NaPoWriMo #3 - Confession

Prompt:

Write about something that scares you. It could be tarantulas or your significant other cheating on you or an existential fear of the unknown so long as it unsettles you. Describe it in the most vivid language possible! Sometimes by articulating our fears, we strip them of their power. (But don’t go too far! A little fear is good to have.)
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Confession

I made it.
The red light bulb cueing my approach
like a lighthouse reeling in a tugboat to the rough and rocky shore.

Faith involves more practice than trust, and I murmur your Name
by habit or reaction or desire for a formulaic bond. But
I have forgotten how to do this.

The sweetness of confession lies
in my left palm, gripping at nothing but air and
the candied fibs deposited on demand.

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Today's prompt was brought to you by Read Write Poem.

NaPoWriMo #2 - Right Wing Porn?

Today's prompt from the Read Write Poem Staff:

If you love acronyms as I do, your mind has already shortened “Read Write Poem” into “RWP.” But the three letters RWP form known acronyms for at least 31 other phrases, including “Random Weird Person” and “Right Wing Pundits.”

Today’s writing prompt is to type the letters RWP into the abbreviation search field at Acronym Attic and write a poem inspired in any way by one or more of the resulting phrases. You don’t have to use the words from the phrase in your poem, but you can if they fit.

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Right Wing Porn?

Pushing papers through
doorslots. Rubbing away at
names, wishing for more.

NaPoWriMo #1

Here's the prompt for day 1 of the challenge:

Donna says she uses this idea all the time for both herself and her students to force new language and connections into drafts.

1. Put your iPod or iTunes (or other mp3 player) on shuffle. (If you don’t have a music player that shuffles, you can choose CD or album titles at random from your collection by writing several titles down on little slips of paper … works the same way.)
2. Write down the first five titles that come up. No cheating allowed!
3. Use all five titles to draft a new poem. They have to be used intact — you can interrupt them with punctuation, but you may not remove or change words.

Shuffle away — the more eclectic your music collection, the better!
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Untitled

In childhood, humans have no use for memory
the architecture of friendships relies on geography

and the delicate balance of knee scrapes, cherry trees,
slices of watermelon and bee

stings during a hot summer baseball game. If we’re lucky we find
someone to pick on. We pretend to be others en plus, fight crime

and solve mysteries, decode languages, prance like an elegant dame, admired and courted by princes from faraway lands. I

hadn’t anyone ‘til you. We depended on each other as crutches,
limping through the wonder years until we could no longer resist

the sirens, more independent than a scorpio. I heard
it through the grapevine, the rumors of adulthood.

How the mind remembers these sweet times.
And they don’t stop, ‘til you get enough of the daily toil.

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Click here for a link to the prompt and to check out what others wrote!

The prompt helps get the ball rolling as always but in trying to avoid cheating, some transitions and words were a little unnatural. Well, they still fit, but they're a little awkward.

Time is medicine for perfectionism. I had to let it go and keep writing the draft; save editing for another time. (gulp!) All in all it was a great exercise/prompt! (This is a bit painful yet still an adrenaline-filled process! But a draft is something.) See you tomorrow!

Oh yeah, my songs were:

Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
Scorpio
En Plus
I Heard it Through the Grapevine
I Hadn’t Anyone ‘Til You

And yes, my library is a hodge podge of different kinds of music. I'm going to use this prompt again in the future -- and have some fun with my shuffle!

Antony Gormley and Event Horizon

I can't wait to see Antony Gormley's installation of nude figures around the Madison Square Park vicinity. This is one of the contemporary art/installation pieces that really excite me at this day and age. The concept and execution (even though I have yet to see them) sound very successful to me.

This is what installation art is about. I know what I'll be doing on Friday and Saturday!

Here's the article/write up in Art in America and there's also a great article explaining more about Event Horizon in the New York Times.

