclear war killed everything. No plants, no animals, no blue skies, no sunsets - the world has become an empty gray waste that's always cloudy and always cold.

"He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone." (11)

I admire the way McCarthy abuses the crap out of standard grammar. I think there are only two complete sentences in that paragraph. But his language is so solid - lots of heavy words, everything is strong and balanced - that the fragments don't bother me at all. Instead of a fluid narrative, that flows like a ribbon, he's serving up little chunks of language like gravel. But you still get a good sense of rhythm - "carried forth and scattered and carried forth again" has a back and forth, soft-to-hard-to-soft kind of swishiness that I like a lot, and the paragraph as a whole has a consistent slow cadence.

"They sat there in silence with their hands outheld to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the cold despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever." (88-9)

I just like the idea of the entire world melting away. Once the physical stuff is gone, your memory of all those things begins to fade. The physical world was destroyed by a war and now the man's mental image of that world is rotting away to nothing. I especially like the final image, "Drawing down like something to preserve heat." The man's body fights to keep warm in the cold, and his mind fights to maintain the memories of life, warmth, color, and meaning in the empty gray wasteland, but both are going to lose to the cold eventually.

A slightly happier view of the (human) apocalypse, from Sara Teasdale:

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

[...]

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

A passage I really like

"i carry your heart" by ee cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear
no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


i really like the way he put the words together, i guess. simple words. and i like the way that he starts out by saying "i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart) as a simple fact and then at the end he is describing the deepest secret, and it turns out to be the aforementioned phrase. slick, ee.


That might have been too long. so here's a shorter passage. Whitman, this time. i know it didn't have to be poetry, but this was the only stuff i could think of, unless you wanted to hear me rant about the amazing lyrics of Jesse Lacey from Brand New (the band i am obsessed with).

A child said, *What is the grass?* fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff
woven.

So, i really like this mostly because i think my disposition is grass, too.
Okay, sweet.

ASSIGNMENT TWO

This one is easy!

Post some words that you really like. Could be a passage from a book, a quote from a song, a poem, a blurb on the back of a cereal box, whatever. Some words that you like.

AND, if you can, please add a few lines at the end describing why you like these words so much.

OH NO MY POEM IS LATE

Late.

A late poem,

past the midnight hour.

Is there an earthquake?

Bob Dylan reincarnation?

Caffeine pills,

distort the lateness,

26 maladjusted chickens.

Veggie Pizza

Veggie Pizza

The only time I smoked the marijuana,
I got really outrageously high.
And the strongest sensation I can remember
(apart from not being able to remember anything)
was how badly I missed veggie pizza.

Now you can't really say that I had the munchies,
because i didn't want to consuuume the pizza, per se.
But the memory of that soft Wilbur Dining crust
and perfectly layered gooey cheese,
topped with all kinds of yummy steamed (NOT ROASTED) veggies,
soaked in about an eighth of a bottle of Tapatio--

made me devastatingly homesick.
Unreality, I noticed, was pretty interesting, and not all bad.
But the fact that it would not give me veggie pizza,
which I knew to be the most perfect Platonic form in the whole wide real world,
was severely disappointing.

And that is how i became homesick for veggie pizza,
which i now eat every chance i get,
and thank the whole wide real universe for giving me
that one perfect Platonic form of all that is good and tasty.

Advice on being cliché

a.k.a. 4 greeting cards combined into one poem:

Run, run away
To find your spirit anew
Look for a place to grow
That will be your new home.

Talk with those around you,
They will be your muses.
Think about what confounds you,
Those thoughts will be your reasons.

Do what you love in life,
Money won’t make you happy.
Live each day to its fullest,
Because it could be your last.

Think of yourself as a butterfly,
Floating through the forest.
Life is full of new trees,
New flowers left to land on.

ok i'll go first

this is a sure-fire winner:


i like rabbits
they have these ears
that... you know, they're soft.

rabbit ear is a soft ear
soft floffy wuff-ear

i had a rabbit named Peter
fed him lettuce

then one day the lettuce
left him upside down

like one of those turtles
after mario jumps on its head

goodbye, Peter
I liked your ears
and sorry
about that lettuce

ASSIGNMENT NUMBER ONE

Ahhh, here we go.

Laugh a little, embarrass yourself a little, grow a little.


ASSIGNMENT NUMBER ONE, due SUNDAY at 11:59 p.m. P.S.T. (unless there's another power outage), is to write something that you honestly believe is bad. Humiliate and offend yourself.

Go!