Voting and Poetry

I haven't updated in a while, but for those of you still hanging around here is something to read. Yesterday I voted for the first time. I sat on my bed and dutifully filled in the little circles. It felt like I was taking a test to which no one has the answers. There was no surge of powerful feelings when I was finished and I certainly did not feel like more of an adult as some of my friends have. Ever since I studied government in my elementary years and discovered that the President is elected not by the popular vote, but by the electoral, I considered it a waste of time to fill out a ballot. Other than instilling fear in your representative of what will happen if they don't vote with the majority, what use is it? It tells us who the voting portion of the country thinks should be President but it has no real power to elect because, technically, the electors can vote for whomever they want. They generally don't, but it has happened. Anyway...

In my creative writing class, we are in the genre of poetry, the one I was most dreading. I have never professed to be a poet and dread writing the stuff so much that I don't even attempt it on my own. Irregardless, I am still expected to do the assignments. So if you would like to see what my creative (or not) genius has produced, read on.

Sound/Image Poetry:
With this category we listened to a piece of classical music and looked at a famous photograph of a shooting in Vietnam and then had to write a response piece of poetry to each. They didn't have to be explicitly related to either one and mine weren't. They simply needed to express what you felt and/or thought of when experiencing those sounds and images.

It's a warm room
with love everywhere.
It's a dim room
with low, yellow light.
It's a cozy room
with rough, comfy couches.
It's a soft room
with a black-bellied stove.
It's a country room
with wintry paintings.
It's a musical room
with classical notes.
It's a stately room
with a grandfather clock.
It's an open room
with large, paned windows.
It's a familiar room
with me in the midst.
It's a family room
with a feeling of Christmas.

____________

Imperfectly I love
So perfectly I fear

My capacity for change
Shrinks with every cringe.

Born not of punishment
Contemptibly of pain

Flawlessly He loves
So incredulous my fear.

Word Group Poems:
We were also given a choice of two groups of four words and we had to choose one set and use all four words in a poem. The first one has to use the words mother, folds, hands, and twilight. We had a day to do it. The second one was produced in class in less than five minutes and had to use evil, good, control, and choice. I'm not so fond of that one but I don't do well under pressure for creative stuff.

Night falling finds me scattered from the day,
Of things no one has taught me how to face;
But in she comes, my mother, here to do
That thing which only motherhood know how--
Smoothing out the wrinkles, binding up the tears,
And folding up the pieces that are me,
Gently with her hands, then I am whole.
Off she goes until another day
Has done its damage and I wish,
"Come Twilight, come once again."

Who controls who?
Who controls you?
Good has evil,
Evil has a choice,
But choice has lost control.

Ballads:
We also had to write an original ballad. After looking at one about the titanic, I decided to do one on the Oregon Trail since I knew that slightly better. People got really creative with these. I was impressed with the wide range of stories.

And the dust rolled in like a mighty wave,
The water rose up to take us away,
We held on to hope and tried to be brave,
But the trail said, "No, you won't find your way."

We struck camp at Independence
With families spread far as the eye could see,
Waiting like prisoners for their sentence
And looking for mules to make a team.

The air burned every last drop of moisture,
Drying us out 'til we cracked;
While suffocation, haunting each breath,
Reminded us of everything we lacked.

And the dust rolled in like a mighty wave,
The water rose up to take us away,
We held on to hope and tried to be brave,
But the trail said, "No, you won't find your way."

Ice-capped mountains loomed up in the distance,
Dampness rotted us outside, then in,
Cold gnawed on my fingers and bit at my nose,
Slowly wearing me down to give in.

The Reeper swept in while we watched,
His brazenness hard to believe;
He snatched her up in a fit of coughing;
That my sister is gone, I can barely conceive.

And the dust rolled in like a might wave,
The water rose up to take us away,
We held on to hope and tried to be brave,
But the trail said, "No, you won't find your way."

Six months, three days, and one minute later
We're here and we've finally stopped walking,
The houses are built; there's food in the ground
And yet, the trail is still mocking.

And the gloom rolls in like a mighty wave,
Our sunshine is gone, yet we still have to stay,
Hope has got us this far, but it's hard to be brave,
The trail's at an end, but we're still on our way.

Found Poems:
Our most recent poetry assignment was the most fun. For found poems you take words and phrases from other people and string them together to make an original poem. We were given a stack of a bunch of different magazines and told to go through them and grab stuff and make a poem. I got a literary magazine and this is what resulted...

