Writing Shapes

The Creative Writing Club members met today and, after a conversation about using Blogger to post our weekly responses, we got started.

We walked around the upper floor of the Learning Resource Center (LRC) and recorded different shapes that we observed. This is a found or conceptual writing technique that emphasizes a process through which imagery may be captured. It was an attempt to see the familiar from a different perspective.

The response pictured here shows Amera Jama's application of our writing activity.

a round wooden table

the reflection of the wooden table in the majlis window
a red circle around a door lock
concentric circles in grey and black on the floor
paper globes hanging by a string
a circular silver keyhole
the domed cylindrical trash can
a young man in a thobe turning half-circles back-and-forth in his chair
four people sitting around rectangular tables
the perfect circle of a black and white clock high on the wall
a cylindrical silver vacuum cleaner
the half moon wall of Lecture Hall C
a hole in the center
an aluminum dish
a marble oval coffee table
circular embroidery on a seat pillow
the letter 'O'
a ceiling lamp
the tiny holes of an intercom

Triolet

Last week, we practiced using a triolet, a French-based form utilizing an eight-line stanza and a rhyme scheme. The first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line is repeated as the eighth line. Here's a sample by LuAnn Kennedy:

We Poets 

We poets are so very strange!
We write and write and lose our minds!
Emotions flow in quite a range;
We poets are so very strange!
We’re happy. Then, we quickly change;
To make a world it takes all kinds.
We poets are so very strange!
We write and write and lose our minds!

Try one of your own...

Life was beautiful back then...

Life was beautiful back then,
everything was so different.

Clear minds, pure hearts,
Life was beautiful back then...

Bigger pictures, fuller parts.
A connection like paper and pen.

Life was beautiful back then,
everything was so different.

Write What You Are...

The ABP Creative Writing Club is back in action!

For our first meeting, as a way to introduce ourselves, we wrote poems about what we are. I offer this possible interpretation by Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by Robert Bly:

I Am Not I.
                    I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

Feel free to join us every Wednesday after school in the English Room.

Middle

At the fire in everyone's presence

Sleepy, I hadn't brought sunglasses

I hadn't brought a letter, going into the library

A U, right? so who was U? I shook my head

A craze of tiny cracks rarely appeared before me

Coming in and doing more, I wondered why

He hadn't mentioned love again since he had given none

Better to hide your knowledge than show

Mixed News, Mixed Views

Hariga Oil
Strike

Bearing down
Armed Factions

Facility
Excessively dovish

Legitimacy
Wreathed in scaffolding and mystery

Cocktail circuit
Exchange programme

Stubborn inflation
Saudi Kayan

Taking some fairly negative results and putting them in a positive light.

Conveyor Belt

There once was a board with four legs
It wondered it's difference from pegs
It thought and It thought
Almost to drought
Now how would it confront the kegs?

It still tried but it couldn't
creaked loud but it shouldn't
ask they who abuse
what do they find in its use
It expected an answer but - they wouldn't

Here comes our friend the board
In a massive line of recycling horde
Broken and shattered
Bruised and battered
It laid there on its own accord

Writing Activity: What Didn't Work Last Year?

For our first activity of the new year, we thought about New Year's Resolutions. I suppose resolutions are a way to purge ourselves of one bad habit or another and try to start fresh. We thought we would write about what did not work over the past year--not necessarily what is wrong with us, individually, but, perhaps, what we expected would be different than how it turned out.

Anyway, here are a few attempts...

2014, A year filled with numbers, grades, calculus and cost
as empty from motion as a patrick starfish laying on the coast
could it be a sneaky snoozy virus with me as it's host?
or am I trying to put the blame on anything to run away from my self-roast?

I know for a fact that I tried to act against it
But apparently acting has many genres other than action.
I once read the sit-ups from sleep a person does in a lifetime don't give an ab to show for it
If that were the case, I'd have had man abs on my brain burning to just...show...for...it.

time didn't work

or not right
it ran out too much
or too often

work didn't work
or it changed
and i didn't

at home i tried to do too much
went to bed late reading
woke up early

three alarm clocks rang
at three different times
i hate

i did what i had to
i spent too much money
or my wife thought i did

i didn't keep in touch
with the right people
or the wrong

i went along with it
i remember one night
in particular

i had to prepare dinner
but the ingredients were wrong
or not available

so i did the best
i could
or thought i did

my wife looked at me
out of the corner of her eye
and laughed

or said something funny
which is usually not the case
so that didn't work right either

Writing Activity: Book Title Collage

For this week's activity, we went to the library and composed writing using only the titles of books on the shelves. Try it!

black dragon crusades

shock high pop
in the cartoon history of the United States
ethnobotany in the spiritual tattoo

in New Guinea
bones apples spiders and populations
enhance student noise

hip hop matters
in music society
in business

luminous things
journey to the center of the scandalous
the wicked

Writing Activity: Compose a Villanelle

Attendance has been small recently, but the few of us who show up still play with language and still wish you were here...

This week's writing activity highlights a form of poetry that we have tried  each of the past few years: the villanelle. Here's a famous example by Elizabeth Bishop:

Read more about Elizabeth
Bishop on Wikipedia.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Hide and Seek!

واحد، اثنان، ثلاثة، اربعة، خمسة [1]

Eyes closed tight, face against a palm tree

حلال دم الغزال [2]

Footsteps I heard, running away.

Wings flapped above my head.

واحد، اثنان، ثلاثة، اربعة، خمسة

I'll search the farm for siblings and cousins

A giggle here, a whisper there

حلال دم الغزال

Cracking of sticks behind a tanoor[3]

A rustle in the fields

واحد، اثنان، ثلاثة، اربعة، خمسة

Footprints by the river

An impatient head sticking out of hiding

حلال دم الغزال

I'll find them all, as I always do.

Run to catch one, call out "you are it!"

واحد، اثنان، ثلاثة، اربعة، خمسة

حلال دم الغزال

---

[1] One, two, three, four, five.

[2] Ready or not, here I come.

[3] An oven for making bread made of clay.