Spiders buying bicycles and sending saucy postcards.

Today was the last day of my course... at least as far as lessons to and fro and tutor marked assignments. I am now at the phase where I put everything together, decide which of the taught forms I want to submit my end-of-course assignments in and then get to work on producing it / them.

I have already decided that I'll be focussing on poetry - no surprises there - but what the focus of my efforts will be is still a matter of my ever-changing concerns. So while I'm dithering I've made another spine poem and mocked up an image to illustrate it - without strings of onions - and am now off to power walk my way around the town while I think.

another spine poem

      three sheets to the wind
      a spider bought a bicycle
      a breath of French air
      stopping places
      left bank
      French postcards













Three Sheets To The Wind, Pete Brown
A Spider Bought a Bicycle, Michael Rosen
Stopping Places, Simon Evans
Left Bank, Kate Muir
French Postcards, Jane Merchant

The Paper-Cut Poet

Today I made a series of amazingly simple poem and papercut collaborations.... I loved it!
So, as of today, I intend to further experiment with this interesting combination of outlets for my overbubbling of artistic interests.
I have opened up a separate blog page to store the images and words in the mean time and will see how it develops.
           
Cherry blossoms bubble

over jutting branches.
Blush burnished sunlight.

Today I started my new project called The Papercut Poet. It has been on the backburner for a few months as I'm creeping through the last few sections of my current Creative Writing course but finally I thought 'Why not? What am I waiting for?' And so I now have a fresh and fruity sister page for this one: http://thepapercutpoet.blogspot.co.uk 

On it, I'm able to post my more cutting (pun intended) paper related postings and will be updating this page with some of its content as and when it seems relevant. I've kicked things off with a new pet distraction - Book Spine Poetry! I guess it comes from hours gazing and ruminating over what to write, the best words for what I want to say, the best form to house or contain those words etc. etc. I find my eyes wandering to the bookshelves that surround my working space and the incredible titles that some of them have. I've often smiled at the juxtaposition of different titles and how they seemed to have connections but never knew this was an existing form of poetry. Who'd have thought it?

So here is a jpg of my first posting:

in the wolf's mouth

losing battles

the ringmaster's daughter

the whole woman

all passion spent

exquisite corpse

Today was a bit of a weird day. Having survived the 'Mothers Day' of mourning I had completely forgotten that I had posted here about my mother passing away until, during a debate about genderism in the arts, a student on my creative writing course mentioned it.

There's a thing!

Ironically I'd just been reading into a docudrama combining diaries, written testimony, research, imagination and a whole heap more surrounding a summer in the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley - so seeing my own scribblings here alluded to seemed somehow fitting.

Enough of that. What of the mother thing you might ask. Well, to the best of my knowledge she is buried and as I know not where or when I have not the least closure on the matter. Perhaps that was the idea. Nothing would surprise me. Culturally speaking a section of my family would say that you should be buried or at least laid out during a Nine-Nights celebration, by your birth tree - one planted over your birth string (also known as an umbilical chord) and a tape measure. Yes, I do understand how bizarre that sounds but perhaps no less bizarre than announcing a death on Facebook and then simply refusing to have further contact.

In an effort to make things better my daughter suggested having a ceremony with some ash from our wood stove. Interesting and suitably out there! Whilst I mixed a totally lethal cocktail in unsubtle shades of purple, of which my mother would have been proud, and I even pretended to enjoy it. I've also been indulged with a day out in London at the V&A lost myself in Botticelli Reimagined and a fantastic amount of religious and glass artefacts.... and pretended not to notice the small willies on the statues - all of which would have met with Mum's amusement and approval I'm sure.

Ah well, onwards and upwards!

what would you do for poetry?

                          
This week I made the momentous (well, for me) decision to choose my next university course. It took some doing, some worrying about if I was making the right choice but in the end I chose and having had a night to sleep on it (or not sleep on it in my case) I think I made the right choice.

My decision was based not on career plans or what will look good on a CV or when discussed at gatherings over a beer etc. but on what would feed my poetry.

Seriously, I based a huge bill of thousands of pounds and the surefire entry into months of what looks like the toughest course I have yet undertaken on the conviction that it will feed my poetry.

Is it, you might ask, a literature course? Is it one dissecting the poetic works of others or teaching me how to write poetry? None of the above - that happened to some extent on my present course. It is one that is called, somewhat enigmatically 'Exploring Art and Visual Culture' and for this I have eschewed a course in literature that included the Beat poets! But wait, I am not completely mad. I know that I am inspired by medieval art, the Renaissance and everything up to the modern and I know that I will learn nuances that will creep into my work and for the rest.... the literature.... the poetry of Beat generations or otherwise, well I shall keep reading and perhaps take some extra course to fill that gap in the things that are the food of life to me.

