Thanksgiving with Reflex

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Reflex in my mailbox, so I was really excited when it came back last week. I was second in the first round, and now I’m third in this round, so there’s a lot of art, writing, and cool stuff in there! Reflex has been though a typewriter, a sewing machine, and been written on and glued in. Excuse my dangling prepositions. I know they bother some folks.

So, I was having fun looking through the art and poems, and started looking at different pages in succession, and in reverse. What I’ve done for my draft is to take words from what’s written, and images from the artwork, and start a draft of something. I’ll post it below. It’s just my handwritten scribblings right now, but it’s creepy. More like Halloween than Thanksgiving thoughts. Unless you count, “I’m thankful my body hasn’t been cut into pieces and buried in a lake,” as Thanksgiving Day thoughts. You might. If you are, please get help. No one should be having thoughts like that on a holiday of giving thanks.

I’ll add one last comment here that Donna V. and I went to the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing last weekend. One of the writing-centric conversations we had was about a session she attended which discussed the difference between a prose poem and a work of flash fiction. The consensus seemed to be that there is really little difference, and poets should try sending their prose poems to flash fiction journals at times.  Whatever this draft turns into, it’s looking like it’s going to be one or other, or both. I’m only giving you one side of my notes. You’ll have to wait to see more…

 

Notes on my first draft, Round 1

I haven’t finished my poem for Reflex round 1, but I’ve been reading and re-reading Rachel’s poem. I got a couple of words stuck in my head a few days ago: synapse, lightning, remember.

I didn’t want to write about God or Satan, or even in response to Rachel’s poem. My process of writing is usually to get a phrase or idea in my head and it rolls around in there a while, like how when you have a blister in your mouth, or you get a tooth pulled, your tongue keeps going to that spot. So yesterday I wrote some words and phrases in Reflex in pencil, and today I sat down at my laptop at a Caribou Coffee shop to try some writing. I used dictionary.com and rhymezone.com for aid, as well as Google to get some facts down. I won’t say which, but I had a Greek god in mind as I was starting, and while I know my Greek gods pretty well, it’s always good to check facts about ancient history.

Here’s what I’ve got so far. The final draft will go in Reflex, and it may not look anything like this, but I’m sharing anyway. The asterisks show the breaks in the notes/drafts I made, and the bold is how I scan meter on the computer. I was just checking it as I went along at times.  If anyone wants more about how this process worked, I’ll share, but I don’t want to bog this post down. Two more days to the final poem…

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

It’s lightning behind  eyes

the spark of neuron

shooting like fireworks

into an explosion

remember what you have forgotten

the snippet of song

the name of girl who grabbed your hand

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

Lightning behind the eyes

the spark of neuron

shooting like a hidden spy

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

It was always lightning behind his eyes

as well as clenched in his hand.

His insatiable need.

Always trying to remember what he had

forgotten. His siblings gone,

his mother’s love and father’s rage.

Lightning was his armor,

but it can burn.

The spark of neuron shooting

between synapses, a firework

of passion sparkling and dazzling

to the eye.

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

1. eye
2. hand/rotten
3. need/awry
4. forgotten
5. neuron
6. rage (sage)
7. gone
8. armor (charmer)
9. burn
10. shooting blast
11. firework (several “burn” rhymes)
12. dazzling enchant
13. explosion/ strong
14. song

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

1. It was always lightning behind his eyes
2. and even his hands tingled. His father’s rotten
3. heart, devouring his children, and a need gone awry
4. lead him violence, misguided. It was as if he had forgotten
5. how love isn’t a part of the electricity of neurons,
6. not that he ever knew to remember. His armor
7. strength and fire, he thought power was all. Gone
8. was all thought of giving up what he wanted, being a charmer.
9. His insatiable passion forever burned
10. like a repeating shot as he looked at human women. Blast
11. that women were soft like water! He learned
12. that even when he had them , he could not enchant
13. them. They would run like deer, and he felt strong
14. stroking their legs open, hearing them scream was a song.

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

 It’s always lightning behind his eyes

and even his hands tingled. A father’s rotten

heart, devouring his own children, and a need gone awry,

will lead to violence, misguided. It was as if he had forgotten

how love isn’t a part of the electricity of neurons,

not that he ever knew to remember. His strengths–

quick shock and fire. He thought power was all. Gone

was all thought of charm, logic. He would go to any length

for his insatiable passion, lust that forever burned

like a repeating shot as he looked at human women. Blast

that they  were made soft like water! He learned

that even when he had one , he could not enchant

her. She would run like a deer, and he felt strong

stroking her legs open– hearing her scream was a song.

 

Guess what arrived…

Oh the pressure! Reflex is on my kitchen table. I’ve read Rachel’s poem, and am percolating ideas. And I have guests at my house this weekend, and am leaving for Duluth, MN on Wednesday! Holy cow. Maybe some Rainbow Brite stickers and a colored pencil will help.

 

From Kristin: Collaboration, from the Latin…

I have yet to see the book Reflex, and I’m excited to see who gets his or her name drawn to get it now that Rachel has marked the first pages. There’s something exciting to me about starting something so new on paper. I have tons of notebooks going back to high school, and each has always held such promise, whether it started as a place to write book titles I liked, jot random notes, or purposefully hold poems that at the time were the clean, polished, clear windows to my young soul.

One of the things I’m in love with about Reflex is that it isn’t mine. Or at least not mine alone. I’ve worked on individual poems with other people before, and read poems aloud with others. But this is something new. It’s not just poems, and we are working separately, in our own states, towns, homes. While we’re connected electronically and through the mailing of the physical book, we will work alone on our pieces, sharing them after they are produced. Well, maybe Donna and I can do something together since spatially we are the closest, but that feels like maybe it would be cheating. We’ll see.

I’ve been in love with the online etymology dictionary www.etymonline.com lately. I looked up “collaborate.” Its roots are Latin, from “com” meaning “with” and “labore” which is of course, “work” or “labor.” Thus, we will work together. But how much of this will really be “work” and how much fun? How much inspiration and how much sweat? There’s pressure working with people one is unfamiliar with. There can be feelings of competition, rivalry, even negative feelings like angst and jealousy. The dictionary also points out that while the word is usually used in a positive sense, during WWII, it came to mean one’s government, as in the French Vichy Government, working with the enemy, the Nazis. I do not even entertain the notion that will enter Reflex, but reflexively, it’s an interesting idea.

Along with being new to this kind of collaboration, some of us are new to blogging, new to sharing our work in draft form, and even to our “finished” work in the book going on as something permanent. I can wait months or years to finish a poem or a manuscript should I choose, and even never show it anyone. In the case of this project, we only get the book a couple of weeks before we pass it on to the next person. And it’s a printed, hard, real thing, not a file we can go back and alter later. Oh, the pressure!

Here’s to having fun, working together, and sharing our work with the world. I hope we are all the better for it.