Thursday, June 30, 2011

Ahmed's Thoughts on the Value of Scaricity (Repost)

Poster Draft 2

Seattle People, it's not too late to sign up for an adventure of self-discovery into your writer's voice. There is no prerequisite for Verbal Expression Lab; writers of all levels are encouraged to apply. As an illustration, in our first facilitation of the Verbal Expression Lab, we had three students. Two of whom were rank beginners and where English was their second language. Both didn't think they could write creatively, but you know what using techniques and exercises Ahmed and I use in Verbal Expression Lab, they both produced creative writing. The third student was a life-skills teacher who was suffering with writers block on a project he was working on. He found the application of scarcity helpful in opening doors into a world he didn't know exited in him

The course is offered at Seattle Central Community College and first class meets July 7th, 7pm, for 70 dollars. That's a whole lot of seven's. You gotta sign up for it.'Cause you know its going to be a special experience.

A few months ago, Ahmed (who is my partner in this endeavor) wrote a short blurb on scarcity, which is the thesis of Verbal Expression Lab:


"Eliminating the illusion of free choice to give real choice is scarcity. Without constraint, free will becomes its own worst enemy. Imagine the horror of immortal beings who have been around forever and will be here forever more: Everything has become banal to them. Choice lies in its own limits--like life gains meaning through its own finiteness, every part of which must be finite and therefore precious.

Another aspect of scarcity makes it an ideal tool for writing exercises: scarcity is too scarce for perfectionism. Under scarcity, there can be no room for revision, second guessing, searching for the "mot juste" rather than "juste un mot". Under time constraints, we produce just what we can before the clock runs out. Under word constraints, we use just the words we have to work with and can't wonder the option of the perfect word. Under style constraint, we fit what we have to say into the form dictated, rather than search for the perfect form to fit our content.

Scarcity is not just a writing tool. Scarcity is the source of the everyday improvisations we all perform to get from A to B, and stay within C. Scarcity is living life to the fullest with intelligence--doing the best with what you have. Scarcity makes art possible: finding infinite meanings in finite materials. Scarcity makes musics possible: finding endless variation of the small number of notes on a scale. Scarcity makes love possible: otherwise, we would always find another fetish in the newest object. Scarcity drives commerce and economics, and governs our day-to-day working world. Scarcity is this class: meeting only four times but attempting to impact your writing forever--or just the rest of your finite lives."

---by Ahmed Teleb


Poster Draft 1

You can do this too; Fill out the Six Word form

 
On 6/27/11 at 13:18:17, Alexis from Seattle filled out the six word form and these six words were beamed into my google docs account: (1) Paradox, (2) Liberation, (3) Sparkle, (4) Quandary, (5) Fruitful, and (6) Chaos.

When you go to the "six words" page you will see just how simple it is to put words in the boxes. And the little people from inside hollow earth sing Abracadabra and walla, words begging to be written into a story will show up in a google docs account Then at a later date I will post said story just like the one you are about to read now.


Paradoxically, the liberation of sparkles
from the dark matter soup was the crux of Hope's quandary.
Chaotic, but unlikely an easy solution would be fruitful.
 
Chaos implied that quandary theory would liberate
the cosmic string Hope singled out called a Sparkle.
The fruit of the thesis was embedded in the paradox.

It was fruitful to track sparkles as they ebbed into paradox.
When dark strings zip around the collider they liberate
quandary separating them into vectors of chaos.

Quandary in a plasma treed into a chaotic mass of fruit
which became the three principle components of paradox.
Sparkles were discovered to unravel into liberation.

Sparkles also disrupted paradox giving birth to new chaos.
This unexpected solution Hope found clever and fruitful.
Liberation theory was born and an end came to quandary.

Liberation was fruitful in that it exposed the quandary
which was a hidden constant Hope frond in chaos.
Paradoxically, strings unravel when contacted by sparkles.



Go to six words and give me six words by keying six words into boxes on the page called six words.

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

William James' Six Word Poetic Form

 
The other day I added a new static page/tab called "6 Words." If you go to it now you will see that it is a form with little boxes that you, the reader, can place information into.

Six words is a poetic form that I derived from the sestina. The Sestina, if you do not know, is a thirty nine line poem that repeats (six) end words in a specific pattern. And if you've followed my page you will note that I have a post (or two) about sestinas

On March 2, I wrote a post on the first generation of this form. Click here to see the first generation of this form if you are interested. As you can see (if you clicked on either of the two hyperlinks above) that six words is twenty one lines shorter than a sestina.






