I will return to April 28’s fine prompt from Jenni B. Baker in FPR which warrants far more time than one day provides.
Instead, I chose one of Greg Santos’s from yesterday to: “Go to Wave Books’ Erasures website to find online source texts…The cool website lets you click on any word or punctuation mark to make it disappear. You can save, print, or email the newly sculpted text when you’re done.”
Well, I went to the site, which, indeed, worked as he suggested. In fact, I felt a ‘frisson’ of power as I erased parts of the source text “Pointed Roofs,” by Dorothy Miller Richardson.
I failed dismally, though, when I attempted to save and email the poem, though I could print it.
So you see, above how “Home Schooled” appears, to which I added punctuation by hand, though I seem to have mislaid the period at the end. Sigh.
Here is how it reads:
Home schooled
Bright faces collected misery.
Dreadful experiences at home had swollen
until she worked her trembling wrists and hands,
elbowed the bottle of green Chartreuse on the tiles.
Full of angry discomfiture, she had poked fear,
and burning nervousness twice
had astonished her day.
Beth Ayer’s April 29 Impromptu prompt to write a poem from an unintelligible text (in your own language)
Beth Ayer’s challenge through FPR was as follows: “In the spirit of heading into darkness after all things unseeable and obscure, write a poem using a text that is inexplicable to you. Could be quantum physics, thermodynamics, mathematics, aeronautical engineering – or something else altogether that to you speaks in incomprehensible language. Choose a text or texts and begin selecting words and phrases as they spark associations. Write a poem using the collected words and phrases. Let your imagination fire, and don’t worry about what these terms mean in their original context.”
I went online and used phrases and words largely unaltered from an article from European Nuclear Society (euronuclear.org.) What Is A Nuclear Reactor? to respond to the prompt on this penultimate day of National Poetry Month. I certainly didn’t understand the technicalities in the article when I composed the poem below. Comments are welcome.
This basic difference
After the separation
converted their bond,
transferred power
for multiple purposes,
fission released them.
Before they escaped
slightly enriched,
they felt intense deceleration,
released from the laws of nature,
the pressure to combine.
Devices designed in a loop
fed into the fuel they use:
The same, reinforced, secondary light.
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