On this day, the sun set in the west.
I cried for the death of light –
craved the waxing moon
beacon of quiet dreaming,
yet it was a waning crescent,
like my tearful heart
yearning for the next full moon.
Its ivory face shone through my window,
beaming brilliance
its sea smiling,
perhaps the eyes of a living being
or an apparition
revolving across the sky,
until its sunrise death.
Sandra
Weave, weft, warp
Woven thread
Silk weaving
Upright loom weaving
Copper-tube loom weaving
Dyeing the weave
Threading the weave
Tightening the weave
Interweaving themes
Hanging the weaving
Weaving gallery exhibit
Weaving dialogue
Interwoven meaning
Weaver collective’s weaving
Weavery!
Sandra
My Research Question (a poem)
In a world where money buys everything,
Who buys poetry?
In a world where human avarice is satiated
At the cost of nature,
Who wants poetry?
In a world where inner peace is hard to gain,
What is the use of poetry?
Poetry,
Cannot buy me a house,
Oh, even a bar of chocolate.
Poetry,
Cannot save a tree;
Writing poetry even consumes paper.
Poetry,
Cannot keep you as high as
Smoking drugs (Look at the addicts. Never try it. It’s illegal~).
But poetry is
The nectar of language.
It is a fountain for
My progress,
My happiness,
My optimism,
My love of life,
And my love of nature.
That is what
I do poetic research for.
Question for my research question (a poem)
Can money buy happiness, friendship and love
In this vulgar world?
How could human beings satiate their avarice at the cost of nature,
as human beings are just a part of nature?
You cannot fool people by saying inner peace is hard to gain,
As you know clearly
After writing lines of poems
And after putting on the “band”
You are in deep calm
Poetry has helped you get a better life
You don’t like chocolate, hey buddy.
Poetry can be a weapon
Combating waste
Poetry kept you high
In a more natural and harmless way
Than drugs do
Poetry is
The nectar of language.
It is a fountain for
My progress,
My happiness,
My optimism,
My love of life,
And my love of nature.
That is what
I do poetic research for.
Ok nothing matters really
because anything I write is totally mundane.
Decide for yourself
if it is worth travelling to the other side of this moon
to face me. I worn you though, beware, you will find
I’m a bone collector,
gathering the stories hidden deep within your veins,
I suck them out a long straw, draw all of the blood
from every inch of words you keep
on walls about to collapse,
my teeth ever hungry to dig
into the weight of your history and your dammed.
I weave around you
like Lucifer licking the meat from your brain
because mine is just too ordinary.
Bbbbbbut don’t be afraid
because nothing matters really,
anything I write is totally mundane.
And just when you think I’ve taken it all
I am simply diverted
by dried out bits
of dialogue with a character
who has no sense of the words
that float above the teleprompter
he has been placed in front of,
a Donald Trump type having a good hair day
I grab all his wireless fragments of frenzied messages
on Facebook to shove into the table of contents
of my next book of poetry
about a shooter with a semi
who walks into an airport
and the kid I support
who doesn’t know where his mother is.
But don’t worry because nothing matters really
everything I write is totally mundane,
stories become wild rice scattered
across a mine field where
the bones of the world are shattered
and I pick them like daisies to horde
for a stormy day
when the guy on the bus beside me smiles
because he has forgotten that he is hard of hearing
and the girl on his lap is listening
to his off key version of Bring Him Home
unaware that the bus driver just announced
he is taking a wrong turn
because he simply can
and we still don’t know if the kid I work with
has found his mother
and the tension rises and you want to cry
but I won’t let you
because come-on it’s just words
on a page that don’t signify anything
because everything is totally fucking mundane.
And it’s Friday night
and come to think about it
did we find the kid’s mother yet
his terror creeps between my toes
and I get itchy
wondering if I can make a difference
because we all have masks
just mine is solid, glued on so long ago
it has attracted rats around the edges
and the black iron cast frying pan
I use for noodles
has turned to brass and I wonder
if Robert Hass ever had any of these problems
did he lose his mom or words
and my words dddddon’t
count because the word count button is as broken
as a brain on fire
and I dance
and think Margaret Atwood
doesn’t dream like this
because she is not mundane.
Nnnnnnothing matters. It is all mundane.
A carrier pigeon to deliver bad news
has a broken wing and we found the mother
safe in Milwaukee on a runway in 40 below
and nothing I say matters
because a man with a gun turned into a maniac
and I sucked his bones dry too
and just because I can’t hold a bbbbb word in my head
for longer than a second or find the last word
I wanted to put on the page that was hiding behind
my desk draw full of the words I have lost
doesn’t mean his bullets will stop
and stay hidden because his brain
is a bit lost as well and nothing I say matters
because we are all mundane.
