closing out

Tonight is my last night with Reflex. Tomorrow I’ll be putting the book back in the mail, and I have to say I’m a little sad and surprised at how quickly the week passed. When I first got the book, I had the intention to write something every night for the week. Well, that didn’t work out. But here’s what my Round 2 Reflex contribution includes:

two photographs

a found poem and a drafted poem

That found poem is something I’m still thinking about. It happened like this:
I drafted “What If the Earth Is Leaving the Sky,” my contribution for this round.
I pasted it into Google Translate & translated it to French.
Then I translated the French to Spanish.
Then the Spanish to Albanian.
Then the Albanian to Hebrew. (p.s. the Hebrew was confusing for me because even though I know you read Hebrew right to left I kept trying to highlight from the left to the right when I wanted to copy it, and that didn’t work.)
Then the Hebrew to Spanish.
Then the Spanish back to English.
Then I cut it up in small pieces and rearranged it on the page.

And there you have it.

 

Round 2 – just in

Yesterday in the mail I received Reflex. The book has made a complete circuit through the five of us, and the work so far is exceeding my hopes. A few notes, as I sit here listening to Peter Gabriel’s astounding new album:

Kristin’s entry was wonderfully surprising and creative (not surprising that it was creative; just not what I expected to see). Very cool.

Jon used some sort of paste / Mod Podge . It smells like 4^th grade to me, like walking in to Sister DonnaMarie’s art class. And now I am thinking about Kristi Serafino, my best friend in 4^th grade, and wondering what happened to her.

Tamar’s entry – lovely, lovely. The texture – I just want to keep touching all of it.

Donna’s poem is the latest entry, the one that will now come immediately before my Round 2 entry. It is definitely going to serve as a great source of inspiration.

It’s interesting to see the connections we made. No one piece is a literal interpretation of another, but the threads are there. I can even see the remnants from the original prompt in the newer entries.

This was a good idea.

Some pictures:

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Whoa.

Okay, I am  just about ready to put Reflex in the mail. And I don’t know whether it was looking closely at the art again or re-reading the original prompt or the fact that I watched a whole evening of creepy science fiction television the other night (Dr. Who, Alphas, and Fringe), but the final product is NOTHING like the drafts. In a good way. And I am quite pleased with it. Get ready to rumble, next recipient.

 

percolating

First draft having been accomplished on the computer, I have been playing around with the form and most promising ideas writing by hand in my notebook. I think I know which concepts are worth keeping, so (along with drafting)  I am working on new thinking about how the poem will look in the journal. Inspired by transformation. Layers. Vellum. We shall see…

 

Finally!

Today’s trip to the mailbox finally brought Reflex my way. In an effort to return to the meaning of the word and respond without too much thought, I spent about 30 minutes looking at all of the previous entries for inspiration,  just taking notes and letting things roll around in my head.  After a break for some errands, I sat down at my computer and pounded out a first draft.

Inspired by something I saw Hannah Stephenson do over at The Storialist, I recorded the screen as I created a first draft. Whatever ends up in the journal will, I am sure, be quite different, but I thought you might like to see how it went.

 

Focus damn it

Open a document in word and something about the blankness of the page makes my mind also feel empty, practically zen-like, but open a blank page in a leather bound book….. my mind almost simultaneously wanders to different places. One idea checking another into a third, until my head is a mosh pit of ideas being slamming into a grey matter padded skull. I finally realize to finish one thought I need to ignore the larva sized new ideas, stretching and flailing their little legs in the hopes of break the limbs of its rivals in my hippocampus. Like an old camera, my brain slowly focuses on selecting which to allow maturation into pupa stage so they might grow large enough to chrysalis and flutter out my ears.

 

Currently listening to calm, melancholy music on Stereomood.com while procrastinating a paper….

 

A critical safety net.

Hi everyone.

First let me apologize for setting a most undesirable precedent in the very first round of journaling. It seems that between having received the good Book whilst on vacation and returning to tumult, the ball has been in my court for much too long.

The good news is that I am quite happy with my first contribution and the journal is now ready to reassert itself upon the world, abetted by the fury that is USPS media mail.

In deciding to be less than more specific about my entry, I will mostly just say that it accommodates a few interests I have been pursuing in my latest work while responding to Kristin’s most pleasing postcard.  I would describe the principle elements as:

• tracing paper and sewing
• separation and reconfiguration
• art on trash

Oh yeah, also celebrity porno websites? Apparently.

Love,

Jon

 

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.