Improv 1, Week 2

Lawrence Benford

The Beginning Of A Long Poem On Why I Burned The City

My city slept

Through my growing up in hate

Bubbling in the back streets

The sun shone on my city

But curved its rays back

Into the corners where I shined shoes

With my teeth,

Where my father ate the trash of my city

With his hands,

Where my mother cared for white babies

With black breasts.

My city, yes, outstretched along

Its white freeways slept

In the warmth of its tall new building

And 100000 $ homes

Of abnormal sapiens with titles

-And I grew up!

My Take

Momma never knew

Windows opened up to late night streets

Filled the addiction

Late night sessions with a girl

She met once, and hated her ever since

Her scent stayed on your clothes

Eyes tired like wrestling sleep after your nap

And momma never knew

Jake stopped me with her, but let us go

We were young

Younger than we she had her first, old enough

For the consequences

She came to school with me

The pool with me

Became a rule for me, every day, every other day

I’d say hello, she’d just hush me

Get deep inside touch me

Momma knows now, but she don’t care

I’m still working on it this is where I stopped

Reading Response 1, Week 2

Reading Response Hugo’s five points

I like Hugo’s approach to poetry a lot more than other books I have read, or manuals on how to construct poetry. Poetry comes off to be this abstract form of expression, but I think that is the case because the reader is not in the poet’s head. When a poet writes something that grows out of an experience the writer does not start abstract, they must start small from an experience that is either made up or that actually happened. The best I think are the experiences that happen to you, because it adds to the visceral aspect of it all. The words are coming from your gut because the words are your gut, you’re spilling yourself on the paper not for the consumption of others, avoiding the “ I write for the world mentality” but to play with these words and make something out of a nominal nothing, or to write because you said hey I want to write about that. Which leads into the avoid room for explanation, a problem I find with myself. I want the person reading to be able to get what I am saying and it not be so damn cryptic, but that’s what adds to the “grandeur” of it all. A piece that no one will get unless they may have experienced something similar, or are breaking the poem apart. I get to suspend time, and I get to control what happens, the poet is in control not the audience, the way I read it Hugo is telling the audience to shut up and let them write you will understand the piece when she/he finishes.

Calisthenics 1, Week 2

Passive into Active

The Math problem was hard :

His School-Bus yellow, Dixon-Ticonderoga became a whittled down yellow taxi-cab, back fender eaten up like in too many accidents. But no off duty signs flashed today, it was all or nothing.

Kim was angered by her boyfriend:

Pulling a Kim was not thought of as a verb, until post emancipation Kim raged so hard, Rage had to put its tails between its legs. Freedom from sexual honesty meant Kim could be the women in her mothers photo’s albums protesting Nixon, and dancing in fields filled with bodies, moving, touching, not slumped over from pounds of napalm.

It was a nice spring day:

The water fountains are back on, the old guys in the park are sitting with their bud lights and that brown paper bag wrinkled like those faces watching basketball game after basketball game. And how could we not forget the kids who court this is, trying to assert dominance, oh yes heat is in the air.

Free Entry 1, Week 2

I give whatever I can to those blessed bastard children of Jesus, Muhammad, and Moses; serenating the concrete ears of non church-masque-temple goers, the screams of iron horses running everywhere and nowhere. The good ones moves across the platform to catch the next train, and the next station hoping their odds increase a little bit more, but this isn’t dice its life and strings of bad luck are choices you have to live with. I usually look for saxophonists and trumpet players, paint bucket drumming has become the latest hype and since most of the artists, if that’s what we can all them, are no better than my Kitchen Floor concerts I avoid them. When I hear the call of Bird and the Vertigo of Dizzy, blood rushes to every inch of my bio-chemical infrastructure like race riots in the 60’s burning every inch of a city. I once met a trombone player on my way to Carroll Gardens, to blaze with my friend Jonah; I dropped fifty cents in his case, thinking he was playing for some money. When the F-train came instead of the player staying he came aboard the train with me, which was a first for me. I know had an opportunity to talk to an Archangel in training, I was so thirsty to learn more about jazz I decided to ask him the song he played. Here this white man I knew nothing about, but the feeling of wanting to know more, to grasp what he could grasp, broke all barriers. He told me the song was Summertime by Miles Davis from the play Porgy and Bess or the musical. I was surprised he was playing a Davis impression because it did not sound like anything I had heard before. He told me he went to Oberlin, and was now a music teacher, I gave the guy props until I went to take a pen out of my bag and the book I was reading at the time “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” by James Baldwin was confused for Invisible Man. This guy so profound in Jazz knowledge didn’t know the difference between Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, so how did you really know the difference between Davis and Byrd? Me and the black guy next to us? He probably couldn’t tell on a dark night, but he got off the stop before me and I was out of fifty cents to give to the trumpet player at my stop.

Response 2, Week 2

Response to Morgan's Improv

Morgan

Catch by Langston Hughes

Big Boy came
Carrying a mermaid
On his shoulders
And the mermaid
Had her tail
Curved
Beneath his arm.


Being a fisher boy,
He’d found a fish
To carry—
Half fish,
Half girl
To marry.

My Take::

Fetch
Tall man came
Carrying his desires
On the bridge of his back
And those desires
Had its weight
Wrapped
Around his neck.

Being a humble man.
He established a dream
To carry-
His desires
Near death
To grow.

I think you have the layout right, but I feel like you gave us really big abstractions, whereas Hughes is being very concrete. You have this big boy, who is a fisher with a mermaid on his arm and he is going to marry her because it satisfies two of the things he want in life. What got me about Langston’s poem was how causal it is introduced that the this guy, just known as the fisher- returns with a mermaid on his shoulder and he is going to marry her. Questions pop up into my head: how was this dude smooth enough to talk a mermaid into coming back with him? Or did he just catch her? Are there more mer-people, who will this one of their females? Etc. You want the reader of your poem to be asking these questions after words, in my reading. Try something you never thought you’d have but then got it. Like for me I waited two years to get a new computer and I’m not complaining I have it, but the hype of getting it was just gone all of a sudden, kind of like once this guy got what he wanted.