The first time I heard about it, it made sense to me that a passerby would interpret figures on a building as a possible suicide attempter (is that a word). Gormley hadn't considered this association, and though I question that. Really? Especially in the post-9/11 trauma state New Yorkers will always be in to some degree.

“I never wanted to freak anyone out. If people think of death and suicide, it’s a sad reflection on evolution. This is meant to be an amazing celebration of New York.”

I am sure he meant it to be a celebration of the city (London in 2007, New York 2010), but how can you not associate suicide with figure on the edge of a rooftop? Is it a sad reflection on evolution or is it simply human? Any way, if you're in the area take a look and you decide.

NaPoWriMo

This year, I'll be attempting the Napowrimo challenge. A writing prompt every day for the entire month of April.

The only other time that I really challenged myself in this way was when I participated in the Squaw Valley Writers poetry workshop week. 7 days, 7 poems. Each day our poems were critiqued by a random rotation of poets and writers who were also accepted into the program. The "workshop" crit was led by one of the following: Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, Dean Young, Cornelius Eady and C.D. Wright. We also had a one-to-one session and crit with Galway Kinnell.

The poems we turned in the next morning had to be newly written from the day before (or that week). The point was, that with this much pressure, a break through can happen. It was a wonderful experience and the best thing was that there was no turning back. You didn't have a back door. Not when you had one of these prominent poets giving you a crit the next day. The worse you could do was show up without a poem.

In return, they too, had to write a new poem every day. We listened to their first drafts!

It was based on an honor system though I suspect there were 1 or 2 people who turned in a previously written poem. You could tell who they were. Their poems were too refined, and clumsy in all the wrong places. They weren't chain smoking from their cabin's balcony, or locking themselves in their rooms when dusk triggered panic with the fact of having no poem after 10 hours of trying to do nothing else but write.

This challenge will not be the same because you can cheat, skip a day and make it up another day, make excuses. Blogging about it won't help either. The added pressure to blog a response to a writing prompt can help, but I suppose one could recycle an old piece. It is too easy to give up because no one is really watching. Life can get in the way and "save us".

You don't have the luxury of peace and quiet. Food is not made for you; work and chores won't do themselves. The phone will continue to ring, deadlines will loom and the bill collectors will continue to hassle you. Even if you do write every day, the idea of writing for a prompt seems like you are setting yourself up for failure. It reminds me of New Year's resolutions. We'll see how it goes starting April 1st. After all, I'd only be cheating myself. So I'll hope for a break-through and plan, at the very least, to fullfil the writing prompt on a daily basis.

Damien Hirst Opening, "End of an Era"

The exhibit is basically a retrospective of sorts featuring his most iconic pieces since he hit it big with Sensation. Of course the artist, formerly and still currently known as, Damien Hirst was present at the opening (1/30/2010) which was at the Gagosian Gallery along with a few other icons.




Other icons and A-listers included John McEnroe, Mick Jagger, Takashi Murakami, Jeffrey Dietch and others. I'll say this, Hirst definitely has a playful sense of humor and didn't seem to take anything too seriously as he played the role. He walked in with a Diet Coke and let the paparazzi snap away while he doodled images of sharks and butterflies as his autograph.

I know many people who love to hate, and hate to love this guy but he just doesn't take himself too seriously. The joke is on them because he doesn't seem to care about the critics. It's about having fun and putting innovative work out there to test the non-existent boundaries of this thing called art that we are incessantly trying to pin down and (re)define.

Something Funny and Conan

There's a book titled, Stuff White People Like which I ran into at Urban Outfitters (which should be in the book's list by the way). I found it very entertaining, and Lo and Behold there's a blog dedicated to the premise of the book! Oh Joy. (really, I mean it this time.)

Looking through the list, I find many things on there that I like. I wonder what the threshold of items you have to have checked off on the list before you are considered a twinkie, chocolate twinkie or oreo? Is there a sociological paper on this?

Here's their post on Conan O'Brien.