Stanza 1
Word Placement in the sentence

Line 1)
1
2
3

Line 2)


4

Line 3)
6

5


Word Placement in the sentence

Stanza 2
beg
mid
end

Line 4)
6
4
2

Line 5)


3

Line 6)
5

1


Word Placement in the sentence

Stanza 3
beg
mid
end

Line 7)
5
3
1

Line 8)


2

Line 9)
4

6


Word Placement in the sentence

Stanza 4
beg
mid
end

Line 10)
4
6
5

Line 11)


1

Line 12)
3

2


Word Placement in the sentence

Stanza 5
beg
mid
end

Line 13)
3
1
6

Line 14)


5

Line 15)
2

4


Word Placement in the sentence

Stanza 6
beg
mid
end

Line 16)
2
5
4

Line 17)


6

Line 18)
1

3










If you'd like to give the form a try study the patterns in the table above. If you have any questions shoot me an email and I'll do my best to clarify your inquiry. And if you email me your poem, I'll post it for the world to read :)

Now, go up to the "6 Word" tab / static page and challenge me with six words.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Response to the Enkidu Experience

 

My name is Adam or Eve or Steve or
Cain or Rehab, Ahab, Jezebel
Jimmy, Johnny, Billy-Sue, whatever.
Does it matter, my name?

What does matter is this:
I am a victim!
A victim,
Do you hear?

This may sound silly, but,
I have discovered
that there exists
processes’, realities’, gnosis’

contained in my biology
I cannot control,
I cannot change.
I am powerless,

betrayed,
victimized,
by this body
I wear as clothes!


---June 28, 2005
    This poem was composed with a girl I offended in mind.

 
 
 
 
 

Monday, June 27, 2011

A Twisted Answering Machine Message

 
Do you remember the answering machine in those dark days before voice mail and the proliferation of cell phones? Back in the days of darkness when I lived in the quaint little city of McMinnville in house I rented on Baker Street (which also happened to have the same designation as Sherlock Holmes' apartment). People used to call my number just to hear what cleverness I recorded onto the answering machine.

In the late 1990's the following is one of the more darker stories I told:


This is Jimmy Jones and I am
speaking for Dick and Anita Jackaway
who are indisposed right now.

You see they traversed down
to the Jonestown Soda Shoppe for
my famous cup of Jo.

Where the Kool Aid is always
served chilled and always served
in little Dixicups

Sunday, June 26, 2011

I wonder...if my fiery vegan candy has monetary value?

 
The last batch I made cost me nearly fifty dollars to make. And I believe the total weight of it netted at almost three pounds of rich chocolaty goodness. I suppose if I could figure out how to reduce the material cost I could sell it. Right now though, would anyone like to purchase a pound and a half of the best handmade vegan candy you've ever tasted for fifty bucks plus (C.O.D.) shipping?

If you happen to be interested just send me an email and push the paypal donate button to the left and enter fifty bucks.

this tiny piece is richer than
ten Hershey chocolate bars


note the gooey booze jelly in
between layers of black gold

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Ohh No...It Wasn't Me...Some Other Poor Sap Wrote This...

 
“Why did you have to tell me that,” her voice echoes through my head, “why did you have to go and do that, Bill?”
I wish I could reach down in that quiet place and enter the glass house of my soul. That Interior Castle Teresa of Avila speaks of in her writings. That inner room, that nexus, where we can meet Infinity face-to-face. Wander in and sit at the feet of Jesus and ask him to talk to her for me. And ask her forgiveness. Explain to her why I said what I said. She probably wouldn’t hear me. It would register in her spirit, but not in her body-soul mind.   
I want her to contact me, respond, and ask why? I want to tell her I did it, because I couldn’t hold onto it any longer. Then I bungled it as it came out of my mind. I tried to trivialize it. Make it appear like it was no big deal that I did such things all the time. It was probably the twisty-tie thing that solidified it in her mind that I was serious.
She did tell me once that I was intense when I talked. She didn’t know how to respond and felt intimidated or intellectually inadequate. I apologized and said I never meant any harm. I was always happy to talk to her. I was always relaxed in her presence. Even when she’d go all girly and fly about the room like a headless chicken. In the wake of her chaos there was always a calm serene lake following her around. I liked her just the way she was.
When I first met her, she annoyed me. She reminded me of a black poodle, because of her hair and stature. Sparky a friend called her. She is a real firecracker. I don’t know when it changed. She grabbed a hold of my heart and I was hooked like the prize sturgeon the Old Man of the Sea caught. 
“Why did you have to tell me that?” I hear again. Over and over like scratched record. "We had a good thing going on. We were pals. I thought you were my best friend.”
Before I left for Seattle, she said with a warm smile, “perhaps you’ll meet a woman there!” A voice in my head screamed “No! I want to be with you. I want to be the father of your children. I want to provide for you as a husband.”
I wanted our parting to be like it was in the movies. Where she says, “I didn’t see it for the longest time. And now that you’re leaving I see how much I love you.” She’d be crying and I’d fold her into my arms. Holding her up as she went limp while melting into tears. She would sob loudly. Her body convulsing with both the sorrow of our parting and joy of finding me. I would mummer quiet nonsensical syllables into her ear while brushing though her hair with my fingers
Then she would lean back and look up into my face and I would kiss her gently on her forehead. She would look at me unashamedly, eyes beet red, and I’d wipe away her tears with my fingers. Then bring them to my lips and taste her sorrow and joy. She’d smile hold me tight into herself.
After drying her cries on my shirt, she’d tilt her head back inviting me to kiss her parted lips. And then when had exhausted ourselves from a tongue tangling kiss, she would murmur a staccato'd purr into my ear, "I'm ecstatic that you told me that you were in love with me; I've waited so long to hear those words, I was too shy to tell you I felt the same."


