My Words Paid a Visit - ROW80 - Preptober

 

Christina Aguilera - Say Something

Well.  I started journaling again late Thursday after Mom was in bed.  It began as an exercise in testing out my lap desk set up in bed for my new Windows Fusion Tablet with my Zagg Bluetooth keyboard.  I was writing in Scrivener but not in a file purposed to something specific.  

I had just installed Scrivener on the Fusion but had no access to files created on the other Windows computers yet and until I have a backup procedure that includes syncing files I didn't want to work on any of those files on the Fusion.  So I had created a scratch pad file called Write Now.  This is actually a thing I've done since my first computer.  

This gives me the ability to take notes, have a copy/paste clipboard for complex posts, and write for any file in any ap on any device on impulse knowing it is just a matter of copy/pasting it into the intended file.  If that file is on a different device I might email the text to myself or copy/paste into Evernote.  

When I started paying for Evernote so I could have it on unlimited devices I'd hoped I'd be able to use it as the scratchpad directly but the interface can't keep up with the speed of my typing and slowing down to accommodate it interrupts my thoughts and keeps me focused on the tech rather than my words.

So I started typing (at first it was all about the typing, the feel of the keyboard, the view of the screen, the feel of my posture) and since I needed something to type I just started typing the word 'words' and phrases with the word 'words' in it.  Soon this became me having a conversation with 'my words' about their missing status.

No conversation isn't quite right.  It was more like a cross between prayer and tongue-lashing; begging and bargaining.  Soon I had a large chunk of unbroken text with no caps, no punctuation, no breaks, and lots of typos.  My typical 'shitty' first draft.  Though calling these things 'first draft' is a stretch because 90% of them I deem word vomit and never look back.

This time though, there was something drawing me forward.  There was a rhythm and if began to feel as though it were singing to me. I was even hearing music in my head that seemed familiar but at the same time new.  And that  music and rhythm began to impose more form on the text and next thing I became aware of was the arrival of mental images, metaphors and moving pictures--all the elements of story!  Or at least how story announces itself to me.

I went with it for a total of twenty to thirty minutes and then started reading it over and looking for places for natural breaks.  Thinking paragraphs at first but it soon became obvious this was not prose but a free verse poem and possibly even a song if I knew how to make the music for it..  Five hours later I posted 'Say Me Else I Shall Not Be'.  

It was after 5am and my alarm was going to go off in less than four hours.  I was too wound to sleep.  It was a good thing Mom was leaving for my brother's before lunch.  At first I intended to at least try for a nap before my alarm went off but I had to get up to get something to eat as I knew I wouldn't sleep without that and while I was eating I sat at my desk and did a search on YouTube for phrases beginning with the word 'Say' or 'Speak' and eventually hit on 'Say Something'  

With the first notes even before the first words, I recognized it as the piece faint memories of had been influencing my poem.  I spent the next three hours listening to various versions and covers and eventually ended up with the two I've embedded here as my top two favorites which I've listened to over and over for the last two and a half days. Multiple dozens of times. 

Some combination of writing the poem and listening to this song has created a calm state for me.  I'm no longer (for now) having meltdowns.  I get weepy but I am not soaking my pillow or shirt with tears, sucking a belly full of air or curled in a ball holding my breath in an attempt to make no sound as I bawl like a tantrumming toddler.  As I had been for seven straight days.

There were some moments while writing the long unbroken text that became 'Say Me Else I Shall Not Be' that I thought I was recognizing suicidal ideation which I had been free of since the late 90s and I was briefly scared.  But then I realized that what it really was was a plea for my life with the words that had abandoned me because I'd long understood my words were my tether to reality.  

Whether I was writing on paper or screen or on that screen that is my mind I had had the habit since early childhood of composing a running narrative of the the events as they transpire.  When I loose that I loose the ability to maintain a sense of reality, to keep the daydreams and fantasy separate from 'what is really happening'.  There is no way to function in the real world when that happens.

As to my goals since Wednesday.  Failure across the board except for the journaling exercise that became the poem.  I'm good with that.  A small price to pay for a huge payoff.

If I could carry a tune I would sing this song to Ed:

Lyrics to Say Something
by A Great Big World:

Say something, I'm giving up on you.
I'll be the one, if you want me to.
Anywhere, I would've followed you.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
And I am feeling so small.
It was over my head
I know nothing at all.
And I will stumble and fall.
I'm still learning to love
Just starting to crawl.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you.
Anywhere, I would've followed you.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
And I will swallow my pride.
You're the one that I love
And I'm saying goodbye.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
And I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you.
And anywhere, I would have followed you.
Oh-oh-oh-oh say something, I'm giving up on you.
Say something, I'm giving up on you.
Say something...

