Poetry Postcard Challenge - Day 5

I'm very sleepy today, but I did complete my postcard, thanks to the extra time I had on the plane to write. Ironically, this postcard is heading to California, which is why I was on the plane in the first place. I took a trip to see my family who are in California.

With this postcard, I was inspired to write a senryu from an experience I had on the plane. Some of the others I have used the picture on the front of the postcard to jumpstart the poem. I hope it makes sense.


Fifth poem complete, into the mailbox it goes.

Maxwell - Rocket Love (song of Stevie Wonder) LIVE HQ

It be pretty cool if Maxwell did this song again for the next concert series (Summers').

Poetry Postcard Challenge - Day 4

...so I was thinking

would anybody pay for a poet to send them a poem on a postcard?

That would be an interesting pobiz situation. I could totally get into it though. It would just need a jazzy name, and some type of etsy situation to handle the money, and advertisement...

*pondering*

Anyway, I opted to just go for the full pencil on the rest of the postcards. I hope they make it!

Fourth poem is completed, to the mailbox it goes.

Corinne Bailey Rae - Closer (HD)

Poetry Postcard Challenge - Day 3

This is a really fun poetry challenge, but it is only day 3. Wonder if I'll say the same thing on day 23. During my plane ride back to Maryland I was able to complete a postcard for day 4 and day 5. It's cool being ahead of schedule.

It was a bit bumpy on the plane, so I wrote in pencil with the mindset that I would rewrite it in pen later. I don't think I will though, it just looks so much better to me. Maybe I'll at least put the address in pen.

Today's postcard goes to the person who I actually heard about this challenge from, Amy Champ. Thank you Amy for tweeting about this!

Third poem done, to the mailbox it goes.

Poetry Postcard Challenge - Day 2

As a little kid, I liked getting the mail to see if my name was on any of them. It rarely happened, until I decided to send my name in to Right On! magazine so that I could receive a pen pal...wait, maybe I just wrote to the people who already had their addresses listed.

*memory fuzzy*

In adulthood, I realize that most mail is a bill or a credit card application. Does anybody like those? It's nice to be able to expect to receive some mail that I know won't be a bill, thanks to this poetry postcard challenge.

So far the only downside is that I have to write these postcards in ink. I'd much rather use pencil because I don't want to cross anything out if I make a mistake. The pencil may rub off during it's journey, and it doesn't help that my handwriting is light, so I figure pen is a must.

Second poem done, to the mailbox it goes.

Poetry Postcard Challenge - Day 1

It's time for another poetry challenge!

Poetry challenges are great because they generally force me to produce without giving my inner critic time to halt my creativity.

For this challenge, I will be required to write a poem for each day of August. The fun thing about this challenge is that you are required to write the poems on postcards and send them to other people participating in the challenge. How cool is that? Thirty-one instant poetry penpals. Thirty-one people who will actually read my poems. That's like being published, isn't it? Okay, not really, but still, it's pretty fantastic.

...and what makes it even awesom-er, is that I have a good excuse to buy postcards! I've already finished my first postcard poem, to the mailbox it goes.

What is your writing process like? Part 6

Click here for part five.
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Listening to Rick Ross' "Aston Martin Music," I heard a piece of the song that might work for my next bop. This is bop #3 for those who haven't been counting. Something about Drake's part spoke to me:

"Would've came back for you
I just needed time to do what I had to do"

Who knows if it will actually become a bop, but for the moment, it works. Perhaps it will be a poem about how I abandoned writing for a short time, with every intention of coming back to it...and then not coming back? Or coming back and it was too late? Or coming back and then being regretful that I ever left.

*mulling it around in my brain*

Listen to the song while I'm thinking.

What is your writing process like? Part 5

Click here for part four.

*********************

Finished the last stanza of my bop in the backseat of the car. I feel some type of way about the poem. I can't tell if I like this bop, though I do like pieces of it. Seems like the three parts aren't married to each other...I need another set of eyes to look at it.