---June 25, 2001

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

Friday, June 24, 2011

About A Girl From A Delta Psi Delta Party

 
I can still feel the texture of her hands
Moist lips bristling against neck

The soft wisp of breath
The smell of cigarettes on hair
Vodka daiquiris in the air
Reeling heads we waltzed in shadows

I never did see her pixie face
Her small crinkled hand
Nested neatly in my palm
We kissed deeply in the dark

A tall muscular man bored
Shot glass holes through my skull
Escaping a lover’s wrath I melted
Out the back door into winter’s fog

I searched two years for her
That is I sought her hands


----December 30, 2002

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. We publish continuously and Issue 1 will soon be released!

Thursday, June 23, 2011

The Enkidu Experience

 
I can smell fertility
on a noncontracepted female.
A pheromone is released onto the earth
at ovulation.

This drives me wild.

My brown leathery skin
sprouts thick course hair.
I beat a drum with a club.
I dance with fire at night.

I am Neanderthal man!
Hear me roar.

---June 23, 2005
 
Here's a poem I read once (in June of 2005) and got into trouble with. The girl I took to the open mic (Mr. Spots Chai House) in Ballard thought I was speaking to her. I wasn't, I tried to explain to her where the inspiration for the poem came from. That it was a reflection of a program I listened to on Sacred Heart Radio a month prior about the primal nature of the human body and the hidden biological processes that drive it.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Here's a Poem That Will Never Achieve Escape Velocity


It’s not a verb
nor a noun of sound
wet hands furiously bail
the carpet stains
behind crusty pink lids
bleach fumes fester
nothing in here
grows

clue two
bagpipe blues
play the smell
a loose diaphragm flap
a ruptured balloon
the sting of the one handed clap

lost words
count strands
of disjointed utterances
following the bomb
a cruel Schlitz shit
sprays down
into one pant leg



----June 6, 2010

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Documenting Bill’s Fiery Vegan Chocolate Squares Experiment 2

 
the first principle of alchemy self-evident


magic begins with a powder made of
coca powder, brown sugar, & cayenne pepper


into the blender goes the nut of a wal
which must be ground into dust


line the caldron with the wal dust


add the magic powder


travel to the heart of the alchemist;
a blooming cherry reanimates the silver of rum


a powerful thickening agent must be made
from juice, fruit pectin, and oil


the second principal of alchemy is heat


a low rolling boil will transform
fruit juice into goo


add chill and dip the instrument in
to test the thickness of the agency



life sprang forth from a primordial ooze


now it is time to blend thickness into the silver cherry


the foundation of black magic is coconut milk,
oil, molasses, and cayenne pepper

the second principal of alchemy is heat


the eye of Jupiter stares down from beyond the sky


black magic brews from a storm of fire


now it is time to melt brains into the foundation
of my black magic spell


the gravity well turns inside out to form magma
from the bowels of the cosmos


the third principal of alchemy is time


the primordial ooze flows onto the ground


photons from a distant solar system reflect
off the sea of blood


the earth is built from sedimentary layers of lava




the soil is a powder of magic on the surface
of the sun are spots


Mars, Aries, the god of war, I gaze upon thy face




these spots are magnetic disturbance
flaring out giving black magic life


Monday, June 20, 2011

Post 100: Bill’s Fiery Vegan Chocolate Squares Experiment 2

 
The first step to making great candy is to set the creative mood by putting the right concert on the telly. Since what I am attempting is something innovated the only possible choice of bands is Slayer. They aren’t the heaviest band I know but they are the best selection in my small library of concerts. My choices were Slipknot, AC/DC, Candlemass, Jimmy Hendrix, Slayer, Coldplay, Incubus, Soft Cell, and Aerosmith. (I’m going to see Slayer again this August and I can’t wait).