Say Something - Pentatonix

Backstory highlights and high and low notes:

2013 Piles of Painted Echoes

2013 Our Broken Valentine

2013 Together We Are Amazing

2015 My Heart is the Lake of Fire

2020 Who Am I Without You?

2020 Sunday Serenity - Sorting My Stuff

2020 Of Truth and Words and Rude Epiphanies.

2020 Sunday Serenity - Sads & Hugs - LOLcat Therapy - ROW80 Check-in

2020 In Memorium: Go Forth Ed and Be in Peace

2020 Sunday Serenity - Wallowing - ROW80 & NaNoWriMo Goals

2020  A Sad So Big- ROW80 - Preptober

A Round of Words in 80 Days

Round 4 2020

The writing challenge that

 knows you have a life

NaNoWriMo 2020

2020 Round 4 ROW80 and NaNo goals:

Sleep 7.5 hours Daily Minimum --  This used to be a major challenge for me but I've got it managed since mid March.  Or at least I had until this past week.  Grief has taken a toll.

Move/Breathe/Meditate 15 min Daily minimum  -- proven to provide a high yield return on investment as whenever I've practiced any of them it stimulates creativity, memory, and insight; lowers anxiety, and increases energy, stamina and a positive mood.

Storydreaming with note-taking tools at hand. 15 min Daily MInimum -- This is a technique I learned from Robert Olen Butler in the book From Where You Dream.

Read Fiction 30 min Daily Average

Read/Study Craft 15 min Daily Average 

Social network activities 30 min Daily Minimum (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc) -- something I've a strong resistance to.  The autism diagnosis helps explain this but doesn't let me off the hook.  If anything it makes it more important.  Plus this is preparing the ground for future promotion once I'm ready to publish

30 min Daily minimum engagement with a scavenger hunt though all my creative writing files including Joystory looking for better than shitty first draft scenes, sections, stories, poems and essays and edit, organize and make hard copies. --  It's been years since I've made clean copies of manuscripts in my portfolios and for most of the noveling writing challenges I've never printed hardcopy.  That is a lot of words to mine as between 2004 and 2015 I participated in more than one such challenge per year-- Nanowrimo, Junowrimo, Camp Nano, ROW80 and Sweating for Sven.among them.  That is a lot of novella length WIP just gathering electron dust.  A conservative estimate is over 20.  I've been wondering for sometime now if the neglect of these stories after the challenges were over is at least partly responsible for the storyworld's elusiveness over the last several years.  I'm hoping that this exercise in honoring their existence will cure my character's recent shyness.

To prep for self-pub: Gather all my poems into a single Scrivener file. Minimum one poem per day until all accounted for.  Adding new ones encouraged.  This will take most of the Round as there are over 80. See Poems by Joy Renee Portal.  Another exercise in honoring old work to encourage new work.

Via the above mentioned Scavenger hunt: Collect everything resembling personal essay into a Scrivener file.  Either this will be added to the self-pup poetry ebook or will become the second ebook.  Or a combo of those options.

Personal Journaling 20 min or 500 words whichever comes first Daily Minimum -- This is the heart of the writing challenge.  The preceding provides the structure and the nutrients that nurtures and honors the work which I've learned over time must exist to ensure that this becomes more than just dabbling. 

NaNo Novel 1666 words per day on average. Am going to rebel a bit and bring back a previous NaNo WIP and rework it.  It is fitting because it's premise was rooted in the dynamics of my own marriage. I'm hoping this can be an exercise in grief processing. It's title is The Storyteller's Spouse and it was an exercise in 'unreliable narrator'.  The wife in my story is a YA novelist and the husband is a life-of-the-party natural born storyteller aka raconteur aka tall-tale-teller. I think the reason I got discouraged with the effort after that NaNo ended was because I had tried to lay all the unreliableness at the feet of the husband not realizing how much the wife's denial about the extent to which his storytelling was not confined to social gatherings put her squarely in the same camp. Older and wiser now. 

 Am tweaking this goal to combine Storytellers Spouse with another story.  I had forgotten that I've made it a tradition since 2008 to write my election year NaNo in the same storyworld as Mobile Hopes which is set in a mobile home park called Hope Estates.  Each of the novels is set during its election year and the families in the park are living the issues that dominate the campaigns: health, jobs, housing, immigration, women's rights, law and order, climate change, race relations and so on.  Alll I have to do is have the characters move into Hope Estates and share the novel with several other families and I don't have a reworking of an old NaNo but a new story in the Hope Estates series. 