Here's a piece of it:

(no title yet)

ideas bubble and surface

easily at the beginning

cursive lead slides across

the page, filling in

the white spaces...but

where does creativity go?

since you went away i just

look into all other faces with no trust

The refrain comes from Maxwell:

does Your House have LionS?

I picked up a copy of Sonia Sanchez's poetry collection, does Your House have LionS? I got it yesterday at a bookstore that was going out of business. All the books were being sold for three dollars. This is a bookworm's dream. Unfortunately, the selection was lacking. I did happen upon a few - hopefully good - books.

I haven't been able to read Sanchez's book in entirety, but what I have read is inspirational, it gives me great ideas on how to organize a collection of poetry. It's broken up into four parts, or voices. I guess you could say it's an epic poem. In the sections that I've read each poem is seven lines long and rhyming along the way.

I'm excited to read more and learn from her. Another mentor-in-my-head.

Thanks Miss Sonia.

What is your writing process like? Part 4

Click here for part three.
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I found a pattern in the first stanza of bop #2. I had 4 words in most of the lines, so I used that same pattern in the other 2 stanzas (not including the refrains). Following the word amount helped push me to write more, oddly enough.

The second stanza is completed, but I'm still working on getting the third stanza to fit the word count.

Side note: It appears that my theme is writing. You know, like poems about writing...I guess my subconscious had these writing process blogs in mind. :-)

Another side note: Tara Betts noticed Jonterri and I tweeting about writing bops and told us to submit to Bop, Strut, and Dance. Sweet!!!

What is your writing process like?: part 3

Click for here part two.

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My writing group gave me suggestions on my bop, and I made a few changes. One of the changes was about verb tense, another was about spelling, and a third about how to make the meaning pop more, by changing the title.

I'm still working on getting the title together.

I started writing another bop Tuesday. I only have the the first stanza and the refrain. I selected the refrain from a Maxwell song (off of Urban Hang Suite). When I have the first draft completed, I'll share a section on here. Until then, it's marinating in my brain... trying to figure out how the next stanza should go.

Light Boxes by Shane Jones

Light Boxes is the type of novel that I would love to be able to write. It's structured basically like a collection of poems that tells a complete story.

Imagining myself completing a novel is hard for my brain to conceive. It doesn't seem within my abilities. Poems are still a difficult and time consuming process, however, they are at least visible on my horizon. If it's on my horizon, I can work at making it happen.

Cute things about Light Boxes:

1. The cover is adorable.

2. It's 145 pages.

3. It's about the size of my hand.

4. The font changes size sometimes, for emphasis.

5. One of the characters likes making lists. :-)

Key characters:

1. Thaddeus

2. Selah

3. Bianca

4. February

5. The Solution (pictured on the cover)

Plot summary:

1. A small town is being inflicted with experiencing winter for more than the three months typically allotted on the calender.

2. February has taken control of the town using magical parchments that when written on, become fact.

3. Apparently February isn't a fan of flight (or sunshine) and gets rid of it.

4. The constant cold weather and flightless-ness dissolves the towns happiness, sparking rebellion.

5. Members of town struggle to come up with ways to defeat February.

Questions for the author:

1. How did you go about selecting the names for the characters?

2. What other title names did you consider for Light Boxes?

3. Have you ever made Selah's mint soup?

4. How old is Bianca?

5. Did you choose the font?

Recommendation:

Get this book in paperback. It's worth owning and you might want to take some notes in it or underline a few parts. And reread a few parts.

"I Wish I Wrote That!" Wednesday: Light Boxes

As an aspiring writer (and therefore, a voracious reader), I often find myself reading other authors and saying to myself "I wish I wrote that!" I'm sooooo impressed by an author's ability to construct words into meaningful and fresh sentences, that I'd like to highlight them here on my blog on Wednesdays. ********************************************************************************
Light Boxes
by Shane Jones
Penguin
Page 36

I told the townsfolk that the war against February was as necessary as the air we breathed. If we refused to fight back, the cold and gray would settle like an endless blanket of rocks.
********************************************************************************
Isn't that just a bite size bit of pretty? The sentiment is on the gloomy side, but written beautifully. I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it would be to remove an infinite amount of rocks off of you. I like it, and Shane has several of these pretty sentences in his novel.

