Photo Challenge #33 “Endless Walk”

Posted on November 4, 2014 by quillfyre

Something about this image caught my fancy, and I respond here with Pas de Deux:

Pas de Deux for High Wire

Grey days Magda walks her crow along the wires,
their lightning rod umbrellas raised against rain,
each in sleek black dress. Crow hasn’t found
right-size red shoes, tiptoes bare-clawed
holding black string, the thing that
keeps them grounded mid-air.

It’s an odd tableau: Woman and Crow, a soggy circus
in sky and air, a curious three-step on the wire:
Shuffle, stop, hop, shuffle, stop, hop—
‘til rain stops the show.
One, two three—
Umbrellas up!
And step off the wire.

Carol A. Stephen
November 4, 2014

Mindlovemisery's Menagerie

Matilda Emgård

Use the above image as inspiration for a poem or short-story

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A Second Experimental

Posted on May 9, 2014 by quillfyre

I’ve posted this one for today in Lewis Oakwood’s blog as a reply, so reposting it here.

“Here’s one for today. This one is a bit more worked than yesterday, simply because the orphan lines came from a poetry generator and it was somewhat faulty in its understanding of what may or may not be a noun. I wanted to start with a poem that did have some cohesion, although I didn’t move too far away from oddness. The second part had then gone a bit haywire and conversational, so I pulled it back a little, made it less proselike, in certain ways.”

Grizzly Shark Yak Avalanche

The arguing pair like yaks,
the situation fell to motives.

A shot shark leaves,
eating jackal snacks,
the lurking mass blocks the sun.

In a drear lake, a golden grizzly
bright sand of beach emerges.

To grow old, bitter, sweet
and lost to time.

II.

Sounds arguing yaks make, cow chorus,
goat guffaw, bray-like burro song

Yakity Yak (Photo credit: ucumari)

argue over spoilt milk, curdles of white spilt
seep into soil, lost soothe of warm suckle
they huddle under trees, backs turned to pelt
of driving rain, hides impervious to snow so
there they go full of fight ‘n’ holler sounds,
yak, yak, yak.

Shot. Shot? buck shot rifle shot pistol shot
shot silk missile shot sling shot gut shot earshot.
Not. Not out of earshot, yakking, strident
tones over shot sounds.

Shark has to go, be long gone, fish out of water
gill-gasp. Yaks, vegetarians all.

Yaks stampede jackals straight to gape-jaw sharks,
mass-lurked jackals out before sunset block the yak sun.

(What nightmare did the grizzly crawl from,
golden or not, and aging?)
A fresh fish lunch shark on his mind
and sharp on his tongue.

Impermanence and change, even the rock faces
groove slowly with the etch of character lines.
Listen for their hollow laughter.

CAS. May 8, 2014

Carol A. Stephen

Posted on May 9, 2014 by quillfyre

This post is also related to two of Lewis Oakwood’s poems on his site, visit to a flea market and a storeroom, http://thecuttingpoets.wordpress.com/ Please give them a read as well. I am working with Lewis on perhaps reviving some of those orphan lines we all seem to accumulate.

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST EXIT INTERVIEW: THE AFTERMATH

Posted on May 1, 2014 by quillfyre

As a kind of farewell and wrapup, we’ve been asked to post an exit interview, discussing the Oulipost experience. It will take awhile still to absorb and understand Oulipo, I think, but that’s why I purchased the Oulipo Compendium. That will keep me going forever! And thanks so much to the Found Poetry Review, for pulling this all together! What a ride, as one of my fellow Ouliposters said!

So, what now and what’s next? Herewith:

Oulipost Exit Interview: Oulipost Ends Where the Work Begins

Question 1:

What happened during Oulipost that you didn’t expect? What are the best (or worst) moments for you?

Well, going in, I didn’t know a lot about Oulipo experimental writing, although I’d had a bit of an intro while taking Modern & Contemporary American Poetry with Al Filreis UPenn, through Coursera.

Some of the scariest sounding prompts turned out to be the most fun. And often the ones that sounded really quite straightforward turned out to be anything but. And I never expected ever to write a poem with zombies in it, much less a zombie sonnet on a day that was not a sonnet prompt. It was Day 9, create a poem from headlines. Zombies just jumped out from the page and off I went. And I found the hardest ones were the ones with selected letters to be used or to be avoided.

I also enjoyed the discussions with the other Ouliposters and their ideas, which often helped me get started in the mornings.

Question 3:

What does your street look like?

Aha! We encounter Oulipo even in the questions. Ok, I will do Q3 next then about something totally off-track. My street is a cornucopia of cars and kids cavorting. No, actually it often looks like a parking lot. Mostly townhomes, and a bedroom community for Ottawa. Everyone has more vehicles than their driveways and single garages will hold. But lovely in spring and fall when the trees, now nearly 20 years old, are either in blossom or in full fall colour.

Question 4:

Who is your spirit Oulipostian? I didn’t have one going in, and I am not sure I have one coming out. On occasion, John Beryman, on others Christian Bök, a Canadian poet who wrote Eunoia, which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, which had 5 chapters, each using a single vowel. Interesting concept, read more about him here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k Perhaps also Tristan Tzara, although not an Oulipolian, did create Dadaist poetry.

English: tristan Tzara Español: Tristan Tzara pero en Español (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Question 5:

What are the top three poems you wrote during this project?

Ooh, not fair! I’m not sure I can narrow down to three. Day 7’s N+7 poem, Behind Closed Doors on Parliament Hill is one. Strangely enough, Day 19’s sestina poem, Zoo Variations. Of course, thanks are due again to Doug Luman and his wonderful tools, which made this a whole lot easier, and actually do-able in a single day. Probably the last one would be the Patchwork Quilt, In a Vacant Lounge in Canada, I Too sat Dowse and Wept,taking lines from all the poems written over the 30 days, simply because it does revisit some of the best lines from all the poems, but then again, there are the two Antonymy poems from April 22, Buy the Pigeon, Sell Carnivores and A Silence Out of Mid-Summer. Both these have a combination of sensical lines and nonsense. I think overall, I liked the ones that had interesting and startling juxtapositions, and were a bit or a lot outside my usual “coherence.”

A city pigeon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Question 2:

What questions do you have for your teaspoons? What questions do your teaspoons have for you?

Questions for my teaspoons:

Teaspoons (Photo credit: eltpics)

Why don’t you hold more sugar?

Why is there only one of you in a set of measuring spoons, at least one for wet and another for dry?
Why are you almost always heaping when you are not scant?

Questions my teaspoons have for me:

Why do you scoop around the slice of stale bread, the clay honeybear and the measuring scoop instead of moving them out of the way first?
Why don’t you use more jam and less oil, since we all have a sweet-tooth too?
Why do you keep us here in the dark when we really want to watch Big Bang Theory?

Teaspoon… (Photo credit: vanherdehaage)

Question 6:

What will you do next?

Hoping to put together a regular submission plan (and implement it!) and to work on the three chapbooks/collections I have in process, including, now, the Oulipo ones. My title for that so far is Newspaper Clippings. And definitely, definitely doing more Oulipo!