Photo Prompts

I've known several poets who hate writing prompts. That's never been the case for me. My imagination seems to love assignments, particularly entering the environment of a painting or a photograph. Finding an image at the spur of the moment can delay the writing process, so I've gradually gathered photos which intrigue me. Unfortunately, I can't always find them quickly in my computer files or I'm somewhere separated from my home computer. So I'm putting up these links today to photographers and photos which have drawn my interest. That way I can pull up this blog and find them no where I am. 

Story 01: Ward Long — Nowhere Diary

A Life Worth Living — ZSOLT KADAR

turdlez User Profile | DeviantArt

• erica & i - AMY POWELL | Photographer | amylynnpowell@gmail.com (amy-powell.com)

Announcement: New Spontaneous Poetry Concept

I've arrived at a new concept for my ongoing series of "spontaneous poems!" Any Facebook status updates that tickle my muse will be fair game for a spontaneous poetry prompt. So watch out! Your status update might inspire a poem. My goal is to do one a week until the end of the year, so that's 12 before the end of 2009. Status away, folks!

For the Want of Wear

From: Max Karl Grimm
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 10:58 PM
To: "Keith Badowski"
Subject: Max Karl Grimm wrote on your Wall...

Max posted something on your Wall and wrote:

"Hello my friend,
How about a poem that stems from a dream that caused you to change something in your life? Much love and many blessings to you and yours,
Max"

For the Want of Wear by Keith Badowski

In my dream, the wind sleeps and no one breathes.
All night I’m a footpath blanketed with gravel,
bored without bicycles, not a sneaker to disturb me.
Numb with immobility, I long to be combed by a rake.

The absence of honeysuckle, the irrelevance of flowers
stirs no dread until I step from the untrodden black.
As if a drowned man revived, I gasp for air,
breathe deep of the atmosphered room of this grand hotel.

Unbathed, in slippered feet and rumpled pajamas,
I descend to the lobby, shuffle passed the lure of bacon
and bolt for the parking lot where I grab fistfuls of gravel
to throw to the sunlight, to the grass, the air of life.




Note: I tried the random pick-a-word again with O’Hara, but my finger stabbed the word “wings.” I was horrified! Wrote, “No, not a dream of flight again!” So in revulsion, my imagination fled in the opposite direction. As in the last poem, I set myself a limit of 12 lines, as much out of time consideration as anything. Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" informed the line: "I step from the untrodden black." Frost's poem also helped me in titling mine.

This poem marks my 6th spontaneous poem since I set my goal of 12. I’m starting to get doubtful that I’ll actually complete 12 in enough time to get the chapbook printed by Oct. 1st. I’ll have to check with the printer to see how close I can cut it. Those keeping track will note that this prompt also came in on Tuesday, Sept. 15th. Writing of the poem didn’t happen until today.

Spontaneous Poetry, Friday Sept. 11th

From: Anastasia Tikka
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 12:18 AM
To: Keith Badowski
Subject: Poetry Challenge

Hello Keith,

Well... (you might hate me!)

I made a list of my favorite words, and whittled it down to the most beautiful and unusual fifteen: nouns, adjectives, verbs - five each.

They're random... have fun!

Nouns

eschaton
gossamer
penumbra
syzygy
yarborough

Adjectives

bathysmal
chatoyant
echoic
lusory
tosticated

Verbs

aestivate
evanesce
imbricate
quinquiplicate
welter

Revelation Revisited by Keith Badowski

Determined to aestivate on the island of Patmos,
no eschaton in mind, just vacation,
I was lusory as a rectory
with my head resting on warm rock
within the creeping penumbra
of daily rented umbrella.

Although I’m no Earl of Yarborough,
I would have bet against it:
an echoic voice so cataclysmic
it elicited a metamorphic subtraction—
if I were still corporeal,
I was now Neolithic!

I was crumpled by a bathysmal waterfall
and out of such pressure and darkness peered
seven pair of chatoyant eyes
whose glimmer was tyrant over my being
and whose stare weltered my lips
with a nectar of honeycomb.