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Say Me Else I Shall Not Be

Say Me Else I Shall Not Be

by

Joy Rnee

Words gone astray

Gone away

Gone

Words gone missing

Stolen away

Gone

Words gone south

Gone out of my mouth

Gone

Gone out of my mind

Wordless I wail,

Words! Oh my words

Where are you?

Words fail?

Me?!

Words be!

Be!

I command thee.

Words now! says me.

Say me

Else I shall not be.

How am I without you?

Who am I without you?

Words! My words! Return unto me!

Words! Be mine again.

Oh my word

Do not deny me

Do not betray me

Must I beg?

I will beg.

Beggar am I

See me? A

Wordless beggar

Wandering circuitous streets

Sightless

For you my light

Refuse to shine.

How shall I find my way without you?

Who will find me without your signal?

Without words there is no significance.

Without significance, I stumble

Down dark alleys of woe

With tattered thoughts aflutter

About my brow.  

A crown of unknowing.

Clothed in a snarl of tangled threads

Shod in flip-flopping moods

I fall and nothing stays me

I reach out and nothing reaches back

For there are no words

Wordless I crawl among the shards

Of the unmaking of my world

Shedding trains of thought that

Scuttle off undefined

Aborted by silence.

Never to be.

Hear my plea.

Soon!

Soon!

You must say me

Else I shall not be.

Rereading this on Sunday, I can see I've still got some punctuation cleanup to do to clarify meaning.  I will be editing this once I get it figured out in the draft.

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Kahil Gibran: Embracing Defeat as the Source of Wisdom

Kahil Gibran's poem Defeat gives me a new perspective on making mistakes, not measuring up, not meeting expectations: Defeat is our teacher, our companion on our path who reminds us the path is the point not the destination which may on any given day prove to be nowhere we want to be anyway.

Defeat can remind us that some destinations are not what they seem when we fix on them, that if we persist in directing all our efforts toward them they will prove to be desolate or worse, desolating of our souls: Perfection, fame, praise, awards, power, recognition, riches, to name a few, are glittering prizes with empty or decaying centers if pursued and grasped for themselves.  If you make them the point the path itself is pointless.

This has reminded me that the theme of my storyworld --the fruits of the Spirit--is supposed to be the point of the whole project.  The vision was to have these fruits embodied in the characters.  But somehow I've lost, or in some cases, never gained, the ability to embody them in my own life.  I forgot to make Spirit my own destination.  With that dereliction I've turned my project into an empty exercise of ego.  No wonder the words have wearied of me.

Love, joy, peace, hope, faith, mercy, patience, justice, grace to name just a few of these blessings of Spirit must grow in the compost of defeat as the ego has no need for them.

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Sunday Serenity --Poems for Life

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

There is just something about having poems read aloud to you.

Especially by someone who knows how to read them effectively.

And with a voice like buttered toast.

I've listened to several on this channel but this one is really speaking to me in my current trials.

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Sunday Serenity -- The Old Woman Who

She'll Swallow Almost Anything

This afternoon that old song was playing in head relentlessly and I couldn't resist playing with the words.  I suspect it isn't finished as a few more concepts have arisen I might play with but mostly I've been tweaking word choice, punctuation, rhythm and verse order for hours and I'm still not happy.

The Old Woman Who
by Joy Renee

There was an old woman who swallowed a sigh
I don't know why she swallowed a sigh
she just might cry

There was an old woman who swallowed her pain
to stop it infecting her kith and kin--but all in vain
for she's gone insane

There was an old woman who swallowed her pride
it squirmed and burned and pricked her inside
there's nowhere to hide

There was an old woman who swallowed a lot
that gurgled and curdled and clotted her gut
it moves not a jot
just sits there to rot

There was an old woman who swallowed a lie
that took her for a twisty ride
now her mind is fit to be tied

There was an old woman who swallowed her words
they scratched and sliced and stabbed her innards
she wants to holler and howl and curse
perhaps she'll burst

There was an old woman who swallowed her voice
to keep the peace she had no choice
now it's choking to death her joy

There was an old woman who swallowed her story
said it was boring but she feared its glory
now they grapple in purgatory

There was an old woman who swallowed her fate
which ate and ate
until it escaped

There was an old woman who swallowed her name
hoping to hide herself from shame--
for having no name there's no one to blame

There was an old woman who swallowed her face
it can't be replaced
she won't be embraced
who'd have the grace?