I wish I wrote that!

Poetry on the plane.

I wrote several poems while I was reading through Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Boats. She had this group of poems that all had similar titles in the section called next - a collection of poems she published in 1988.

Somewhere in my brain (probably near the middle), I remembered that the prompt from Big Tent poetry said to create a poem with some sort of secret message. Along with these poems from Lucille, I came up with a way to celebrate her by using the words from the titles of her poems. The title of my poem creates the number code where you can locate those words. Lucille fans may be able to spot the words easily without the code. The first one is below:

#191021

my head bobs heavily
fighting sleep
avoiding the dream
about visiting you
only to find out
i've run out of time

*******

For those who aren't Lucille Clifton fans, the way to find the words is to count all the words in poem and then use the numbers in the title to find them. I mashed all the numbers in the title together, but the first "1" in #191021 represents the first word in the poem which is "my". The "9" is "dream", and the "10" is "about". So what would "21" be?

Blessing the Boats

While I was on the airplane Wednesday, I read all of Lucille Clifton's collection of poetry, Blessing the Boats. I went through the book and marked the ones that I liked immedeatly on the first reading, sometimes I would stop and write a poem of my own.

I feel like creating a list of the ones I like best.

The collection is divided into sections of her previously published poetry books, plus one section of new poems.

new poems(2000)

moonchild
donor
jasper texas 1998
what i think when i ride the train

next (1988)

album
why some people be mad at me sometimes
sorrow song
my dream about time
shapeshifter poems

quilting (1991)

quilting
white lady
poem in praise of menstruation
poem to my uterus
to my last period
wishes for sons

The Terrible Stories (1996)

1994
what did she know, when did she know it

*******

I left out one section, the book of light, because I didn't have any favorites in that part of the book. Based on my favorites, my next book of lucille's to pick up is quilting.

Teaser Tuesdays: 32 Candles

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

“With regular salon visits and trims, my Afro only got larger, which didn't please Nicky in the least. But other than that, I took him one hundred percent at his word and did not mess with him again after the Great Hair Battle, which meant I asked one of the darker-skinned waitresses to teach me how to put on the makeup I bought at the Fashion Fair counter.”

~ p.100, 32 Candles by Ernessa T. Carter

Reeeeeejected

I stayed up late last night working on a submission set to send to Nibble. Within 24 hours they had given me notice that my poems weren't quite right for their journal. Rejections are never good, but they are a part of the process. I've never seen any journal/magazine respond so quickly though. This is a good thing, and a bad thing I guess. Good because I don't have to wonder for months if they were interested in my work and I can send the poems elsewhere that might be a better fit. Bad because it makes me wonder if it was even read. In the rejection letter, the editor did mention that the submission was "read with care and given thorough consideration."

Oh well, on to the next submission....

What is your writing process like?: Part 2

Click here for Part 1.
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I put Janelle Monae's CD on in the background as I was reading, and stopped when it got to the "Locked Inside" track. I wrote down a few lines that could potentially be refrains for my bop poem. Here are the ones I wrote down:

1. Oh how, oh how I need you baby
to keep me from going crazy

2. I really need you baby
need you to stay

3. And when I look into the future
I see danger in its eyes

4. Hearts of hatred rule the land
while love is left aside

I could possibly use these four for my set of bops to submit, but the first one that grabbed at me was number one. Here's a piece of my rough draft of the poem:

this poem needs

this poem only loves you
this poem thinks you are sexy
this poem can be anything you want
this poem cleans, cooks, and backs "it" up
this poem will laugh at all of your corny jokes
this poem follows you with glazed and shiny eyes

oh how, oh how i need you baby
to keep me from going crazy


Even as I was writing this part of the bop down for this blog post, I revised it a bit, because I noticed the first four lines were creating a type of downwards stair-step, and lines 5 and 6 didn't, so I tweeked it so it would.