Like a prophetic prodigy
I grasped I was crushed before the Syzygy—
none other than the Trinity!
My tosticated awareness reeled
as They precisely expurgated
every raunchy pleasure I ever instigated.

All my futures imbricated
and like domino falls They mandated
that all my Poker games would be stalemated.
They revealed how this old blasphemer
would so very soon fly on gossamer.
Yet my mortal life they would elongate,
in fact promised to quinquiplicate
all my earthly days!

I struggled to address Their omnipresence
but my questions dissipated like frankincense
and I had to acquiesce as They simply
and utterly evanesced.



Note: You might notice that I got Anastasia’s challenge on Thursday morning. I’ll admit I needed some extra time for this one. It took over an hour just to research all the words I didn’t already know. Then Thursday turned out to be too full for any devoted writing time. So today, Friday, I set about to manufacture some semblance of a poem from these very difficult words. The sets of words grated against all my instincts for poetry. I love interesting words, YES. However, if a poem has more than 2 words that I have to pull out a dictionary to understand, there is something deeply wrong. Mostly the poems I write (and the poems I enjoy) must be in a familiar language heard in a slightly different plane from normal conversation. Difficult words usually distract from the experience of the poem which ought to produce the illusion of a speaker. In this case, I think I tried to make sure the speaker had a profound experience so that his highfalutin words would seem applicable. Interestingly, Biblical language usually tends to be simple and accessible. Revelation is probably the least accessible book of the Bible, not because of the language, but because of the symbolism and coded terminology.

This was a very rough challenge, but I think the results are interesting and I did learn a few new words—at least for a short while.

Spontaneous Poetry, Tuesday September 8th

From: Ron Self
Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 11:30 AM
To: Keith Badowski
Subject: Re: Keith's chapbook plan

You asked for it. Here's your challenge: I just got back from the dentist. How about writing a poem using all of the following dentist-related terms without mentioning dentist or dental visit? Here are the terms: crown, cavity, brush, floss, filling, amalgam, and root canal. In other words, write a poem not about dentists or dental visits but somehow using the terminology of dentistry.
Ron

Beneath by Keith Badowski 9-08-2009

Deep down in the bowels of my basement
where I’ve stored the amalgam of all my dada,
there you will find a guitar strung with floss
which of course could never be tuned.

When last I ventured into the dark cavity
to find those soldier dolls armed with bouquets,
I fell like Jack and banged my crown, crawled up
cursing Ebay. Filling shelves, loading every nook

runs in our family. Uncle Gus saved spatulas
and shoeshine brushes, ketchup bottles
and army cots. No different really from
my penchant for implausibles like that turntable

needled with a cat’s tooth. The tongue
of my imagination keeps probing
that festering gap, for who can have
too many harmonica mobiles

or shoeboxes swaddled in Sunday comics
or lanyards stolen from the dresser-drawers
of school chums’ parents? Yet out of sight
needs not mean out of mind, as you, my spouse,

my kids, and even my parents (acting as if
you expect to outlive me), chide me to purge
the bins of bird call pipes, and pipe cleaner
cake toppers, to lance my hoard of Play-Doh

body-part molds, and once and for all to root
canal those insidious bags of belly
button lint I saved for posterity, a legacy
you’d trade in an instant for oral surgery.

This fondest hope I hereby bequeath
that when I’m dead and deeper, if not before,
you might creep down this decay of steps
perhaps to curettage all I have gathered

only to discover vast gaps, not crowding—
room enough to spare for your endless beneath,
room enough for a spiral tower (of all things)
composed of all our ancestor’s baby teeth.




Note: I combined Ron’s challenge with an assignment from Bonni Goldberg’s Room to Write: Daily Invitation to a Writer’s Life. The assignment appears on p. 115: Today describe your basement and probe its contents in writing. Pay attention to all your senses. Notice whether what you discover has symbolic potential.

I don’t actually have a basement, but I did have an Uncle Gus who collected a wide variety of oddities. The lanyard was pilfered from Billy Collins. The "Play-Doh body molds" were filched from Tim Healy. The "belly button lint" was robbed from my high school drama teacher Mr. Burgers. The "pipe cleaner cake toppers" were swiped from a Google search, as was the concept of a tower of teeth...but the one I saw on the net was repulsive, made of diseased human teeth.