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2014: Forget Me Not

forget-me-not by Alice Popkorn  (cc)

So long 2014.

I will not forget you
but not for trying.
Your whirlygig antics have
ground my nerves raw.

Thanks for the memories...
urm...not so much...
well, one, anyway.
OK...two.

I guess you were an affiliate
of the School of Hard Knocks
and devotee of the theory:
'you must be cruel to be kind'

for you were generous with your cruelty
and stinting of your kindness.
Maybe someday I will thank you for the lessons
having found them crucial to my future joy.

but not today...

Today I say "Get thee hence
before I slam that door on your behind...
and take your 'kindness' with you
to where the sun don't shine."

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Friday Forays in Fiction: The Dark Thread in Stories for Children

Natalie Merchant: Singing old poems to life

Natalie's website

At this 2010 TED talk Natalie Merchant sang five songs from her then new album, Leave Your Sleep in which she had put to music a number of 19th-century poems for children.

I was introduced to Natalie Merchant's music when she was still leader of 10,000 Maniacs in the mid 80s.  I was in my late twenties and in college at the time, studying literature, I was struck by the story elements in many of the songs I heard her singing.

It was some years after that when I learned about the folk song traditions and understood that the roots of the now solo Natalie Merchant were firmly planted there.

My interest in folk music in the early 90s had been sparked by learning from my mother that the songs she had sung to me as a young child had been sung to her as a child by her mother who had said she'd learned them from her mother.  I was trying to trace the origins of one in particular as I'd made it a centerpiece of my story, Ragdoll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes.

That was the song that began:

Oh don't you remember a long time ago
There were two little babes their names I don't know
who wandered away on a bright summer's day
and were lost in the woods I heard people say.

Later in the song the two babes lay down and die and the robins so red covered them with strawberry leaves.

My research (pre Internet) led me to sources that were able to tell me that the song existed in Britain and Europe from as far back as the age of the troubadours and that evidence of it was most plentiful in England and France.

I used to sing it to my sister when she was a baby until she was almost three.  I would have been aged 8 to 11.  The summer she was about to turn three I was rocking her to sleep for her nap and and started to sing that song which was one of my favorites and she piped up saying, Don't sing that song. It's too sad.  So that was the last time I sang it to a child of any age and I sang to a lot of babies and toddlers over the next three decades.

My not quite three year old sister had alerted me to the dark thread that ran through so many of the stories and songs for children.  And once alerted I kept noticing it every time I encountered it.  But I held no judgement for or against it other than noticing how often one of my favorite stories contained that thread.  These stories were always emotionally charged with fear, anger, and sadness and they didn't always have a happy ending.

I remember reading the Disney movie picture books to kids from age 10 or so and up and being annoyed at how sugary they were for I'd encountered earlier versions of the same stories which had not had sweet flavors at all.  I much preferred the pre Disney versions.

This line of thought was opened up again for me by the first song Natalie sings in this video, "The Sleepy Giant" in which a 300 year old giant is reminiscing about his younger years when he ate little boys raw, boiled, or baked and how he now regretted that having reached the conclusion that little boys don't like to be chewed.

My imagination and long interest in that dark thread in children's stories have been ignited.  Now I want to go look for other works from the authors of these five poems and check out all the other authors represented on the album.

And I want the album!!

Natallie's years long project that culminated with the album Leave Your Sleep in 2010 had been to collect poems written for children in the 19th century and put them to music in an effort to revive them before they were lost.

Below I've listed the titles and authors for the 5 songs  You can find the lyrics  here:

• “The Sleepy Giant,” Charles E. Carryl (1841-1920)
• “Spring and Fall: to a young child,” Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
• “The Janitor’s Boy,” Nathalia Crane (1913-1998)  She was still a child herself when her poetry book was published.
• “If No One Ever Marries Me,” Laurence Alma-Tadema (1865-1940)
• “maggie and milly and molly and may,” e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

Davy and the Goblin by Charles E. Carryl was a quite popular book of children's poems for several decades around the turn of the last century.  The first song in the vid is from this book--“The Sleepy Giant.”

Charles E. Carryl (1841-1920) was an insurance salesman who composed nonsense verse for his children

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Sunday Serenity #388: Mother's Day

Mom's 80th Birthday January 8, 2012

A Mother's Day Musing

by Joy Renee

Have you ever noticed,
while flipping the pages
in a family photo album,
how often
mothers seem to not be
in the picture?

Even though we all know,
if we consider for just
one moment,
that every breath

every bite

every step

and every bright

smile
depends on her involvement.