I’m not going to reveal the recipe this time as I did with ginger candy experiment I conducted earlier this year. I really want nail down the specifics of the recipe for the possibility of filing a patent on it or resale purposes. I’ve always had dreams of grandeur, which is probably why I still like metal. Metal or (as I would like redefine it as) Post Rock music is generally larger than life. It’s not Post Rock if it doesn’t have a big sound. Maybe this what I’m trying to achieve with this candy is to create a larger than life flavor. And working within the constraints of vegan makes the problem that much more difficult to solve.

What I’m doing different this time is sandwich rum cherry jelly between two layers of vegan chocolate truffle. In order to do this I introduced a thickener to the (uncooked) jelly. The thickener is starting to set up nice. I mixed one box of pectin with 2 cups of pomegranate blueberry juice. In a few more minutes I will be able to mix it into the cherry booze jelly that I made yesterday from ½ pound of dried bing cherries and 1 full cup of a clear rum with a dash of coconut milk. This is the stage of the experiment I am most worried about. I hope that I didn’t make the thickener too thin.

Already, I can tell that the first part of my experiment is failure. Overnight the alcohol has evaporated out of the cherry booze-jelly even though I took precautions by sealing the container up in the refrigerator. Probably the only way to get a high alcohol content into the candy will be to inject it in with hypodermic needle after the candy has set up. Oh well, such in life.   

My apartment smells of cayenne pepper. This batch will have 3.5 teaspoons mixed into it. Most of the pepper went into the coca powder brown sugar coating that I will add on top of the candy. In the bottom of the pan I made a walnut powder crust and as you can see in the picture, I added some of the fiery powder into it.

The thickener should be ready now to blend into the cherry rum mixture. Hopefully, I won’t burn the motor up in the blender trying to mix this thick gooey blob into it. I guess I’d better help it along. Wow…this stuff is really thick. It’s collapsing into itself like a black hole.

It’s time now to begin cooking the foundation of the truffle. The building block is a creamy mixture of coconut milk, molasses, vegetable oil, and cayenne pepper. I’ll cook this stuff for five minutes at a low boil and then add two pounds of chocolate and two tablespoon of rum. The next step will be to lay a layer of this madness down onto the nut powder crust add some of the booze jelly and seal it up with another layer of heavy chocolate metal. The final step will be to coat the top with a thick layer of the coca brown sugar cayenne pepper powder. As it the candy sets overnight this mixture will form a delicious crust.
  
{See the next post for the pictures documenting the process}


Addendum: June 21, 2011,12:43 AM, the candy set up and it tastes better than my first try at the fiery vegan truffle on May 24. This recipe is even more decadent. I shouldn't have tasted it. I will most likely not get to sleep because of its out of this world richness.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Cal Anderson Park Found Poem


Pizza Truth

Whatever happened to Donny Strawberry?
A chalk sidewalk outline
Is, is not a crime
What does this mean?

Cowabunga tank top
Nice legs
Cute butt
Dam, cuss yeah [‘cause the]
Boom, boom in de boom box

Sweet moves

Squeeze me
My jeep or yours
New spaces
My juice is sweet like Georgia peaches

I wish I was your lover

You remind me of cool lemonade
Nasty freaky
Alligator inside
Skinny dip
Dance
Summer is here




----6/13/2010

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Ohhh God, Did I Write This??? No...Someone Else Must Have Penned This. Surely Not Me.


Some writer's, like Hemingway, have said that you should compose your shit with someone else in mind. Clearly, with this piece (of crap) I should have ignored that advice. Just reading over it makes me cringe. It is telly verses showy. Tell me no shit and I’ll show you no poetry.   

 

RUN–AWAY

Run away
Little mouse,
Run away,
Always skittering away,

     mouse,

You don’t realize
How rare and unique you are.
That’s what Eagle saw
The first time it swooped down close.

Look at that ground.
Look at those flowers.
Look at those trees.
Look at that grass.

They are not afraid.
They don’t worry. 
They don’t plan.

They don’t plot to control their own lives or those they associate with.
They don’t have issues on who their neighbors should or shouldn’t be.
They don’t worry about what they have or lack.

Standing upright, they live free.

They take the sun.
They take the wind.
They take the rain.
They take the cold.

Look at their eyes
Where they point.
See the stars in the sky.
See the sun and the moon.

What else do you need little mouse?

Making excuses.
Skittering away.
That is why you’re alone. 


----6/19/2005