The rest of the items are primarily mine. But it is actually hard to claim ownership of anything really. It is my opinion that the most basic form of art is collage. Our minds, our very imaginations are collections of various junk and treasures that seep in and become reconfigured within us.

Poetry Stunt Leading Up To Oct 1st Reading

Here's what I propose: a Spontaneous Poetry chapbook.

Between now and Sept 22nd, I will take on 12 challenges for spontaneous poetry. That will leave a week to get the results printed as a chapbook, before my "feature" reading on Thursday October 1st in Columbus, GA. I won't be aiming for slick or pretty. This will be a "cheap" book that draws its energy from speed and uninhibited creativity. I might even include scans of some of the original handwritten pages. I also might include some of the earlier spontaneous poems.

I won't be printing very many copies of this thing. I'd say no more than 125 or 150. I'll be publishing this as a Brick Road Poetry Press book with the logo and our company info. I'm not too concerned about an ISPN or barcode. Mainly I see this as a poetry stunt, nothing more, nothing less.

As for challenges/prompts, anything goes: random words, strange topic, specific form, an image, a question, a first line, phrase that must be used, a reference that must be included, etc.

I will spend 45 - 60 minutes on each challenge. Maybe longer if time permits that same day. I will only solicit the challenge on the day I will tackle the challenge, so there will be no forethought.

If you are reading this and wish to be solicited for a prompt, shoot me an email at "the bearded poet at hot mail dot com" (eliminate the spaces and substitute @ for at).

Poetry and Writing Stunts

If you’ve read my blog before, you know I’m a sucker for writing stunts, such as the “spontaneous poems” I did for awhile. (By the way, I fully intend to get back to that stunt one day very soon—so keep tuned in!)

Anyway, I found my way to the website of René Battelle, who has explored several varieties of writing stunts.
See: http://afternoontea.250free.com/SpecialEvents/EventsFrontpage.html
Main Page: http://afternoontea.250free.com/

The following Writing Stunt ideas are inspired by René Battelle’s projects. In several instances, I’ve slightly modified what she describes on her website. Whatever the case, the credit goes to her for the inspiration.

Poem-a-day challenge—It’s self explanatory isn’t it? Write a poem every day for one month, any style, any length. (I’ve also heard of other poets doing this for an entire year, but that would be a Herculean feat!)

Stanza-a-day challenge--Write a four-line stanza for each day of the month, then post the entire poem for the 30th. The only real rule is that you are not allowed to look at the previous stanzas while you move forward with the poem. You can't look at any of them until the entire thing is done.

24-Hour Surrealist Poetry Marathon!--Produce one poem, written during that day sometime, that is no less than 10 lines long. Then the fun begins! All night, from 6:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m., produce at least one poem per hour. There are no form or line restrictions for those hours, and since you’re awake all night it could get weird, which is where the Surrealist bit comes in!

Midnight Madness—For one week (or month if you can stand it), write a poem every night at midnight. Wake yourself up from a dead sleep (if necessary), and give yourself a mere hour to compose, edit, and post a lovely piece of verse for general consumption.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words--See if you can produce a thousand words for a picture. . . . All right, maybe not a thousand, but how about as many as you can? The challenge is to produce poems and/or stories from pictures in magazines or any other source of photography.

Ten Hour Shower—For ten hours, 8:00 p.m. -- 6:00 a.m., write a poem an hour, two if possible. Start out writing in your bathtub or shower stall. From there move to other unusual writing locations as needed, such as under the kitchen table or with your feet in the fireplace.

Poetry Duel—Find a fellow poet with a strong constitution and challenge him or her to a poetry duel. Go back and forth each day and write poems in response to each other's poems. See if you can keep it up for an entire month.

Morning Minute—For one month, every morning, within minutes of opening your eyes from sleep, taking no more than a minute (but less, if it happens) to write everything you’re thinking.

