Junkyard Quote 3, Week

"I would remain idignant even if I was wrong." -I don't know who this came from; I had it jotted down on the back of a piece of paper.

Response 1, Week 10

Response to Elizabeth Wood's Spring Break Improv.

Elizabeth,
I love the idea of list poems, and I like how you followed Albergotti's form and simply changed the topic of the list. Your list seems to contain a much higher percentage of long phrases. It would add more interest and texture to play with clipped phrases too, and even more one-worded ones like "admiration." Lines I am not sold with include "the growing power of godesses' smiles" and "Chinese food lunches of laughter." The first is too impersonal and vague for this piece, whereas the second is awkwardly phrased. "Early morning phone calls", "hot tea with honey", and "wailing women singers" do a better job with particularity and interest. I suggest branching out even more than you have, modeling this piece closer to Albergotti's poem (which ranges from fine beer to white shirts, olives, walnut speakers, to cold fingers).

Junkyard Quote 2, Week 10

"The Greeks would truce and put down their weapons to go watch the Olympics" -Dr. Leslie

(even better in that it's apparently true)

Junkyard Quote 1, Week 10

"all the gears are visible, and the machine is thus visible" -Dr. Fraser

"Machine" and "gears" are both good, punchy words. Also, a strange way to look at it: usually one would think of seeing the machine and then uncovering the gears.

Free Entry, Spring Break Week

Light-hearted, I mock the wind as it blows through the open ceiling of Spanish architecture. I see how it quivers for me, speaks through me, each dog-eared leaf and coat-tailed branch shake, beg, and settle. The movement of this city makes it hard to find a breath, and I'm left black-faced in front of Planeta, each of its carefully selected ivies thriving in the concrete, tended for lush survival and hung in the air to join a parade of meticulous absurdities. This city has made me heavier, feet weighing down clouds with every step, pulled to the stamped sidewalks like skateboarders: up, down, hours, hours. Imagining the tiny hills of cold chills on their t-shirted bodies, watching the thrill of momentum rising from flexing, contact, calf-muscles; wheels, trucks, and the slight bend of black sandpaper glued on smoothly sanded wood, painted and branded. They mimick the wind. A face appears and stares. Waves politely, wordless empathy. The buzzing of mopeds, motorcycles, Nissan Micros, and two-toned taxi cabs; bees in a hive. They provide the background of my dreams until the wind picks up and sings in Russian, "Remember how like a tree you are" and settles back into the stillness of muscles spasms, blinking, or the stillness of earth in orbit.

Junkyard Quote 2, Spring Break Week

"a divinity whose brilliant smile glistened like oil in his gaze" -Albert Camus in A Happy Death

I love the idea of a tangible smile on a divinity, especially if it glistens like oil

Junkyard Quote 1, Spring Break Week

"Consciousness is like a cardboard box thrown in the ocean" -my roomate