The next step will be to decide if I'm going to use the other three lyrics to create bops from, and if I decide not to, then I need to listen to Janelle's CD some more to see if anything else pops out at me.

In addition, on Saturday I meet with my #justfinish group to share the poems we've been working on to submit to different journals, and my bop collection is what I plan to share...but with only one poem done...eh, I'm a little behind. Thanks goodness the deadline isn't until September.

What is your writing process like?

I'm very curious about how writers - especially published ones - write. I'd like to know their whole writing process, from the brainstorm, first draft, second draft, seventy-elevnth draft, all the way up to publishing. It would be nice to know these things, to see if their advice could help me with my own writing.

Would anyone want to hear about the writing process of a newbie like myself?

*crickets*

Yeah, I didn't think so, but hey, it's my blog, I can do what I wanna.

*Who's gonna check me Boo?*

So anyway, I'm planning on submitting 3-5 bop poems to Bop, Strut, and Dance: A Post-Blues Form for New Generations. I figure I could share my whole process with writing these poems to the point I submit them, including the acceptance/rejection.

Tag along with my process, encourage me on the way.

* * * * * * *

Right now I'm in the beginning stages, which means I'm mostly thinking about writing the poems.

*smile*

Hey, thinking is a part of the process, at least for me. My thoughts are to connect the poems together in some way. Linking them together helps me write more, for some reason. Due to how bop poems are structured, I'm thinking of linking them together using songs from one album.

Let me back up a bit for those who are unfamiliar with bop poems. A bop consists of three main stanzas, and in between those stanzas there is a refrain that is repeated, which is taken from an actual song. The last CD, um, album...what are we supposed to call it when you download the whole thing from iTunes? Whatever you call it, the most recent one I've purchased is The Arch Android by Janelle Monae, so her music is fresh in my brain. Her, um, iTunes album is cohesive on it's own, so the theme will reveal itself easily I'm sure.

Next part of the thinking process will be to pick those five songs and song lyrics that will become the refrains. They will be the ones that sound the best to my ear and work well together as a group.

*thinking*

"Locked Inside" is probably going to be one of the songs, along with "Say You'll Go", and "Bahbopbye ya" because those are three of my favorite cuts. Then maybe "Cold War" and "Neon Valley Street" or "Mushrooms & Roses."

*off to think some more*

Claudia's Poetry Notebook: Celebrating The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison has exisited longer than I have, but the messages within the novel are as valid today, as they were when it was published in 1970. Pecola is often the character many focus their attention on, because of her desire for blue eyes, and other troubling events in her young life, but I felt myself latching on to Claudia during my third reading of Morrison's novel.

I imagined what Claudia might write in a notebook about her experiences, if she felt that poetry was the only way she could express her thoughts. The idea was plausible, given how children and adults communicated with each other in her household, "We didn't initiate talk with grown-ups; we answered their questions" (23). Being the younger sister, Claudia harbored feelings of jealousy towards Frieda experiencing everything first, admitting she was "sick and tired of Frieda knowing everything," eliminating her as a viable confidant (28).

What would she write after listening to Frieda and Pecola gush about Shirley Temple?

…accept me?

I can pretend to
love and worship the Shirleys
but when can I stop? Can I learn to…

Claudia's dislike for Shirley Temple was "because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy..." and it hurt her that Shirley Temple - a White girl - got the opportunity to be with her idol. By this point in the novel, Claudia has developed a mask to diguise the hatred she feels towards White girls as a group, but she reveals a more "frightening" revelation from a previous Christmas experience.

…black me.

Destroying baby
dolls, digging inside to see
the special that makes them better than…

Instead of appreciating the baby doll Claudia receives as a gift, she demolishes it, in an effort to discover why everyone finds them - White girls - beautiful, and ultimately to figure out why Black girls aren't.

...except me.

Surely, the Shirleys
of the world aren’t the only
beauties, but everyone believes it…

Claudia is repulsed by the ease at which she feels the same destruction could be applied to a real White girl. It shames her into a masquerade where she feels a "fradulent love" instead of sadistic thoughts, which Morrison remarks "that the change was adjustment without improvement" (23).