Friday Spontaneous Poem: 'Jesus as a teenager . . . '

Last week, Ron Self sent me the following challenge: "Jesus as a teenager . . . "

Here's what I came up with this afternoon:

Jesus as a Teenager
for Ron Self

“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”
---John 21:25

At the dawn of creation, God gave teenagers survival instincts--
a supernatural sense for the patsies who would never tell,
a radar for the abettors young and old who would cover up,
and a gift for schmoozing every slippery way out of scalding water.

Oh, but the Hebrew teens at the dawn of A.D. were especially loved,
at least those podunk Nazarene punks who grew up with Jesus.
When they stole their parents Passover skins and got stinking drunk,
Jesus passed his hands over their heads and filtered them sober.

And we all know why those wineskins were never missed.
When those boys played too rough near the street and one went under
the crushing wheels of the chariot, Jesus was there to inflate his torso.
When he caught Bennie Barnabus deflowering the prim and proper Pricilla,

Jesus turned back time and orchestrated an escort. The Son of God
was a handy to have around, although at the time they couldn’t say why.
There was just something mystical about that gawky youth
who spent his days seated on the temple steps, his head in a scroll.

Those God-given instincts reigned in their jibes, sealed their mouths.
After all what were they going tease? If you keep reading like that
you’ll go blind. Stop playing with that scroll or your hand’ll fall off.
Yet Jesus had no friends, too busy for that, so many sins to undo.

He was so grateful at eighteen when God’s messianic plan for him
finally penetrated his greasy hair and zits, when he finally knew
he could rest at night instead of listening at tent flaps and thatched roofs.
He could take it easy for awhile, slow down, build a bench.

What a relief to know he would undo it all. So what if he had to die . . .
that would be a pretty good rest too.


Keith Badowski

Friday Spontaneous Poem: 'Action in France'

From: Steven Shields
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:57 AM
To: Keith Badowski
Subject: RE: Poetry Challenge?


Keith, have a look at the first photo in the blog I am keeping for our family history. It's entitled "Action in France" and can be found at http://shieldsfamilyconnection.blogspot.com. There are lots of other photos there too--maybe something else strikes your fancy. This is what I've spent most of my summer doing, most of the past year or two actually. This blog is a small slice of it but maybe will prompt something. Hope all's otherwise well with you and yours--S.

Here's a link to the photo mentioned above.

3rd BN Infirmary, 26th INF. USA
(Charles Thorne, fifth from left)
for Steven Shields

Those coarse white-washed bricks
and the crusty mortar in-between them,
every morning I opened my eyes in the dark
to escape that texture.

All night my dreams skittered like mice—
miniature hearts racing, anxious to preserve fur.
That morning I awoke breathless,
terror stricken that my mouth had scabbed shut.

My fingers sprang to my teeth, my tongue—
still there! Oh, yes,

I’ve patrolled the mouthless rows,
watched ribs stand in for jaws,
seen those who can not sneeze.

As the photographer posed me,
instructed the whole infantry where to place
arms and hands, so our bodies would not repeat,

I kept marching past rows of moaning blankets—
stubs of eroding trench feet poking out,
white pads draped over sightless sockets.

Against the bricks, I couldn’t hear them.
The nurses would tend to the bandages
while I stood stock still, held my breath for 26 and 3—
certain those bricks would grind me to dust.

Keith Badowski

Friday Spontaneous Poem: 'Sexy Push Ups in New Fall Colors'

From: Jean Copland
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:49 AM
To: Keith Badowski
Subject: Re: Poetry Challenge?

Keith,

Suggestion:
Sexy Push Ups in New Fall Colors - Victoria's Secret
in rhyming couplets.

Jean


Seasonal Marketing Strain
for Jean Copland

When bras must mimic leaves
autumnal orange heaves

beneath silk-cutter’s cuff.
These spinning models slough

saffron and sage like slaw.
Our designers dread the thaw

all those dyes they must expend
and heft of time suspend!

They so rarely know the peace
of hooks undone, release.

Keith Badowski

Friday Spontaneous Poem: 'a bald man speaking'

From: Brad Tree
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:43 AM
To: Keith Badowski
Subject: RE: Poetry Challenge?

a bald man speaking
I will explain my source after I see the poem. I do not want to spoil your process.

