Image Additions and Abductions: More Exercises from English 221!

Abandoned: School in Beaver, IA

This week's exercises worked with and against images devised by our reading. Today, we replaced concrete nouns/images used by the original poet/author with our own stuff. I thought this would be really tough, but I wound up with a pretty decent idea for a story. I took a paragraph from David Owen's "Dime Store Floor" and rewrote it using some image-sets I'm pretty obsessed with (as those who've seen my Pinterest well know). Swamps and abandoned buildings. I see this as having real potential as a short-short for the new grouping I've been working on.

The Tower

The next place we try to teach Davy a lesson was an abandoned structure that was called "The Tower." It was surrounded by chain link fence topped with barbed wire that had been cut apart and cast aside by some brave delinquents we grew up with. The original "Tower" became our favorite smoke spot later, but it was the first destination we were warned against by our parents and teachers, as far back as the third grade.

The first place we tried was the 32nd street bog, just over the hill and through a woods from Davy's house, which I passed on my route to school. The bog grew red algae and splotches of purple loosestrife and smelled 1000 years old. One day, my friends and I decided to rid ourselves of Davy by luring him into the bog and up an old oak tree with a low, chair-shaped branch perfect for perching over the bog's murky waters. We coated the oak-seat with algae to make it not just disgusting but slippery, so Davy would fall right in - maybe get stabbed in the eye by a cattail. We tried it first and found it hardly slippery enough. The algae emitted an odor of fish eggs and dead frogflesh, and turned the butts of our jeans rust-color.

Last week, we also worked with genre-switching: turning a poem from the reading into a scene, and a scene from the reading into a poem. The latter can involve just gathering some of the concrete nouns, imagery and/or metaphors from a story and piling them together, as I did for the following, which is after Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." This is one of my favorite stories, and the poem didn't turn out half bad for a first run-through.

This is loosestrife...in case you wondered.

Go On Bub Get the Stuff

(after Carver’s “Cathedral”)

Though I touch my fingers to every part of the its face

Juice dripping from scalloping potatoes on a draining board

The poem died in Seattle without even the smallest compliment

green eyeshadow on a pig

straight pin in a baby’s nostril

yellow slacks and purple shoes

beard on a blind man

half of a twenty-peso coin spent on metaphor

Going to ambiguity you should sit on the right

Coming from you should sit on the left

Too much white in my iris

The image escapes

My eye ever on the roam

very little water scotch man

strawberry pie juicy thigh

I am trying to have a ham radio conversation with Guam, the Philippines, Alaska, Tahiti, Poetry

I imagine myself in Portugal

Imagine men wearing cowls, men dressed as devils, skeletons, lords, ladies

But I am not inside anything

Smooth the wrinkles from the bag, the poem says

Press hard

Don’t fudge

Keep your eyes closed