Maybe it's because
she was the one
taking the picture
or so busy making
stuff happen
or just
making stuff--

from matching outfits

to fully outfitted

snowmen

from flapper dresses

to wedding dresses

from birthday cakes

to wedding cakes;

picnics,

stage props,

rag curls,

curly tops,

smart bow ties

and...

matching eyes.

There needs to be,
don't you agree,
more than one day
each year when
the one who makes
it all happen,
who makes home
feel like home,
who frames all the pictures
of our earliest
memories,
is given her rightful
place...

right in the middle

of the picture?

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Joy Renee Juvenilia

Poem by Joy Renee age 14

An high school classmate (and friend) posted these on my fb wall today.  At first the embarrassment was jalapeno hot.  My first thought was to download them and then delete the posts off my wall before anyone else saw them.

But a minute or two of thought cooled me down and I saw that it was fitting in some ineffable way that this showed up like this just a month or two before my scheduled self-pub of my short story, Blow Me a Candy Kiss.  Ineffable does mean hard to put into words and yet I just tried for half an hour.  I give up.

Reading through it again I blush extravagantly at the silliness of this 14 year year old's angst.  Silly or not she was wiser than she knew.  The angst was born in her second guessing herself.  Her first instincts were true. That kid was Trouble with a capital T.

I find it interesting that I was using the poem format to tell a story.  I don't remember having any model for that at the time.  This was over thirty years before Ellen Hopkins popularized it with her YA novels Burned, Crank, Glass etc.

I'm feeling that itch about three inches behind my eyes that often signals the sprouting of a story that needs to boom and grow.  I wonder if I could sustain a story in the poem format for the length of a YA novel.

There's a story begun on those two pages.  There's a story behind that story.  Then there's a story behind how those pages ended up in the possession of that classmate.  A story which I still don't know.  The last time I saw those pages they were tucked inside my 8th grade yearbook.

But because they were in his possession (yes, his, yet another story) they survived while the twenty odd other pieces of my Juvenilia did not.

There is a tangle of stories attached to those two pages.  But  none of them are the one trying to sprout behind my eyes.  I'm not that into memoir.

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A Word Wrangler's Lasso

 Masterwriter 2.0 is a suite of word-finding tools assembled into one package:

Word Families

A unique and revolutionary reference dictionary, that will open up a new world of possibilities for descriptive words and ideas.

Parts of Speech

A comprehensive list of descriptive words, with various filters including alliterations, that allow the writer to be more specific.

Phrases

A collection of over 33,000 phrases, sayings, idioms, and word combinations.

Rhymes

The ultimate Rhyming Dictionary with over 100,000 entries, 36,000 Rhymed-Phrases, and the most comprehensive list of Close Rhymes ever created. Rhymes from our Pop-Culture Dictionary are also included.

Pop Culture

A Pop-Culture Dictionary with over 11,000 icons of American and World Culture.

Dictionary

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. 165,000 entries, 225,000 definitions,
and 10,000 new words and senses.

Thesaurus

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Thesaurus. Over 340,000 synonyms, antonyms, related
and contrasted words, and idioms.

This isn't a review as I've not actually used the software yet which is why I took the tool descriptions off the MW site overview page and put them in quotes.

Not sure what to call this.  A wish-upon-a-far-flung-star?

The software was designed by songwriters for songwriters, lyric writers and poets but it looks equally useful for any kind of writer.  On the Amazon site there were two versions this one and one for the Creative Writer that did not have the Rhyming Dictionary or the Audio features that allows import of music tracks but on the MW site there was no mention at all of the Creative Writer version.

More mystifying than that was the fact that the two versions on Amazon were the same price though value had been removed and not replaced with equivalent value..  At nearly $200 with no upgrade support, a fairly steep price at that.

For unlimited upgrade support you need to lease from MW for a monthly ($9.95) or annual ($99) fee.

To further my confusion there were differences in the description of the tools between the Amazon site and the Masterwriters site.  On Amazon the dictionary and thesaurus were listed as American Heritage and Synonym Finder which I think are better choices.  Especially the Rodale Synonym Finder with its nearly one-million words which I have depended on for three decades and have long desired a searchable electronic version.

Both Amazon and MW call it version 2.0.  So the question becomes which site has the most up-to-date information?

Since I do write poetry as well as stories, essays, blog posts and the current training in copywriting, I would want the songwriter's package.

I think that pop culture dictionary and the phrase dictionary would prove invaluable for copywriting.