Bare Club for Men
for Brad Tree

Whether a bald man is speaking to the cold
that has infected his children
or to the plastic vessel brimming with cough syrup
or to a market square littered with overturned trash cans
or to a ballpark that’s lost its third minor league
or to the valium he’s about to swallow dry,
he has to break the silence despite his baldness,
stomp his foot sometimes for emphasis
and wield his bald tongue.

It’s easy to sympathize with his plight
especially if you already feel badly
for anyone whose daily
chores include scooping kitty litter.

When the bald man is speaking you feel sorry for him,
not because he can’t jump on one foot
and rub his belly, nor because can’t swap
his snobbish tone for newscaster's,
but because you know in your heart of your hearts,
he’s worried

that while he’s speaking
all you’re thinking
about is his glistening
under the compact fluorescents
and not really listening
at all.

Keith Badowski

Friday Poems??

Got the following email from my blogliophile friend, Todd . . .

Hey, Keith --

What happened to the Friday spontaneous poetry? I bet you've got a backlog by now, so bring it on!

If you need some more keywords to get going again, add these to the pile:

Superfudge

Waterloo

Spartan

Watchmen

Tachyons

Hope all's well,

Todd

Hey Todd:

The requests dried up on 4th of July weekend and I didn’t have the mood anymore to nudge anyone else for prompts. Basically I quit writing on the 4th and hadn’t picked up keyboard or pen to do anything poetic until yesterday. The 3rd Thursday poetry workshop met again yesterday and I hate to go without something to get feedback on. So I dusted off a scrap of writing I’d started and whipped it into a more finished form for the group. It got some good responses but it’s not quite done yet.

Anyway, I was ambivalent about the arrival of your prompt. I almost turned it down. But the poetry bug seems to be biting again. Not to say this is anything all that great, but I’m getting more in the mood to play with words again. So thanks for the prompt. I hope you find the results interesting enough.

Peace,
Keith

Dream Theory

Superfudge is a book about a boy
who wants to be a bird.
That dream will never come true.

Waterloo ended Napoleon’s rule.
Some dreams end in abdication.

Although rumored to be lethal,
the Spartans left on permanent vacation.
Some dreams are never written, dying on the tongue.

Girls and boys are raised up for the Presidency,
but who watches those watchmen who let us down?
Too many dreams of justice never reach the psyche.

Tachyons, tachyons, theoretical but never slowing down—
dreams are like that, cold hard proof never found.

Catch-Up Spontaneous Poem

Here's a challenge I received awhile ago . . .

Okay… here’s something for you.

- mutant

- breakout

- painting

- script



Thanks! linda

Linda Ames
GPS Newsletter Editor (www.georgiapoetrysociety.org)
CVWC Publicity/Webmaster/Graphic Art (www.chattwriters.org)
www.authorsden.com/lindames
http://lindasphotoart.blogspot.com/


OK, so here's another one for Linda, who based on her emails has been one of the biggest fans of this Spontaneous Poetry stunt. Thanks for your support and encouraging words, Linda.

Delayed

Observe the new form of fruit
which had nothing to do with innovation.

Its mutant difference from all other fruit
was spontaneous like ketchup

splashed on white paper and called
a painting. Not even Tropicana could script

the creation of this violet skinned fruit
filled with gallons and gallons of bruise

tinged juice—one tree bears enough
to quench the thirst of all of Baghdad.

If only we could bring it to market,
extinguish the breakout of fighting

amongst the marking team
tasked with naming this Juicy Fruit.


I already have received the challenge for tomorrow’s “Friday Spontaneous Poem”, so please hold any new challenges until mid-next week. It’s nice for a change to be caught up!

Friday Spontaneous Poem

From: Emery Campbell

Hike Eith,

Interesting. I once entered a similar sort of challenge contest in which one was to write a poem incorporating the following words:

exaggerate, wind, dirt, raisin, game, chicken, garlic, cream, chimney, and soda.

It could be any form but it had to make sense.

If you show me yours I'll show you mine (nudge, nudge, wink, wink...)

ELC

OK. Here it goes, Emery:

The Greatest Form of Flattery

Chimpanzees under attack exaggerate
their screams and the more cinematic ones wind
up channeling Tarzan. These exacerbate
quandaries of the immaterial mind.

