Next Week's Meeting, March 2, 2007

Because our lovely meeting room D at the library was not quite conducive to a Poetry Lab meeting, we decided for next week (3/2/07), we will meet at Java Juice (e-mail me for directions---> rememberingjinxremoving@gmail.com) at 4:00. We decided to do Gilsun's project about converting essays into poem's. This will involve choosing an essay you (or someone else, I guess, too) have written and attempting to put it into some sort of poetic format.
If you have any questions, e-mail me.

-Meg

Meeting, 2/23/07

As we decided to concoct a group serial poem about breakfast cereal, we had many interesting and varying ways bringing this to life. Matt's poem, "A Soyish Dream", was inspired by last week's conversation to try soy milk with cereal. He had an apparent euphoric experience with that, which translated nicely in a sort of "love poem" about cereal. Bret, who likes to write in the visual genre, brought us something a little more confined than usual, but still unique, utilizing the word "crunch," to overwhelm us. Derek brought us, "Part of a Well-Balanced Meal," about the sugary sludge of a Cheerio breakfast. We combined all of our poems together at the end. Matt's poem, being the longest, is the stanzas in red, Derek's is in blue, Bret's is in green, and mine (Meg) will be in gold.



An ode to my sweet nostalgic friend
I feel as if I never knew you
Yes, there was once a time
When I'd utterly devour you with pleasure.
Ravishingly skimming you dry,
A condiment to my desirous impulse
That vanished amidst my wincing wishes to die.

Fuel for the fire
with little chocolate covered
CRUNCHES.
A magic melting pot of marvelous mysteries,
A super sugar solution for sleep.
The chemical colors will continue to
smile down and take us in, to:
Day or night,
it is just what feels right.

Yet, soon I discovered a remedy
That allowed Chocolaty Delights
To finding solace in my belly,
Maybe it took a little NASA ingenuity
Or maybe it was a similar concern to somebody else.
A soyful engagement, nevertheless
That allowed this concotion of love to attest.

Tricks are for kids
so milk it for all its worth
iniquity in mastication
knowledge through saturation
get up early
don't quit your day job

Now, to have one is not without the other,
An equation withing which I long to smother.
Dry lips quenching for something sweet
A melodrama for my mouth to meet.
Yet, my delicious Delights, it isn't you I eternally hunger for.
Oh, the selfish slup that I am, I want so much more.
More sweetly pleasures with soyish cream.
You couldn't possibly fulfill this boyish dream.

my spoon sinks
into a sludge
of sugar and milk
scraping
the gritty enamel
of the porcelain bowl
it lifts
breaking the surface
with a heap
of glistening mud
and one
single
sweet
soggy
cheerio

So I walked through the aisle where this love gave birth
To find the tempting tang of soyful mirth.
Starving to have my fill of exotic fruit.
Toucan you can become my exotic beaut.
Or buzzing around my ear, sadly she might say,
"I'll be your honey, if only you'll stay."
But alas, my tempestuous craving for variety yields
To an almost obeying desire to play the field.
There is a richness in flavor I cannot concede,
It is the soy in my life upon which I shall feed.

Okay, so I got an link to this article in my e-mail today: “Tricksters and the Marketing of Breakfast Cereals.” Given our cereal serial poem project (or is that serial cereal poem project?) I thought I’d send you guys the link. But what’s a link without a little taste of the sweet frosty coating covering the wholesome flaky goodness of cultural critique? Nothing, I sez. So here’s the first paragraph of the article:

BREAKFAST CEREALS ARE SOLD BY TRICKSTERS. FROM LUCKY THE Leprechaun to the Cookie Crook to the mischievous live- action squirrels who vend General Mills Honey Nut Clusters, an astounding number of Saturday morning television commercials feature 30-second dramatizations of trickster tales that are designed to promote breakfast cereals. True, breakfast cereals are not the only products sold by tricksters, and not all cereals are sold by tricksters— especially in the last decade. But the association is common enough to persist as an unexamined assumption that seems obvious to most Americans once it is pointed out. Naturally, breakfast cereals are often sold by animated tricksterish mascot characters, and naturally such commercials feature motifs and narrative patterns that are common in trickster tales. But the perception of an inherent internal logic in this scheme overlooks a couple of key questions. Why, for example, are tricksters considered a particularly appropriate or effective means of marketing breakfast cereals? And why breakfast cereals in particular (and a few other breakfast products), almost to the exclusion of tricksters in other types of marketing campaigns? The answers to these questions, it turns out, may lie back in the semi-mystical, pseudoreligious origins of prepared breakfast foods and the mating of the mythology of those foods with the imperatives of the competitive, prepared-foods marketplace.

Copies

Hey, I was thinking, I don't know about access to a photocopier (and I'm sure it wouldn't be FREE!), so if everyone could perhaps print an extra copy of their poem and/or send it to me by 3:00 Fri. so I could print it out, that'd be great. That way we could get it all together and up on the website by Saturday. Thanks friends.

Next Week's Meeting

The meeting for Lab for Friday, Feb. 23 from 4-5:30, will be held at the IC Public Library on Linn St. in meeting room D. If you have any questions, you can contact me (Meg) at rememberingjinxremoving@gmail.com. For our meeting, we will be piecing together our serial poem which is to be written on the topic of (breakfast) cereal.

Quickmuse

A friend just sent me a link to this site called Quickmuse. It’s quite interesting. The following is from their own about page:

QuickMuse is a cutting contest, a linguistic jam session, a series of on-the-fly compositions in which some great poets riff away on a randomly picked subject. It's an experiment, QuickMuse, to see if first thoughts are indeed the best ones. We're not entirely sure about this, but we suspect QuickMuse will bring readers closer to the moment of composition than they have ever been before. Best part: our "playback" feature lets you watch the poems unfold, second by second. Or as Thlyias Moss says, it's "the chance for a poem to find its/audience fast," in which words don't "have as much/time to stale, pale/lose the relevance of the moment" to which they belong.
——In an essay for Poets & Writers, QuickMuse publisher Ken Gordon explains the philosophy behind the site.

Check it out.

a mess of experimentation

wakako

i you never forgetten
and everyday missly
i every night dreaming

those dreams
skillfully speaken
at your side when
you my sister were,
she my mother was,
he my father was,

small time your island
my island was

there i peace founded
you with clappingly laughs
in brown hands
your surprise gasp
my last happiness was

you my love were
probably last
cliffs of itoman speaken
waves too loud are

you
i hurt
still i listeningly
yet to departen
numb

--------------
and a well-deserved explanation: i was screwing around using japanese grammar to write a poem about japan in english... then i remembered we were doing the verb thing this week so i made up some words and (slightly) englishized the structure to make (barely) more understandable. i'm too tired right now to tell if it's at all legible, so feedback would be appreciated. :/

slam

Don't forget folks: The Big Idea Poetry Slam. Valentine's Day at the Mill. 10:00 p.m. The cost is $3, but only $1 if you want to read a poem. It's good place to see Midwestern poets and meet area poets as well. And who knows, maybe one of us will get brave and spit some stuff.

First post

Hey, this is just a test. Soon I'll be welcoming aboard other members of The Poetry Lab of the University of Iowa Writing Center.