Poetry seems the perfect antidote for SSHRC proposal-writing (arguing to such a fine point where hardly anyone but the three or four people pouring over each $31.50 word can’t be bothered to figure out) whereas poetry is so much more expansive and “capracious” as Dr. Leggo calls it. How much can it do with just a few smartly crafted phrases, the occasional rhyme and a balance between babble and doodle? The poet Jane Hirshfield gives poems six qualities: music, rhetoric, Image, emotion, story and voice. Physicist David Bohm seems to get it too, writing about the creative process like it ain’t no thing (yet has the power to name everything that is and was and will be). And to top it all off, Hermes Trismegistus, that mysterious alchemist from RMES 501, makes a guest appearance in LLED, proving that grammar came from the French word for magic, spelling also took roots in these mystical arts, and to cap it all, hermeneutics from his own namesake, the trickster god of messages!!
So onto my own writing, what I did in class today. First a ten-minute free write:
It gets a bit crazy how much my car is not like other cars on the lot but it is still mine this piece of darkness I will own it till it finds its way to the bottom of the sea. Or will it be the bottom of the sea finding its way up to it? This was going to be the world’s worst movie made on a watery deck on a sound states that the great green one could not contain but instead ended up breaking Hollywood out of bits in the solar rights – why just make a big budget Pix servers the USA can enjoy when Waterworld lead the way overseas for who cares about the nuance of a character or the finally designed backstory when oil tankers get to explode and there is a hint of a woman’s breast just inside of the male protagonist. I know it is transforming car is taking over China so the non-exploding oil tankers can fill the demand for Tarsem gold that we are just too happy to provide. So yeah my toe Yoda will probably outlive the planet but at least I don’t have to worry about the resale about you going out when it sinks to the bottom of the sea and gets filled with ping-pong balls because the future craigslist shoppers want to bid on this relic of such a wasteful aids. The movies won’t last so long all the digital blips have long since been sucked up into the ether and reprogrammed the seven spirits – those planets that used to influence us to good or bad and have been long since ignored. They were still operating in sleep mode and it just took a couple of downloaded blockbusters like Transformers eight or the prequel of Harry Potter to tip the scale towards planetary restart mood.
Not bad, iPad Siri, you got most of what I wrote down on the page with some reinterpreted words (some of the. Are poetic improvements that I can’t really take credit for unless I admit my pronunciation went a bit off at times. In any case, much of this first attempt to write freely was inspired by articles I read obsessively from Cracked.com – the only source I go to now for a sense of what is happening around the world – take that Georgia Straight and Huffington Post! At some point I may revisit the above writing sample and put the hyperlinks in. For now, let’s see how voice recognition handles my next classroom writing sample, the longest sentence in four minutes:
In order to understand how are one the singular planet traveled from that universal central point, known as where the Big Bang took place, and reach the present gravity well of our heliocentric solar system where it’s main job is to build up enough escape falsity to leave the dying star behind it is important to know that the earth has never been nor will it ever be, and the exact same three-dimensional unit of space time that great back to me an idea of a crown a tope then it has is or ever will be again BECAUSE everything is moving away from a singularity.
Still doing okay with the voice-to-text, and finally the one gem I found on my twenty-minute walk outside the classroom:
I am too street for Wreck Beach.
But I still got to put my hands in the sea!