‘Who’s imitating whom?’ stirs us to dig dirt
to crush clods in search of the golden raisin.
‘Well enough’ is never left alone. It hurts
to pray when answers are trapped inside resin.

A chimp would never booby trap the chimney,
bait Santa Claus with cookies and spiked soda.
Our vocal cords and thumbs have made us cagey,
plotting murders while prone in a pagoda.

The chimps have moved on to a banana game—
they wring the peels as if choking a chicken.
When bananas go extinct who will they blame?
Moot point when the baby chimps cry and sicken

while onlookers lunch on stir-fry with garlic
sauce and one of us humans orders up cream.
A sip of tea to go with man’s oft cyclic
icing up of ‘nice’ into a cube of ‘mean.’

Friday Spontaneous Poem

This week’s prompt comes from my friend Todd. (Apologetic note: Jean and Linda, please be patient. I’m sorry it’s been taking me awhile to get to your requests. I hope to attend to them this weekend. Todd’s request came earlier and was misplaced.)

I suppose Todd thought I was ignoring his request, thus the challenging tone of the re-request I got:

If you're not up to the challenge of incorporating:

(( greased pole climb ))

(( town square ))

(( courthouse clock ))

(( sunburn ))

...then I'll wrap that one up myself, since it's drawn from a pretty specific summer memory of mine when I was about ten years old. Your call; let me know either way.


Well, Todd. I’d sure like to see you write this poem also. But here’s my crack at it, buddy! And thanks for the positive feedback and encouragement too!

One last note: If you ever have difficulty reading the scans of these poems, you can enlarge the view by clicking on the poem. If that doesn't help enough, drop me a line. I'll fix the problem somehow.

Writing Toolbox: Spring Boards

Ever since I was introduced to the concept of freewriting, early in my undergrad college days, I have been a big believer in keeping loose, especially in the early drafts of any piece of writing. In the last few years, I have found a few specific techniques that help me to keep writing and, in some cases, lead to poems.

One such method has been spring boarding off a line in some other poet’s works. My favorite resource has been Carolyn Forche’s collection The Blue Hour, in particular her poem "On Earth", a forty-six page chant of images and phrases which are alphabetically arranged. I copy a single phrase from the poem on the top of the page in my notebook. Then I free-associate as I write, thinking about what the line evokes for me.

Sometimes I write about memories from my own life. Other times, I imagine a persona who has spoken the Forche line and write a monologue in that voice. I might write down a series of related images or ideas. Occasionally I write down the road of whimsy imagining a surreal universe where anything can happen, as in dreams.

To give you the flavor of Forche’s lines (my favorite prompts), here’s a sample:

as for children, so for the dead
as gloves into a grave
as God withdrawing so as to open an absence
as he appears and reappears in the unknown
as if a flock of geese were following
as if there were no other source of food
as if to say goodbye to his own mind
as if we had only one more hour
as if with the future we could replace the past
as in the childhood of terror and holiness

I have used all the above lines as prompts to keep me writing for hours and hours. Why not give it a try yourself? Even if you use only the 10 lines I have given above and write for only 15 minutes in response to each prompt, you will write blissfully for 2.5 hours.

This strategy for writing typically works best for me if I don’t worry too much about the results. In other words, I don’t start with any expectation of producing a poem. Often I leave whatever writing that results from this in my notebook for a year or more. Then whenever I finally get around to it, I open up my notebook to discover pages and pages of writing that I know I wrote, but I don’t remember actually writing. That is to say, I have given myself enough distance on the writing that it is as if someone else wrote it. At that point, I have the correct perspective to discover whether any of these bursts of freewriting have any potential to become poems. To my delight and surprise, many poems have resulted from this process. Of course, there are also many pages of writing that are hopelessly terrible and deserve only to be burned. But the process must be endured for that wonderful result of a few good poems.

At some point soon, I’ll share some other techniques along these lines.

Oh, and by the way, I am anxiously awaiting your challenges and/or assignments for my Spontaneous Poetry Friday. Please do send me something. I will guarantee use of the first one I receive (and will allow the possibility of using some of the others.)