Saturated

 

 

Write something that defines and relates your life to the word Saturated. 

 

Here is my effort:

 

Saturated by tex norman

 

 

Who has not stood to face some

stunning feat of nature, a chaotic muddle

of mud, stone, flora and fauna, all artfully

placed, and been awed by such a

view? We have looked, and having

been moved, we say, “I must soak

up this view, I must immerse myself

in this stunning majesty of Nature, I

must absorb it all to my saturation

point, as if a view had anything

in common with a cup of jostled Joe,

or the proverbially cried over spilt milk.

Is that what I mean by “Saturated?”

 

No, I think that definition’s too abbreviated.

Our head is like a bone bowl

and data is poured into our

brains via vision, and hearing, and time

and we are so soaking saturated by

life and our brain is so much

more absorbent than photo

paper, that we are absolutely sure that

we always know what we think

we know.           

 

              I have, more than once

been caught in the rain, arriving home

drenched, soaked, and most definitely saturated by

rain. I could not have been more

saturated as I stood on the welcome

mat of my own house feeling most

unwelcomed as I shout through the door

“I am totally saturated, my honey pie.”

And she says, “I’ll put towels in

the garage. Get undressed there and dry

off there,” says my sweetness, my warmness,

my corn muffin. And in I come,

still moist, as nude and wet

as the day I was born

and wondering, ‘Might I be saturated with

life? Could I have soaked up as

much living as I can hold and

unable to hold more? Is it possible

that I, unable to take in one

more drop of life, am now ready

for what comes next? Perhaps I am

ready to be squeezed out, wrung out,

and tossed out, having served my purpose.

 

But maybe life is more like an

artist’s brush, designed to be saturated with

color. Perhaps I am not fully ready

for use until I am saturated, with pigments,

and being so saturated that I can spread,

mark, blend, define the darkness

and the light and make clear that there’ll

always be middle tone grays in my life.

 

INANIMATE OBJECTS TALK

My brother Tim and I started trying to spur each other on to write more. He sent me a prompt that I enjoyed and want to share with you.

This is the email he sent to me:

I got this app for me phone called "Writing Prompts". We could use it as something to work from each week. I just opened it up and it says, "Inanimate objects in your room communicate at night."

We decided on seven words per line as the form, keeping it simple since it was our first joint effort.

HERE IS MY TRY:

WHY HE LOVES COFFEE by tex norman

The book by the bed said, “Not

much was read. Hey pillow is
he asleep?”

“Yeah,”replied pillow, “but not

deeply. His head bobs like a boat
moored on a windy night.”

“He’s got

restless leg syndrome, or so I suspect,”
said the bedclothes.”

“Well, if you saw

through his eyes,” the glasses explained,
“you’d see what he sees, you’d know
what he knows, you’d get why he
is troubled in sleep.”

“And why?” asked

the digital clock. “Will the glasses share
their insight? You know time is always
running out.”

“He gets that,” said his

journal.“He knows his time alive is
short, and that has magnified his shortcomings,
intensified his regrets, and shame waits for
him to sleep, so while he rests,
shame nibbles and gnaws on his guts.”

Hiscoffee cup asked, “Am I the

only one here willing to comfort him?”

Panicked Poet: Needing Prompts

I learned a lot from reading biographies of several poets. Frost was a night-owl and tended to write into the night and this, of course, put him late on the day. It was not a great schedule for a poet who was, in the early years, also a farmer. But William Stafford, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins all have said they get up early to write.

In that great work Early Morning by William Stafford's son, Kim Stafford has the great poet talking about how his kids would get up early and interrupt his morning writing, so he would get up an hour earlier, and then another hour earlier, until he found that sweet-spot where the house was quiet, the kids were asleep and he could write.

I took this practice on myself, getting up at 5, or 4 am to write. The problem, for me, is that I don't always know what to do at that hour. In fiction I just make it a practice to stop writing in the middle of a scene that I know where it is going. That way, when I go back to it, I know how to start. I just take up where I left off. But with poetry, sometimes, I need prompts.

Here are some prompts that I use, and you are welcome to use too, if you want to, or feel it might be helpful.

1) Start a notebook and fill it with prompt stuff: Stuff like a list of topics to write about:

• fear
• sleep
• death
• spring
• snow
• a spider
• paying bills, and on and on

2) Prime the pump: Either collect in your prompt notebook a list of phrases you come across as you read. When you need to prompt yourself, scan those phrases and pick one. Paraphrase the line in 5 or 6 different ways, and see if it leads you to a poem.