Teaser Tuesdays: Reading Like a Writer

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

“The only way I was able to trick myself into writing a first novel, as well as the first short story I published that I liked (as opposed to the first story I published) was to write both the novel and the story as stories within stories, narratives told by one character to another. Eavesdropped upon by the reader, the storyteller and their audiences appeared at the beginning and end of the works, and occasionally throughout, to interrupt and comment upon the action.”

~ p.85, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose

Writer's Block: Does it Exist?

Uh, a lot of the authors I admire don't believe in writer's block.

On her website, Jacqueline Woodson said:

Nope. I don’t believe there is any such thing as Writer’s Block. I think it’s just your mind telling you that the thing you’re writing isn’t the thing you really want to be writing. If this happens to me, I start writing something else.

In an interview, Toni Morrison said:

I disavow that term. There are times when you don't know what you're doing or when you don't have access to
the language or the event. So if you're sensitive, you
can't do it. When I wrote "Beloved," I thought about it
for three years. I started writing the manuscript after
thinking about it, and getting to know the people and
getting over the fear of entering that arena, and it
took me three more years to write it. But those other
three years I was still at work, though I hadn't put a
word down.

Surely these ladies know what they are talking about. You can probably trust an author who's won a Nobel Prize, or one that's won a Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and a National Book Award.

So what should I call it when I get to a point in a story/poem when I can't mangage to write anymore about it for a long period of time? Let me be clear, I don't mean that I can no longer write period, cause I can always whip out a journal entry, a random blog, or a timed free write. It's that I can't write on that specific topic that I actually want to complete.

That's where I'm at with my La'Mia story. I'd give up on her if I didn't like her so much, but I don't know how to get back into her. I need some kind of pressure, to make me move forward. Sending it in to GirlChild Press might be the type of pressure I need; there was a call for submissions last week for 10 pages of a YA manuscript.

*hopeful face*

47 by Walter Mosley

So...I had this idea a while back to participate in a book sharing experience with Walter Mosley's YA book, 47, but it never quite happened. I got the idea from Where's George?

I imagined giving the book to another person, who would read it, write notes inside the book, perhaps create a blog post about it, and then send it on to another reader who would repeat the process. At the end, the book would come back to me, and I could read the notes written inside, and make comments on the posts that each reader blogged. I figured it would be reasonable for each reader to keep the book for a month, before passing it to someone else, and then the 12th person would mail it back to me. Then, the process would repeated again with another book.

Are you interested yet? No? How about I give you a summary of the book first, before you turn me down. This summary is from the School Library Journal:

The intense, personal slave narrative of 14-year-old Forty-seven becomes allegorical when a mysterious runaway slave shows up at the Corinthian Plantation. Tall John, who believes there are no masters and no slaves, and who carries a yellow carpet bag of magical healing potions and futuristic devices, is both an inspiration and an enigma. He claims he has crossed galaxies and centuries and arrived by Sun Ship on Earth in 1832 to find the one chosen to continue the fight against the evil Calash. The brutal white overseer and the cruel slave owner are disguised Calash who must be defeated. Tall John inserts himself into Forty-seven's daily life and gradually cedes to him immortality and the power, confidence, and courage to confront the Calash to break the chains of slavery. With confidence, determination, and craft, Tall John becomes Forty-seven's alter ego, challenging him and inspiring him to see beyond slavery and fight for freedom. Time travel, shape-shifting, and intergalactic conflict add unusual, provocative elements to this story. And yet, well-drawn characters; lively dialogue filled with gritty, regional dialect; vivid descriptions; and poignant reflections ground it in harsh reality. Older readers will find the blend of realism, escapism, and science fiction intriguing.–Gerry Larson, Durham School of the Arts, NC Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sounds good, right? If you liked Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, I think you would like this book. Even though it's a YA book, any adult can appreciate this story. It would be great if someone made a graphic novel version of it.

So what do you say, do you want to participate? Leave me a comment.