Take the poet who lives in poverty and eats grass;
Maybe that's it.
Is there anything so helpless?
That poet should have written like somebody else
It is a fascinating idea.
Is it holy?
Is it boring?
And what about poets who don't want to smash people's heads?
As if there could be a world of absolute innocence

Hope you enjoyed it!

Haunted

Yes, Steph and I are being haunted...by demon wasps. I swear, they prey on our fear and enjoy tormenting us. If you find this incredulous, read on. During the final week of school last semester, Steph and I started finding wasps in our room. There would be one or two a day, but we couldn't figure out how they were getting in. We checked for holes in the walls and screens and looked for nests outside the window. There was nothing. And it was only our room! Both of us are terrified of the things, though me probably more so. Steph is content to watch them buz around from across the room as long as they don't get near her. However, this might have something to do with the fact that they usually appeared on my side. I can't stand to be in the same vicinity as a wasp, yellow jacket, bee, or anything other stinging, flying creature of that kind. I have to find someone else to kill it before I can have any peace. By the end of that week, the poor girls on my floor automatically grabbed a shoe and begin heading for our room when they saw me scampering down the all from it in terror.

Like I said, this happened the last week of school, so we didn't really feel the need to deal with it since we were switching dorms for the next semester. Well, guess what. A few days ago, with the warm weather, wasps started appearing in our room. They followed us!!! Yet again, we can't find how they are getting in or why it's just our room. Only this time, we are putting in a work order to get someone to come look at the problem because I am really tired of being chased out of my room by a thing less than two inches long. Luckily, Ali doesn't mind killing them, but Steph and I have devised a new method of disposing of them which is quite effective--we vacuum them up. I've always been a fan of cold weather, but now I am practically begging God for a good, hard frost to put an end to all flying insects.

Sharing an assignment with you

My creative writing professor assigned us to find two paragraphs from different sources that exemplified some of the best creative non-fiction we've ever read. My choices were from two books that I currently have with me at school. The first is an essay so it can be debated as to whether it is creative. I chose it because I think it's good philosophy and good writing. The author is currently my favorite philosopher and I wrote a critique of this essay last semester for my final paper in my philosophy and literature class. I found her theories to be quite applicable since her topic is "the good life" and her question is "What is the best way to live?" She compares the mediums of philosophy and literature for dealing with this question and believes that something vital has been lost by seperating these two. Ok, I will stop rambling on about philosophy; here is the quote.

"This is after all, the spirit in which much of great literature has been and is written and read. We do approach literature for play and for delight, for the exhilaration of following the dance of form and unraveling webs of textual connection. But one of the things that makes literature something deeper and more central for us than a complex game, deeper even than those games, for example chess and tennis, that move us to wonder by their complex beauty, is that it speaks like Strether. It speaks about us, about our lives and choices and emotions, about our social existence and totality of our connections. As Aristotle observed, it is deep, and conducive to out inquiry about how to live, because it does not simply (as history does) record that this or that event happened; it searches for patterns of possibility--of choice, and circumstance, and the interaction between choice and circumstance--that turn up in human lives with such a persistence that they must be regarded as our possibilities. And so our interest in literature becomes cognitive: an interest in finding out what possibilities (and tragic impossibilities) life offers to us, what hopes and fears for ourselves it underwrites or subverts." - from "Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory" by Martha Nussbaum

My second choice actually has two paragraphs from the same book because they are equally beautiful, I think, and though only separated by a page, I was too lazy to type up all of the connecting information.

"I have been wondering this summer why our love has seemed, deeper, tenderer than ever before. It's taken us twenty-five years, almost, but perhaps at last we are willing ot let each other be; as we are; two diametrically opposite human beings in many ways, which has often led to storminess. But I think we are both learning not to chafe at the other's particular isness. This is the best reason I can think of why ontology is my word for the summer.
A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me, "To say to anyone 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.' "
I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality."

"Suddenly I said, 'Hey, I think I know why astrology has such tremendous appeal. The year and month and day you are born matters. The very moment you are born matters. This gives people a sense of their own value as persons that the church hasn't been giving them.'
"Now," he said, "you're cooking with gas."
(My note: the previous section was just background for these wonderful lines coming next that as Anne says "thrill my soul".)
To matter in the scheme of the cosmos: this is better theology than all our sociology. It is, in fact, all that God has promised to us: that we matter. That he cares." - from A Circle of Quiet by Madeiline L'Engle

Let me know what you think of my reading choices!