Hey man that’s so good the way you dusted off the elemental reals the way you faced your dusty bookshelves the way you resurrected your personal periodicals the way the wave vibrantly held your perambulating intelligence, the way those neuron’s drop down into the elements like a hot water bottle the way a sound of being a child makes waves in nasty wild world where the starvation of intellect and imagination kill children who deliberately walk down Sephira’s path the asshole avenue the funny person your serious larva whipping and wailing in topoi and politics (way laying in talk away) politics the Great Wall of time the great surface margins of the Magus (maggots) imagine us in the upper structured echelons (at salons) arguing about the sum (this some) the biologists took to make conservative politics his goal and the voyeurs blues inside the sarcophagus of unread tomes (tones) the galaxy galaxy galaxy looks again like Star ways and door turns and visions of seasons the way you portably hang out with your toilet and scraps of temporary almost sad feelings the beholding the great beholding the coralling butterflies in groups of downward pricks and (tricks and keepsake) peeps (some) and dehydration and defenestration defecation all these things that focus on the cold pissed stuff that makes home a country house where (artwork) hard spirits are bought and taught in floating orbits like a swan of the phonies what phobias do they spring upon us our energies (be mad) thematic and burnt by blackness this summer comes again stunned with body power stunned it liquefies on exposure the gutterless (list) grind the hopefully totalled outer electron the channels that blister in healing and make miracles from configurations that step to step step to your step and keep up on the island of the single burned body where abundance is falling and schematic tears flit past the echoes of all this funny fully covered circles of night the orgasmic filling (feeling) the fillatron the Lego bomb the boys can the crayons in the front row each person a prodigy a psychology of Moses flipping through the 10th actual trump card (downpour) thou poor ghost that walks in the semi hemispheric that moves the mechanical medicine of the universe and clears a radioactive woodcut across the choice between outside and inside of causality feline enema (and I’m in) and the hillsides of deserted chaps (chops) where all the unparalleled coming into being fires and sets (insets) flares sideways across the tectonic horns (corns) the animal grist and wailing mist (whaling missed) that fills the combination of the (kitchen) shades bulls head buried in the middle of a guitar (EL) the alchemical (looks) frights and spites and sprites (spiked) (since brights) the flying craft of faces those pellet born symphonic rotations that emerged into hiss hiss (kiss kiss) family of aliens clustered in a small barn where fully mechanical senses (sentences right) writes on Paper in the Movies That Historic That Hysteric the Self Proclaimed emissions (Omissions) of Boring Stupid Toxic Dust the Fluid Sculptures (Is) That wear (Where) Life (Seems Slow) in flow upon the Many Lucid Buildings the Black Rain and the Cold Sky of Dandelion Petals in Puddles Falling from God’s Eternity (He Fear Reality) ethereality infinity the Boring Manifest Conversely Indescribable (Tom) upon the Water Keeps the Keys Imagining Psychodramas knock you still will you flock and (Flokton) cut yourself upon the dream that seems to spill out and (in) fascinating histories of khaki and (car key) (in Coppell) cattle and (make your) meteor impact the bright side of burning bus riders blue (sounds) thumbs the green terror that rolls upon the freeway of chromatic influence the smelly dark lonely road the boring saints with their (that) hourglass hips and humanity’s own poetry feeling its way from the ankle to the ultimate extrapolation that reality shifts beyond the route to the scene beyond the head above the dream halo in oscillations of magnetic chemical blooms the ultimate universe keyboard that plays glory glory get hip hip and hop hop in from the girl who filled the world with her small blue pale.
My article, to get you started thinking about procedure in poetry and narrative writing.
James, K. P. A. (2009). Could be inquiry: A process poem. In S. Thomas, A. Cole, & S. Stewart (Eds.), The Art of Poetic Inquiry, (pp. 257-272). Halifax, NS: Backalong Books.
This is the syllabus for the course. As it states in the course description, it is a work in progress and we will continue to shape and develop it as we progress through the course.
LLED 565C 2017 Course Syllabus
Here is the Cultural Fluency Language Assessment Tool for use in the creation of formal constraints for writing prompts.
This is the overview of language, a “Trilogistic Diagram” useful for considering how your work fits in the bigger picture of language use.
Click here for the link to my introduction to Poetic Inquiry III, edited by Sameshima, Fidyk, James, & Leggo (should be coming out this year. Some of the authors in this edited volume are also in our class!)
Here is a link to the reading which I’d scheduled for March 02. If you have a chance to look it over it’s short, and focused on a short history of West Coast Canadian spoken word of the 1990s
Here is a collection of event poems from an anthology by Jerome Rothenberg titled Technicians of the sacred: A range of poetries from Africa, Asia, & Oceania. You may complete the third (final) assignment for this course by creating an event poem. You may choose to do the final assignment as it is specified on the course syllabus (with a media focus). You may also choose to do a media version of the event poem. Please note that these examples are examples only. The event poem you create should be relevant to your world, to poetic “events” that you perceive as being useful to, or worthwhile to your own world. It is neither expected nor desired that we appropriate the kinds of events that are represented in this collection. The event poem is a loosely defined subgenre, and like poetry itself, it belongs to all people.