Besides the steep-for-me price and the wondering which thesaurus and dictionary is really on board the requirements paragraphs on both Masterwriter and Amazon lacked clarity.  I had to search out and read nearly a dozen online reviews before I was able to learn that yes, Masterwriter will run on Windows 8 tho XP is recommended.  Hmmm.  Gives me more than a bit of pause.  No explanation as to why.

Then there is the issue of the small font.  Always a concern for my visual challenges.  But I use other aps with that issue and have workarounds.

A lot to give me pause.  And yet...

And yet I still yearn.

Because the ability to search such a huge collection of words and phrases and filter by connotation, part of speech, alliteration, rhyme, intensity, number of syllables and positive/negative attributes then save them in favorites lists and collections attached to projects is the equivalent of a cowboy's lasso for the word wrangler. Not just invaluable but essential.

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It Takes Two to Tangle

It Take 2 to Tangle
moar kittehs  see  share  caption

It Takes Two to Tangle
by Joy Renee

I want to tangle with you
(you know who you are).
I want to be caught in sweet snarls,
to be tugged by a tidal moon
and wrangled by octopus hugs
until dawn dreams us awake
and the memory of this ache
furls like morning mist in the sun.
I want to wake wrapped in your arms
to be enraptured by your charms
(yes you, my love, my only one)
I want to tangle with you.

_________


so that was comepletely off the cuff
consider it a draft quite rough

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Piles of Painted Echoes

Piles of Painted Echoes
by Joy Renee

My veins run with menthol
In a rush of icy hot.
I cry into my fear
drinking my dry tears
My voice drowning
In a bitter parch.
Despair's silence bellows
A staccato through
The gravel of my grief

The empty accumulates
In piles of painted echoes
He cries into his fear
Drinking his dry tears
His voice catching
On a jagged glitter
Demands shallow peace,
A sanctuary in which
Slow suicide is chief.

Our vows on the altar
In shreds of ragged rage
We cry into our fear
Drinking our dry tears.
Our voices distorted
By pixeled ether,
Distance morphs hope's
Substance into
Treacherous reefs.

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A Lay on Grass

Sing It Kitteh

The scent of mown grass woke something in me today.

A Lay on Grass

by Joy Renee

Mowers purr in the scintillating air

skiffing the turf snow-blanketed

just yesterday.

The scent of awakenings seeping

into barely cracked car windows

settles on wool

and down-filled wraps, hitching a ride inside

where, harbored in hair it abides

awaiting dark

quietude, that sinking moment dream-snared,

to thrum a rapture of rebirth

laying in wait.

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Writing Is...

i haz a write  2 B hurd

Yesterday I was browsing blogs I've neglected to visit for a long time and saw mention of a meme on West of Mars in which one is to fill in the blank: Writing is like ______

Well that stuck with me over the next several hours as I worked at the sorting and packing of my crochet projects for Sunday's trip. Several possible answers came to me as I mulled and mused. I was drawn to listing them and soon I was writing a poem. The first one in ages. I can't even remember the last one.

Apparently in the space between reading the blog post and starting to write I had lost the word 'like'. After returning to Susan Helene's blog for the link I noticed that and went back to my poem to insert 'like' before each verb int he first line of each verse but it changed too much in several cases--the rhythm, the meaning, the immediacy. So I left it as I wrote it.

Writing Is

Writing is dreaming,

taking you away to other

where, giving glimpses into

that expanding vastness that

is your spirit.

Writing is grieving

for the lost ones, the lost dreams

giving substance to memories,

recovering that sense of

your life's meaning

Writing is weaving

words of golden wisdom from

all your pain and joy to find

hope, like a nova, in the

palm of your hand

Writing is dancing

on fluffy dandelions

spreading their seeds among weeds

whose proliferate leaves ooze

a healing balm

Writing is pitting

your own self against your self

daring to face the challenge

of giving all that you are

without reserve

Writing is looking

deep within the beating heart

of your dankest self loathing,

dissipating its fog with

reason's bright light

Writing is seeking

a knowing of the other

and a quest to be known

by someone acknowledging

you as worthy

Writing is exalting

in the heat of creative

passion that brings forth out of

nothing but thought and yearning

a new being

Writing is journeying

far from the familiar

greeting yourself in the eye

of the raging storm that is

your own desire

Writing is questing

with the heart of a hero

for the prize in the depths of

the pulsing shadows guarded

by fierce dragons

Writing is yearning

for a world of wonders

of mystery, of power, of awe,

which is not to be had lest

we dare chase it

Writing is streaming

the mind of the universe

bringing the brilliant spinning

galaxies circling in a

baroque gavotte

________________________

Now back to the packing. Though not for long as I've had two hours of sleep since Tuesday afternoon. I'm determined to avoid leaving her Sunday morning having already been awake over 24 hours as is my habit. I can't afford to as my sister is leaving town on Monday morning which puts me on duty with Mom only twelve or so hours after I arrive.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

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I tell aspiring writers to read poetry, which I think for them is often the literary equivalent of being told to eat Brussels sprouts. They're none too enthusiastic. But what a shame if a writer doesn't at least try to find poems that speak to him or her. Poets manage to get into a couplet what i struggle to achieve in an entier book.

