Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.
Month: July 2015
Poem dump
Since I hardly have time to post on this blog lately, I’m going to drop a couple different pieces on you per post that have nothing to do with each other. I like using this blog as a portfolio of sorts so I want to get as much uploaded to it as possible without making 6 different posts in one day.
So! Here it comes. The great unloading of the past week(ish)’s worth of work.
The first is a revised version of a poem I posted earlier.
My prof had some great suggestions for how to make the poem read faster, as it was dragging its feet before workshop.
The next two I’ll mash together since they’re both experiments in our latest class endeavor: chapbooks.
I was playing around with a possible cover for my chapbook here. This one is made from a page out of Basic Tools of Research and coffee grounds laminated on top. The grounds didn’t entirely allow for lamination so some of them shake and move around a bit, kind of like an etch-a-sketch.
And this little guy above is a bolder attempt at a chapbook, made from laminated gum wrappers (a regular cast member in my visual art, lately) and masking tape. Objectively, it’s the cutest thing.
Finally, my latest workshop poem. This version’s the revised one based on suggestions from my prof (get rid of “The” at the beginning of the second stanza, get rid of the final word in the poem) and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I created it out of the casual encounters section of Craigslist, which now shows up as a visited link on my browser. I’m shameless.
In other news, my Vonnegut blog is starting to come together which is fun. I’d still love it if you peeped it sometime soon. It has inspired me to ramble less (perhaps my biggest blogging faux pas) and to make my posts more interactive. Expect TDIM to improve some, I guess is what I’m getting at. Shit, am I rambling? Okay, I’m done. Now.
Cheating on my blog
It’s a good thing no one reads this blog religiously enough to notice when I neglect it.
And I really don’t mean to neglect it! This blog is an extension of myself. I made it on the cusp of a real creative breakthrough in my poetry and I can’t– won’t — throw it away.
But, for the time being, it looks like TDIM is gonna take the backseat to my new blog, Vonnegutnut, since the latter is a project for class and therefore demands my immediate attention.
I’m pretty excited about Vonnegutnut, though. I was unsure of its premise in the beginning but I’m becoming more confident in my vision and I can tell things are gonna get good, fast.
So, please! If you will, follow it. I’ve designed it to appeal to Vonnegut fans and not-yet-fans alike, so stop by and click around. But really, click around. You never know where a picture or word might lead you.
Until next time, friends. I’ll try and post some of my work here soon, but the majority of my new material will be Vonnegutnut blog posts. All the more reason to give it a look!
Compost: it stinks
I’ve been rather absent from this blog, haven’t I? Why was it so much easier to post at least twice a week when I was in the midst of the busiest quarter of my college career than it is when I’ve decreased my hours at work to “just enough to pay the bills, and eat some” and am only taking one class? Chalk it up to needing a distraction, a moment to let loose my narcissism.
Well. While I’m here, I might as well post a few things/say a few things.
The first two are just exercises from class. Little bursts of “whaddya think ‘a THIS” and “I don’t know but I hope you do”s.
Not much to say about this one, as it’s the exact same exercise as one I did last quarter (writing on an unconventional surface, letting the matter matter). I wrote, or rather imprinted, a poem on a gum wrapper last quarter and after my prof accidentally destroyed it, decided to find a more durable surface this time around. The text on the other side, if you were wondering, is instructions to nudging an orchid towards blooming on the same flower spike after the flowers from the first bloom start to fall. I like the gum wrapper one more, but this’ll do.
This one also comes from an exercise I did last quarter: the photocopier poem. I think I had an unfair advantage with this one, seeing as a great deal of my focus last quarter was on using a photocopier to distort my poems. Still, I love this technique. I can’t imagine it ever getting old for me. This one’s made from a scrap of printer paper packaging that I found to be compelling due to what looks like a sun setting on the horizon. Many, many distortions later, I got something I felt right about.
These next two were made with the intention of being sent to workshop, but only one of them made it.
Made this little guy from my Twitter feed, again. Hence why I’m not taking it to workshop. I figured it to be the “safe” choice, and for fear of seeming like a one trick pony I moved on to composting a new source text: texts!
For respect to the sender, I won’t disclose whose texts I made this out of. This time around, I’m not including the source text at the bottom of the page for my classmates to see because I want to know if I did a good enough job with my composting.
Ah, composting. It’s been a struggle, often, to bring something through the entire composting process. We are currently working on a compost blog project (which you can check out here, once I’ve actually begun working on it) and damn if I’m not having the hardest time trying to figure out how to take my intended subject (Kurt Vonnegut novels) through the ringer and end up with a fully composted final product. It’s frustrating, but I’m hoping I’ll work all the kinks out soon enough. Right now, I’ve just got a big smelly pile of peels, eggshells, and half-eaten heads of broccoli and it really, really smells.
In the meantime, I’ve got a toilet to fix. Yeah, the chain thing came off the valve thing so it won’t flush unless I make it flush (fun…) and since I’m a DIY queen already, I’m off to the hardware store to make things right with my own two hands. I guess I oculd let you all know how that works out for me, but I figure you didn’t follow this blog for my plumbing skills (and inevitable toilet humor that ensues, ha).
Until next time.
Beyondsense
Not to be confused with Beyonce, bless her soul.
beyondsense: a sensical nonsense; nonsense that feels right
You may have noticed a touch of beyondsense in my previous post. Sorry, did I say touch? I meant smack. Er, I at least attempted to smack it with some beyondsense. Maybe it’s nothing more than our old friend nonsense.
Well, in case you couldn’t get enough of the crazy, here are a couple other pieces I’ve spent time with this past week.
Homophonic translation. Our assignment for class was to take something written in another language, preferably one we speak/know the sounds of, and essentially translate the sound of it to English. My passage was from the first chapter of Don Quixote:
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.
Here’s what I got:
A noon Lou guard– day lemon.
“Shah Day cool, yo.”
Gnome bray Nokia row, accord army Noah.
“Mooch yo team, pokey Vivian!” He’d all goad a low stay lawns, Anne as tea euro. A dog, a antique, a row scene.
“Flock, oh ye gal.“
“Go, Korra! Door!”
“Ooh, nah.”
“Oh, yah!”
Day: all comb as far.
“Cocky car? Ne’er, oh Sal! Pick on loss ma snow.”
“Chez do well, oh seek a brawn toe?” Slow sad bod. Oh, slant he hassle, oh fear neighs!
“S’all good, pal.”
“Oh, me? No day. Anya! Did your, uh, low stomach go consume Ian?”
Lost Stress Parties Day; halcyon.
Duh.
My prof’s suggestion was to punctuate the nonsense differently so it didn’t seem to be posing as something sensical. A mix of oddities and beyondsense. I might play with it later.
Workshop. I had my first workshop of the quarter yesterday, on a poem I made out of my Twitter feed. I scrolled through, taking interesting fragments of tweets, and chronologically assembled them into this:
I’m actually pretty crazy about it. I’d like to do more like this.
Well, that’s all for now. Time to read in the sun for a couple hours with my buddy William Blake. Cheers!
watchtheFruits 