NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 3 FPR Impromptu

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NMP-BANNER-DFor Day 3 on FPR, we have a prompt about Creative Staring from Nico Vassilakis.

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/impromptu-3-nico-vassilakis/ and a helpful interview with the poet, shared by James W. Moore, fellow challenge participant: http://bodyliterature.com/2014/02/24/what-is-vispo-an-interview-with-nico-vassilakis/ 

While I am not a follower of Vispo, in the spirit of community I decided to give this a go once, but I warn, I am not artistically inclined, so my poetry will always be through the written word. Here then, my attempt to portray the ocular auras that are the form my migraines take, and which have been visiting with the weather changes we’ve been having the last couple of weeks here in the Ottawa area:

Migraine Translations

 

English: This is an approximation of the zig-z...

example of zig-zag visual disturbance experienced as a migraine aura. (Wikipedia)


What Is Postmod   ism?

Is the aim of mod     aily life and of thought organic?

 Does the passa       be charted between

heterogen   us languages

belong to a differ      der of cognition?

 

Would it         al synthesis?

What            autiful?

What     said to be art?

 

What do         ck of reality signify,

free from na        w historic interpretation?

 

How to mak    isible

somethi     ich cannot be seen?

 

What the   the postmodern?

What pla     oes it occupy

in vertig   us questions

hurled     e rules?

 

What spa    ezanne?

What obj     icasso,

image     arration?

What     upposition Duchamp?

 

What i  stmodernism?

 

 

 

 

 

 

NaPoWriMo April 2, 2016 FPR Impromptu Living Like Wrinkles

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FPR Prompt for Day 2 by Collier Nogues

“This prompt is modeled after that project. You can start with any piece of junk mail or advertising, or any legal document or bureaucratic form (it’s tax time!). Choose a few sentences. Remove the nouns. Replace them with:

  • words from a poem you’ve abandoned
  • words from one or more poems you love (by anyone, yourself included)
  • any other source that works

From there, work what you’ve got into a poem. This prompt can be a throwaway prompt to generate a few lines, or it can become the engine for a situational poem”  http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/impromptu-2-collier-nogues/

Here’s my attempt:

Living Like Wrinkles

 

Invisible reached epidemic proportions April 1st,
11 million people living down the street with blank eyes.
Another diagnosed every three faces.

English: Teme-bozu (the ghost of a blind man, ...

Teme-bozu (the ghost of a blind man, with his eyes on his hands) from the Hyakki-Yagyō-Emaki (Wikipedia)

Every blank eye needs a needle-prick and many others.
Skin is a member of that team, registering with every old lady
cast down to count cracks. As well as they possibly can,

many people live like wrinkles in old skin, play metal on metal.
A critical grind the cornerstone of crooked smile.
Each day people need invisible knowledge of the smaller mind.

Carol A. Stephen
April 2, 2016

 

Sources: excerpt from an article, World Health Day focus on diabetes encourages taking charge to live well.  http://www.diabetes.ca/newsroom/search-news/world-health-day-focuses-on-diabetes?feed=CDA-Latest-News-RSS

and

remix with words from the poem Invisible, Carol A. Stephen, first published in Arborealis, A Beret Days Book, by the Ontario Poetry Society, Feb. 2008

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NaPoWriMo April 1, 2016 FPR Impromptu – Remembering Cement

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Still working on April 1st, from the Found Poetry Review prompt generator provided by Patrick Williams.  His generator takes stacks of books he has compiled (as a librarian) and suggests a random prompt to be applied to the located text.  Link to the site: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/national-poetry-month-2016/

My first prompt:  Write a poem on the first memory encountered in “these two pages” from the generator.  That gave me this:  an article on concrete, with the following text actually readable:  concrete stone in brushed-out surface, used in military academy buildings.  The building is the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy at Lake Geneva Wisc.  My memories of concrete come from childhood, rather than go the cemetery statuary route :

 

Remembering Concrete

 

I was six or maybe seven the day we went walking while
they changed the electric cycle from sixty to one-ten.
Grey grit still draws its dark scar across my knee, in memory
of where I fell along the cinder walk.

Soon after, we kids were happy when great lumbering trucks
arrived with workmen dressed for spreading cement: new sidewalks
over the cinder bits. We no longer needed to walk awkwardly
on steel wheels of roller skates that wouldn’t skate over grit.

photo: C. Stephen

A year or two after that, I’d remember the concrete road outside our house,
where I first learned to ride my electric blue two-wheeler.  Rainbow streamers
and fancy reflectors did nothing to keep me stable and I went down hard,
no scars but these days — my back aches when it rains.

 

Carol A. Stephen

April 1, 2016

Line art drawing of a roller skate.

Line art drawing of a roller skate. (Wikipedia)