pen ink river

This is one of many fun writing exercises from the poet Bernadette Mayer's list of Writing Experiments posted on the St. Mark's (NYC) Poetry Project's web site, www. poetryproject.com:

"Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses."

I'd already been keeping a running list when words that sounded, well, titular, came to me. The rest I found as phrases or groups of words in existing journals and other writings. A pleasant way to spend a late May Tuesday evening, watching the daylight fade. It probably would be fun, now, to try and make poetry or some kind of writing generated from these...

1. I Wait Until It Rains to Wash My Hair
2. You Arrive, A Vulture
3. Angel in a Porsche 922
4. All the Accidental Puppies
5. Look for Me in the Middle of a Run-on Sentence
6. With Eucalyptus Fingertips
7. Seduction is a Typeface
8. In Love with the Buddha’s Feet
9. Spiral, Circle, Dot
10. One Bone Snapping
11. Love Masquerades as a Peach Pit
12. Armored by Marching, We March
13. Into the Whip of Dust and Grit
14. On Buzzboy’s Planet
15. My World, Bereft of Handkerchiefs
16. With An Inner Eye to Banishment
17. Refresher Course Kama Sutra
18. Pity the Contravening Winds
19. His Diaspora of Objects
20. Every Gesture Chiaroscuro
21. With the Gift of a Disappearing Sound
22. What’s the Fuss about the 45th Parallel?
23. Still-life with Bacon
24. Dream On, Bingo Boots
25. My Side Pocket of Stones
26. All Those Stars on My Tongue
27. Stayed Tuned, Frisson at 11
28. During Which Time We Start the Conversation
29. Eat Marginalia, Then Bullets
30. I’m Not His Date, I’m His Mother

Posted by peninkriver at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend sent me an e-mail from the Hope Flowers school in Bethlehem, in Israel. I love the name -- Hope Flowers. I'd like to name a character that. What would Hope Flowers be like? Let's see. She's be a seeker I think. Someone interested in growing and changing. She'd either be hopeful like her name -- no, that's too easy. I think she'd be more likely to rebel against the hope part of her name some time in her life, be downbeat and depressive and curmudgeonly. Can women be curmudgeonly?

She'd wear dresses from the 1950s, bought at thrift stores, in loud, vibrant prints that show off her uncommonly tiny waist. She'd either wear tiny flats in brightly colored leather, again bought at thrift shops if possible to color-coordinate with her dresses. OR she's be in those lace-up Doc Marten boots with the only bit of color on her feet the shoelaces. I think she's younger than me, maybe 36, or 37, which would make her born in the late 1960s. She's not from where I grew up, in northeastern Pennsylvania. I want to make her a California child of flower children but maybe that's too obvious and would then imply one of her parents changed her/his last name to be "flowers." That isn't improbable. Working at the co-op I've run into a Twinkle and a Greenpeace and Jennifer Juniper. She could be Hope Flowers of Millbrook, New York. There were plenty of wild-eyed, acid-crazed hippies running around up there. Maybe I'll move her to Meander, though, the town in NE Pa that I use in my other stories. She's there because she met Miles Malloy in New York City when he had that job moving sculptures to/from the temporary MOMA in Queens and then back to the new MOMA in midtown.. Miles, son of my main character, Irene. The one who has moved back to her hometown because she inherited her grandmother's house.

Hope wouldn't be typical for her generation. She's prefer the music of her parents, maybe she inherited their LP collection when they died in a car crash or moved to Vancouver, BC? Hope has a brother. Let's call him Seymour. Seymour Flowers. Is that too literal, too J.D. Salinger, too gay? What about Percy instead? I'll have to think more about that.

What does Hope do now? She's some kind of artist. She makes photo album collages out of photographs she finds in junk stores, past generations of anonymous family members no one could remember or ever knew the name of, sent off with the auctioneer when they were getting ready for the esate sale? Hope finds them for cheap in dusty corners of secondhand shops. If she's lucky and finds an intact album, she's careful in the way she disassembles it, in tne the stories she calligraphs below the photos on every page. It's like she's running a rescue operation, a safe haven shelter for lost, abandoned souls. The eyes are the windows of the soul, Hope often says. She uses colored pencils to color in every person in every photograph's eyes. Sometimes their eyes are colors you don't see on real people in real life. That doesn't matter to Hope.

Posted by Nancy Flynn at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was an exercise in the very fun, after-the-fact useful Writer's Block course last December. The instructor gave up pieces of a sentence, maybe the verbs in what's below and we had to fill in the blanks. It was a great way to jump start and make strange the imagination, to break the grip of the rational on automatic words. Perhaps each of these lines could be a seed into other poetic writings?

Catch shooting stars on my tongue.
Wait until it rains to wash my hair.
I’ve never been one to tolerate a balloon.
Make the hen tell the truth.
Steal an egg.
Play an axe.
Carry talcum powder in a quart berry basket.
Eat marginalia, then bullets.
Breathe miasma.
A screwdriver drives the truck.
Shrunk to the size of a pea, I shout for help.
I put the pocket in my tale.

Posted by Nancy Flynn at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)