exercises: images of a pivotal event; writing from lines

Posted on: Sun, 08/31/2008 - 20:55 By: Tom Swiss

Tonight's Zelda's exercises. Two tonight.

The first was to write a poem from images of a pivotal event. In two parts:

1) write about some pivotal event, using as much concrete detail as possible

I was eleven years old when I took my first computer programming class. It was as part of a special summer program for "gifted" students at Western Maryland College. This was before the days of PCs in every house; we were working on a minicomputer, a PDP/11, and had to connect from old style blue-on-black CRT terminals with heavy-duty keyboards that clacked when you typed, using acoustic-coupler modems. You dialed - really dialed, on black Bakelite rotary phones - the extension number for the computer, waited for the ethereal whistle of data, then placed the handset into a pair of suction-cup like cuffs on the modem.

We learned the fundamentals of branching and looping, if-then, for-next; learning a new language, BASIC, to become speakers to machines, staring into the blue light of the terminals, hesitantly hunt-and-pecking out incantations. When a program worked, we would print out its results on a teletype, the print-head that sounded like a robotic bee tearing up canvas flying across the fan-fold paper.

It was a week that changed my life.

2) collect the images from part 1 and make a poem

staring into the blue light and
hunting out incantations in a new language

mechanical clickings precede an ethereal whistle;
the sound of a hive of honeybees ripping up canvas,
fingers clacking broken percussive rhythms

rubber and metal and Bakelite connect worlds
Asgard's rainbow bridge

a young mind learns the power and restriction of logic

in our second exercise, we wrote from lines selected at random from local newpapers:

mauve walls give way to exposed rafters and bricks

a successful metalworker and inventor

cupcake mobile

bring back the tree army

we may have to cut more services because we have to pay for the diesel fuel

it's for kids who do not have the means to continue their education

the exposed rafters and bricks
of the structure of thought
the plaster and lathe stripped away

the architecture laid bare
nothing to hide
the beauty of function
makes one question the function of beauty

bricks in their orderly ranks
the mortar that binds them together
I remember the instructions of one writing instructor to his student, to write about the local opera house: start with the upper left brick.
the upper left brick of the wall behind the counter at the Daily Grind in Fells point is hidden, from my perspective, by a big round air duct, at least a foot across
the sort of duct you see in these old buildings, with the exposed bricks and open rafters, the retrofit of air conditioning into the solidly delineated spaces of buildings that have outlasted their builders - maybe my great-grandfather walked by while that wall was being built

stacking the generations
reaching up through time
like stacked rows of bricks