 

3) Take a color and color a poem: Jot down every memory you have that includes that color. See if it leads you to a poem.

 

4) Never, ever, no way: Start by making a list of stuff you could never, would never do. See if it leads to a poem.

 

5) Start by making a list of stuff you could never, would never do: List, explain, read, delete, add to, and see if this starts to lead you to a poem.

 

6) Don't start the morning with writing, start with walking, or standing, or sitting: Take the dog for a walk, or take yourself outside, and intentionally look, listen and feel. Then come back in and write down what you saw, heard, and felt. Do haikus or just very short poems that tell no story, or reveal some memory or opinion, they just capture the moment.

 

7) Write a rant: Take some issue that really chaps your hide and write a ranting tirade about it.

 

8) Write a funny rant: You can make this a separate activity, or you can let it spring from the serious rant poem. Take the ranting poem, make it rhyme, and make it so extreme it is silly.

 

9) Write an inventory poem: Inventory a drawer, or the contents of your pocket, or your purse, or three or four things you lost recently, or all the pieces of mail that arrived yesterday.. Maybe you could write some thoughts or memories about each of the items in your inventoried list.

 

10) Looking for your mind, a million miles away: I have often heard, and sometimes said, "My mind was a million miles away." It is a phrase used to explain why we didn't hear something or notice something that happened right in front of us. Well, go find that mind. Where is it. What is it thinking about? See if it leads to a poem.

Forty Poetry or Journaling Prompts

Forty Poetry Prompts

 

 

Here are 40 ideas for writing a poem, or as a prompt for a personal essay.  If you want to make it a funny poem, try using rhyme.  If you get stuck on a rhyming word use the following link as your on line rhyming dictionary:  http://www.rhymezone.com/

 

Write about...

 

1.     being underwater

2.     a person whose life you're curious about

3.     your mother's perfume

4.     trouble sleeping or waking up

5.     growing older

6.     the feeling of getting lost in a book

7.     telling someone, like a grandchild, how to know when you're in love

8.     a bad dream

9.     tell a ghost story or something about the occult. Even if you don’t believe                    in that stuff it can be fiction.

10. your mother’s whistling.

11. an important life choice you've made

12. spring, summer, fall, or winter

13. something most people see as ugly but which you see as beautiful

14. a n emotion that you have struggled with, such as jealousy, or worry

15. becoming a parent, or a grandparent, or a great grandparent

16. an event that changed you

17. a place you visited -- how you imagined it beforehand, and what it was actually like

18. the ocean, or huge storm from your childhood

19. forgetting [i.e. does it get scary when you first notice you are forgetting stuff a lot?]

20. the speed of light

21. someone with a skill: doll maker, weaver, painter, et cetera.

22. reflections in a window

23. a newspaper headline recently or one important one from you past

24. holding your breath

25. a specific color

26. your greatest fear

27. time travel and how or why you would travel to a particular time and place

28. a particular toy you had as a child

29. being invisible, maybe it is just people not seeing you for some reason when you are clearly right there in front of them.

30. a time you felt homesick

31. telling someone about something that is hard to tell

32. about birthdays [i.e. birthday candles: how they matter to children who get few of them, and they don’t matter at all old people who get a whole bunch of them.

33. a favorite food and a specific memory of eating it

34. an imaginary city

35. losing your ability to sing, or giving up driving

36. imagine life in an aquarium

37. pick a Bible verse and tell how it give insight into something that happened to you.

38. write about falling two ways:  a physical fall, and something that was a downfall

39. what a computer might daydream about

40. your grandmother's hands

Poetry Prompt: Emotional and Feelings are Visitors.

I read a quote I wish I’d read in high school.  I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but it went something like this:  Feelings are visitors, they come and they go.”  Write a poem about a frequent emotional visitor.  This could be a good visitor, a positive or pleasurable emotion that has left you, and you could talk about what made it leave.  It could be a negative emotion that keeps coming into your life.  How do you get that emotion to leave?  Why does it keep coming back?  What do you do if this uninvited guest just won’t leave you?

Form Suggestions:

Make this a FREE verse sonnet.

• Put 10 syllables in each line, but the beat of each line is free.  Make the rhythm of the line just sound good to you. 
• Write 14 of these 10 syllable lines.
• If you want to do what Shakespeare often did for his monologues on stage, end with a rhyming couplet as a way of signaling that the poem is done.

OR write it however you like:  free verse, traditional sonnet, a blank verse monologue, a dialogue between you and the emotion, short, long, whatever you feel inspired to try.

NOTE:  since there are a lot of visitors this could actually be used for lots of your emotions and then you would have a chapbook, or perhaps a full book of poetry.