Louise Penny

Acknoledgements in Brutal Telling

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My Curse Upon Your Venom'd Stang

I've got four bad teeth and possibly a cranky wisdom tooth acting up today so I'm going to be lazy and let Robert Burns do all my talking for me today. I couldn't say it any better myself anyways. The title is linked to a Google scan of an 1887 copy of The Complete Works. The poem is on page 61 and the picture on page 70.

Address to a Toothache

by Robert Burns

My curse upon your venom'd stang,
That shoots my tortur'd gooms alang,
An' thro' my lug gies monie a twang,
Wh' gnawing vengeance,
Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang,
Like racking engines!

When fevers burn, or ague freezes,
Rheumatics gnaw, or colic squeezes,
Our neebors sympathize to ease us
Wi' pitying moan;
But thee! - thou hell o' a' diseases,
They mock our groan!

A' down my beard the slavers trickle,
I throw the wee stools o'er the mickle,
While round the fire the giglets keckle
To see me loup,
An' raving mad, I wish a heckle
Were i' their doup!

Of a' the numerous human dools
Ill-hairsts, daft bargains, cutty stools,
Or worthy frien's laid i' the mools,
Sad sight to see!
The tricks o' knaves, or fash o' fools
Thou bear'st the gree!

Where'er that place be priests ca' Hell,
Where a' the tones o' misery yell,
An' ranked plagues their numbers tell
In dreadfu' raw,
Thou, Toothache, surely bear'st the bell
Amang them a'!

O thou grim, mischief-making chiel,
That gars the notes o' discord squeal,
Till daft humankind aft dance a reel
In gore a shoe-thick,
Gie a' the faes o' Scotland's weal
A townmond's toothache!

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The Last Minute Artiste

Am going to be starting this book immediately after posting. Its due at the library tomorrow. I'm going to read straight through for as much as I can until I finish it or until I need to get ready to go to the library or until my eyes give out. It is 243 pages and they aren't large pages tho the prose is of the sort I'm likely to savor so I can't speed-read.

Why am I just now starting it when it is due tomorrow which must mean I've had it in my possession for a time [three weeks actually] and could get it again eventually?

Good question. Can't answer it. Stubborn maybe. Or don't want to live with the regret and disappointment after sending it back. It's set her beside my computer for the last two weeks and I keep promising myself that just as soon as _______ [fill in the blank] I'll pick it up.

There are 5 people in queue for it and only one copy in the system so if every one of those 5 do what I did, it would be five months before I could hope to see it again.

Yep, Ms Last Minute. That's me. I'm an artiste at procrastination. Also at overcommitment.

Maybe if it were just any old story I could let it go and wait for half a year for another turn. But it is a story that muses upon story telling itself, upon words and their uses in prose and poetry, upon beauty and how we dare to imagine we can create it with our words.... Listen to the author, Nicholson Baker, muse on the writing of this book in the vid below:

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Book Review: Impulse by Ellen Hopkins

Impulse
by Ellen Hopkins
(c) 2007
Margaret K. McElderry Books
666p

Three teens' lives intersect in a psychiatric hospital after their failed suicide attempts. All three of them had been failed catastrophically by the adults in their lives. The story is told by alternating first person POV scenes from Tony, Vanessa and Conner. Tony, whose home life had been so abusive he found living on the streets preferable had resorted to intentional OD. Vanessa, raised by a bi-polar mother and an absent (military) father had long been a cutter to ease her pain had slit her wrists. Conner whose cold, unaffectionate parents obsessed about his performance in school and on the football field, had shot himself in the heart.

In the course of their treatment the three are able to forge connections of emotional intimacy that offer hope of healing and a foundation for a future.

Like Hopkin's other novels, Crack, Glass, Burned, Identical and the recently released Tricks, the story is told in verse. And as with Crack and Burned which I read two years ago, I continue to be fascinated with

...the way Hopkins weaves dozens of one or two page poems that in many cases can stand alone into an intricately plotted, emotionally cathartic and psychologically complex story. The poems are sometimes rhyming and sometimes free verse and often carved out of space as well as molded with words as Hopkins uses placement of whitespace around lines and verses to indicate mood, theme or pace.

