The Boy from School

I am a boy that knows,

how to get that GPA,

and fight for alpha male.

Stone body built

firm sinew

eyes of bullets through skin.

You have to understand

the breaking point of sticks,

our bones must be stronger

than his.

I am a boy, slippery as an eel.

Facades will get me far.

RR #5

"We read contemporary writers and imitate their line breaks, or their similes and worry that we shouldn't, that we'll only create bad reproductions instead of original works."

"We want a presence that convinces, one that engages and seduces a reader into the world of our poems, a voice a reader will want to listen to. When we fail to produce this voice, the poem fails."

"If you're studying some one's style, just about every aspect of her poems is worth considering."

"Of course, there's a mysterious element in poetry that seems to resist intellectual analysis, and this is good."

"The high road is filled with long, Latinate words - "expectorate" instead of "spit," "indefatigable" instead of "untiring," and so on... Taking the high road is tricky, but some writers have done it successfully. The danger of is that you'll sound pompous and overinflated; the danger of ordinary diction is that you'll sound ordinary."

Drive

Anxious eyed driving,

new like a kids first.

Smooth T and the jeans

with the rips. Hair sculpted

un-kempt

A circle of stretched skin

cool, under clammy fingers,

and a petal push

to go faster than a cycle.

Eyes like two candles in the twilight,

as a child in a storefront peers.

The hollow resonance

of bending metal define

the silent gasps.

Through spider-webs projected

red fur, no body found.

RR #4

"...We live in a figurative world; our language and our thinking, our very perceptions, are metaphoric. We continually make comparisons and connections, often without even realizing that we are doing so, so comfortable are we with seeing in this way."

"Figurative language is a way to deepen and intensify the themes and concerns of your work."

"... Metaphors aren't always contained within poems in discrete bits; often, entire poems work on a metaphoric level. This is one fo the pleasures of both reading adn writing poems: the recasting of one thing in therms of another, the revelation of the ways outwardly different experiences can be seen to have a similar core."

"A poem may consist entirely of ltereral images, but they may well resonate with metaphorical meaning."

"... those 'passionate midnights' in the basement are a metaphor for the work of shaping the materials of a poem, writing and revising until the magined world is fully formed. In developing your own figurative images, don't worry if your language is clumsy or confusing at first. Just have patience, and keep digging."

RR #3

"We are all haunted by images, both light and dark. ... That partly explains why they're so powerful, why we respond to them in a much more visceral way than we do to generalized abstractions."

"Put simply, though, an image in poetry is language that calls up a physical sensation, appealing to us at the level of any of our five senses. Images may be 'literal': the red kitchen chair in a dim corner of the room; ... Or they may be 'figurative', departing from the actual and stating or implying a comparison: the chair, red and shiny as fingernail polish."

"Magic. That's what an image should do, produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is 'like being alive twice.'"

"Poets need to keep all five senses - and possibly a few more - on the continual alert, ready to translate the world through their bodies, to reinvent it in language. Images are a kind of energy, moving from outside to inside and back, over and over, a continual exchange."

"Images are the rendering of your bodily experience in the world; without them, your poems are going to risk being vague and imprecise, and they will fail to convey much to a reader."

RR #2

"They arrange their thoughts in lines without much sense of why they are doing so, beyond the hope that if what they write 'looks' like a poem, it will mysteriously become one."

"You'll need to get a feel for the line, for what it does when it is very short, very long, and every place in between; you'll need to be able to test its weight and heft according to the rhythms of the language you've strung along it; and you'll want to use it to create tension or relaxation, to emphasize words, to speed up or slow down your reader's eye, to fulfill or thwart expectations."

"...it's especially important to pay attention to the tools we do have, to become aware of the sounds of language and begin to work with them - both in your choice of words, and how you organize those words into lines that are meaningful - not only in what they say, but how they say it."

"The rhythms of certain lines also swerve to intensify the contrasts in the poem."

"We're made uncomfortable when words that usually go together are suddenly severed from each other, like adjectives and nouns ... articles and nouns ... when even verbs are split up."

RR #1

"There is a world inside each of us that we know better than anything else, and a world outside of us that calls for our attention - the world of our families, our communities, our history. Our subject matter is always with us, right here, at the tips of our fingers, at the edge of each passing thought."

"... unless we're able to transform the raw material of our experiences into language that reaches beyond the self-involvement of that person standing at the window, so that what we know becomes shared knowledge, part of who we are as individuals, a culture, a species."

"These and other poets began with the simple idea that what they saw and experienced was important to record, and that the modest facts of their lives, what they knew within the small confines of their limited, personal worlds, could contain the enduring facts and truths of the larger world."

"The poet has mixed the ordinary with the fantastic to convince us that the dead, indeed, act this way. At the end of the poem, the dead merge with the memory of the living - parents or relatives who 'stayed up / drinking all night in the kitchen.'"

"If you have a life full of drama, then of course that will be your material. But don't wait for something to happen before you begin to write; pay attention to the world around you, right now. That's what poets do."