Write a poem about your pillow.

Write a poem about your pillow.  It can be as serious or funny as you like.  If you pick funny see if you can write some rhyming cat in the hat like work.  But serious can be perhaps easier.  I heard on TV that your pillow can double in weight due to dut mite excrement.  As a kid I remember how I would get hot and throughout the night I was flipping my pillow to the cool side.   Think of all the dreams hatched on your pillow, or lovers who shared your pillow, or children who rested on your pillow, or times when your significant other hit you in the face.  Think of your pillow as a witness to some aspect of your life.  Perhaps you have cried on your pillow.  Maybe you like to read while propped up on your pillow. Maybe a pillow played some role in your sex life.  Count the pillows on your bed.  Count the pillows in your house.  Imagine a functional pillow debating a decorative pillow.  Has a pillow ever played an important role in your past?

Here is my pillow effort:

MY PILLOW  by tex norman

                As a child I had pillows

stuffed with feathers.

I was before foam-rubber was common.

I was during the time when feather’s were common

and pillows were filled with bird magic.

Sometimes, in the night, I would feel something sticking me.

I used my fingers like tweezers and pinched the point and

pulled.  Out came a feather. It was my explanation for

how my dreams traveled, not on wings, but on feathers.

My dreams drifted.  My dreams responded to the slightest

hint of a movement.  My head filled with the impossible

and it seem all so totally, absolutely possible.

Boomer Poetry Prompt: More Ranting Poetry

On June 25, 1857, French poet Charles Baudelaire published his book Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil).

This collection of poetry led to his conviction on charges of blasphemy and obscenity.

Here's a sample of Mr. Baudelaire’s nasty poetry:

"Huddled, teeming, like gut-worms by the million,

A clutch of Demons make whoopee in our brain

and, when we breath,

Death floods our lungs, an invisible torrent,

muffled in groans.

" Get good and dark:

You can find some translations on line if you are willing to read a bit from Flowers of Evil. 

You can purchase the book on line: 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081120006X?ie=UTF8&tag=httpwwwgoodco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=081120006X&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2

If you just want to vent, then write a short venting poem.  Unleash the gut-worms!  Remember the movie Network?  The protagonist was “mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”

Write a poetry rant.  You can read more of Flowers of Evil, or just sound off on what pisses you off.

Here is one of my rants.  I won first place for this work in a coffee house poetry slam.

Bra Ads  By tex norman

I stand before you

a man racked with guilt

and shame

that came

(or so I felt)

from my Calvinistic, blackbelt,

fundamentalist

father.  He wasn’t much fun,

but he certainly was mental.

He could make a hard-shell Baptist

look like a godless ACLU liberal.

No lie.

So all my life I

have felt like a hopeless

and helplessly unworthy one

living in the State of SIN,

the black sheep of my family.

Despite, however, the

the religious oppression of my family

we did have porn in

our house.  It was called

the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue,

containing seventeen provocative pages

of brassieres for all sizes and ages.

Back in 1950-twelve, I

perused those over (and under) developed bra models

modeling bra, after bra, after buh-buh-buh bra.

I could sit for hours imagining

their hoooo-haaahs.

Back then there was a poplar song

about an “itsy-bitz,

teeny-weenie-

yellow-polka-dot bikini”

that prompted Sears to add

three pages of two-piece

bra-topped swimming suits

added, I thought, just for me

adding to me variety.

Then, one day, all my fears

came true.

I got caught

while scrutinizing a brassiere

that hooked (oh, my god)

in the front.  You know,

between the left hoooo and the right haaah.

My father saw what I was seeing.

There must’ve been like 57 hooo-haaahs

on each page

and I was of an age

my daddy thought too

young to

be forming such mummeries

so daddy worked himself into a

brew-ha-ha

like rage reciting scripture

about how impure

my thoughts were.  He

threw scripture at me

like one of those onward Christian Soldiers

lobbing verse grenades.

“The Apostle Paul wrote

in his First Letter to the Corinthians

that, ‘it is good not to touch a woman.’”

When a guy says something like that

you can’t help but wonder,

“Had Paul ever tried it?”

Then my daddy quoted Jesus, who said,

“It is adultery to look at the bust

and to lust.”

Finally, my father bemoaned those cross your heart

Playtex living bra ads on TV.

But I have to say

it seemed to me

that those television bra ads were directed right at me.

Their very name was a Direct Address.

Listen carefully

I’m sure you’ll hear it:

“PLAYTEX”

                “Play tex”

                              Play                tex!”