So that is my next course and in the meanwhile, I shall pop up a jpg of a poem I'm currently working on as it is visual and although it was started before some recent news it seems like a portent of its coming. The news was that my mother died last week. It was posted to me on Facebook. The poem is about receiving benedictions after a death.

It's a strange world to be sure.

Rhymes well, rhyming well, a rhyming well.

A few weeks of being away from writing anything that I can publish on my own blog as I'm collating work for a submission to my tutor - how strange that still sounds!

The inspiration for a poem about poets.

So, why have I not created 'stuff' that I am not considering for my poetry submissions and just publishing here? Well the simple answer is that I am so het-up about achieving good marks that I dare not let anything go until I'm past this latest hurdle and back into the world of preparing some other narrative forms for submission. How crazy is that? (She sighs theatrically)

This week the course has been about rhymes, half rhymes, non-rhyming poetry forms - much-heated debate about how 'well' a thing in these categories rhymes or if indeed it's a poem at all - and the wonderful world of the rhyming well.

What, you may be asking, is a rhyming well? If you imagine a stone (or in our case a word) dropped into a well, and the associated (rhyming words) rippling out with lessening force (or nearness in rhyme) as they reach the outer rings of the plop! This has brought up some delicious words and I've loved the experimentation in sounds and associations but for others it has been.... trying. 

My personal tastes in poetry are like my music tastes - eclectic so perhaps it was easier for me to be flexible about the poetry diet of the past few weeks. I enjoy things that rhyme well, include half/slant/ etc. rhyme or no rhyme at all, and I've even shared some of my more experimental poetry on my tutor group forum. 

The experimental item I'm thinking of uses the page as both white space and dynamic space. In it the words fall down the page - why wouldn't they? There is no need for them to travel only in one direction. Why would I control my words when they want to be free? In another I use a more formal repetitious format that doesn't have a name that I am aware of but it felt right and I used it. Expect to see examples of my poems creeping back here again when the coast is clear. 

What's in a name?

Would a rose by any other name really smell as sweet? 

Would the rose, if we called it 'stink weed' become a wry observation or would the rose wither under the onslaught of our imposed title? 

Today I read an interesting piece about titles – poetry titles, but it set me to thinking about titles in a broader sense. I remembered a friend from when I was a professional dancer who decided to rewrite herself, to start herself anew and to do this she gave herself a title, a new name. Her chosen first name was Natasha; rather a topical one considering the recent adaptation of War and Peace, her surname will remain a secret for the obvious reason. She rewrote herself, and gave herself the new title and became that person, who she and other people thought she was in response to that name.

I have had a few other friends who have also done this and although critics could say that they were the same person inside so nothing had really altered I’d have to disagree. It was suggested that there are two types of poetry title: descriptive, evocative and that some may, in fact, masquerade as the other or be an amalgamation of the two. So how would this work with humans I ask myself?

I had a friend who called herself ‘Red’, dyed her hair scarlet and became ‘red’ in character. Fantastic! But what of me? What of my hatred of my own name? What colour would I become? Violet? Blue? Chartreuse? Do I feel inclined to change a name given to me by someone I feel no need to appease by keeping it? Well, yes, actually, I do. However, the ramifications of a name change – legally executed – would be an issue these days. My qualifications, legal documents, hell, even my drivers license not to mention all my friends are used to thinking of me in terms of a name I do not relate to so…. All I can do is conjecture.

Who would I be? What would I call myself? I can think of many names that could describe me if people knew what they meant and many that I could make an enigmatic point with but in all probability, I shall remain Karen.  And what of you? Who would you be? If you were a poem, what would be your enigmatic or descriptive title?

No blogging for me for literally weeks now, and the reason? I have been engaged in the creation of a new website dedicated to all things poetic, visiting various museums and galleries in an effort to engage in some much-needed research for my own poetry and writing for my Open University course.

I will be taking part the launching of the new poetry ezine in January and can't wait to tell the world about it and my involvement but until I get the go-ahead I'll just say that it will be a fantastic home for students of poetry and I can't wait to get started.

Apart from these fantastic, time-consuming events I have at long last found my beetle glasses chain so expect some creepy images of me writing with beetles climbing up to take a peep through my eyes. Well, someone has to do it and if the Mexicans can get away with live beetle jewellery then why not shake things up with a beetle chain?