Hopkins' books have become a phenomenon among teens in the last half decade and won a number of awards in the literature for young adults category. I have my own teen-aged niece to thank for introducing me to Hopkins and loaning me her own copies of Crack, Burned and Impulse. Now I guess I'm going to have to compete with the local teens for a turn with the public libraries copies of Glass, Identical and Tricks.

Excerpts of Impulse and the other Hopkins novels can be found here. I encourage you to check them out.

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Monday Poetry Train #65

Lisa Marie Regan - Tulsa

The Scope of Hope
by Joy Renee

Hope: the path
Forward my feet trod
In joy shod.

It's 8:05 PM PST
November 4, 2008
and I'm crying as if my heart is breaking.
But the feeling is the opposite of grief.
It is joy. It is relief.
It is like a mending of the shattering--
the gathering and fusing of the parts,
of the many scattered shards
of my heart.

This freight of dreams we must
remember--for posterity's sake--
long time coming, swift appears to exclaiming
cheers, but the feeling is ephemeral, brief.
It is joy. It is relief.
It's a commending to our hands, for sheltering
against extinguishing, this precious spark
now shared among scattered hearts,
this our hope.

Inspired hearts
Conjoined in hope
Effect change.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I reworked and expanded the piece I began in the minutes after the election results were announced last week. In order to balance out the opening haiku, I added to the ending the haiku that I wrote months ago and have had in my sidebar for awhile now.

While I was looking for images to post with this, I ran across the following video of Will I Am which expresses exactly the same thing I was trying to above--that the exultation of the moment, wonderful as it feels, is only the beginning. We must continue to invest the same energy, cooperation, imagination and hope that was put into the campaign into the work that is before us for we are the change we have been waiting for.

Hop on the train.

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Monday Poetry Train #64

I've talked about Lawson Fusao Inada here a number of times. He has been Oregon's Poet Laureate and an America Book Award winner but that isn't my main motive for continuing to bring him up. He was my creative writing professor in the late eighties when I attended Southern Oregon College in Ashland Oregon. (Southern Oregon University today.) I am bringing it up again today because I've got a DVD of him reading his poems and talking about his childhood in the American internment camps checked out of the library. Not the one above but What It Means To Be Free.

Lawson Inada was the one who woke me up to the power and potential of my own unique viewpoint and pointed toward the way to develop my own voice. We studied and practiced both poetry and fiction in his class. Before doing the poetry section with him I had never considered poetry to be part of my path as a writer. I wrote for his class the first poem that I continued to like as time passed. I see Soul Mirror as one of the first true things I made out of my own heart and knowledge. It still speaks to me in startling ways to this day.

I took his contemporary literature class as well which introduced me to the power voices and stories of women and non-WASP writers. These stories opened the world up to me and probably helped prepare me in ways I can only guess at when the moment of my break with my childhood religion came in the early 90s. I cannot overstate the influence this amazing man has had on my development as an artist and a thinker in my own right. I first learned from him two of the techniques for tapping into inspiration (aka the right side of the brain or non-linear thought) which I continue to use: listening to music and gazing at art. Once we had learned how that felt, he taught us how to gaze at the world around us and see it fresh.

He gave me personally the assignment to describe something I saw on my daily forty-five minute bus ride to school every day. I described a woman I saw on the bus who appeared to be talking to herself or possibly performing on a stage only she was aware of--a woman with red hair down to her waist and a face that looked like a shelled walnut. That woman walked onto the stage of my first Faye story as Estelle Star in 'Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities.' Which story I also began as an exercise for his class. The story that grew to become my Fruits of the Spirit story world with a cast of dozens.

Because I'm busy with the kickoff of NaNoWriMo and at least partially because we lost power last night for five hours between 10:15 PM and 3:30AM, pretty much the entirety of my usual work session, I didn't get a new poem written for today so I'll just leave the link to my Poem Portal in which I try to keep links to all my poems posted in Joystory. It needs to be updated some. More recent poems missing from the portal can be found through the Poems by Joy Renee Lable below this post.

Oh, and I can point to the poem at the top of my sidebar under Obama's picture. That's one of my Haiku. And with that, I will take the opportunity to encourage all my American reader's to VOTE tomorrow. Whoever you favor, VOTE. It is the most solemn duty of every American. VOTE.

Since Rhian has been too busy to keep Monday Poetry Train running lately, Gautami Tripathy has taken on that task until Rhian can return. Find more passengers here.

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