8/30/16

For Your Enjoyment: The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon

For Your Enjoyment:

The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon (in Apex Magazine).

It is 14 thousand words, but worth it. The fantasy aspect of the story doesn't come into play until you've learned to enjoy your narrator's voice, a good lesson to you omniscient types. Read the story. Be inspired by it.

Possible writing exercise: Sustenance is vital to life, so food and water will always be key in places where life and death are both near at hand, which is also the fertile ground for so many wonderful conflicts. Use a character who very much enjoys gardening, especially for a specific type of food or herb as one of the main characters of your story or poem. Do some research and get facts right, drop interesting tidbits.


8/26/16

8/26/16: Ekphrastic Exercise: Up on Melancholy Hill

Daily Exercise Genre: Ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis is from Greek meaning the description of a work of art as a rhetorical device. That's actually pretty straight forward, but another way to look at it, is it's highfalutin fan fiction, usually about paintings or pieces of music, but it can be about virtually anything. Look at or listen to the following piece of art and write a piece of prose or poetry that is inspired by some aspect of it.

Listen to and watch the video for "On Melancholy Tree" by the Gorillaz

Grab onto something. Listen avidly, look closely. Find something to love and grow that love in your mind until you can't help but let it burst from you. Express it in words. This is the best part of existence.

Every exercise is an adventure in tiny loves. Discovery and the infatuation for what makes it it is the lifeblood of creativity.



8/25/16

8/19/16

For your enjoyment: Campbell McGrath's "Capitalist Poem #5"

For your enjoyment: Campbell McGrath's "Capitalist Poem #5" in its original line configuration.

I noticed while trying to link to Campbell McGrath's "Capitalist Poem #5" that the most popular, and potentially the only text version of this poem has the stanzas messed up. It is from McGrath's first collection Capitalism, and in an interview with Smartish Pace (if you aren't a frequent reader of SP you should start now) he said:
"In graduate school I began to write a series of "Capitalist Poems," beginning with "Capitalist Poem #5." Those poems for me mark the beginning of my "authentic" voice as a poet. They were still young poems, but in them I began to identify the subject matter from which my poetry would spring-American culture and commerce and discourse and dissonance, the search for place and community in our contemporary world. In some senses my writing has evolved far beyond those early poems, but in another sense I am still writing them. The 7-11 was the iconic heart of those poems, and I'm sorry that my life today does not include a 7-11-they don't have too many down here in Miami." 
Instead of typing the poem up again, I decided to just take a picture of the poem in the book, which isn't exactly the easiest book to get ahold of. I know I bought my copy used for $30 almost a decade ago, now the cheapest copy used on Amazon is $34, so you know, inflation. "Capitalist Poem #5 is fairly commonly anthologized I believe, I know it is in Ryan C Van Cleave's very good anthology "Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes" but in that incarnation there are no stanza breaks at all, and I much prefer the broken version that appears in Capitalism. Enjoy



Possible writing exercise: Take a month of your life in which you followed a steady routine whether from work or hobby or school or whatever driving force put you on a very repetitive schedule and think of things that you did over and over again. Write those down as a list poem. If you can tie it up with an overarching statement that indicates something you did not know while you were doing those things which you would have wanted to know (or know at least of, so that you might remedy your ignorance).




8/13/16

Three things exercise: Donald Trump in WWI

For today's exercise write a piece of poetry or prose that somehow utilizes the following three things (ideally, not in throwaway dialog, but as vital pieces of the story):




Steel Blue, Normandy, FR, Donald Trump




So, let's go with this. This can be awesome. 

8/12/16

8/11/16

8/6/16

8/5/16

8/4/16