Tonight's writing exercise: we all looked at art books, each choose a piece and briefly described it to everyone else. We all took notes on the descriptions; that's the first part below. (Mine is #5.) Then we used these as feedstock to write poem. Obviously I stuck on the first one; others integrated all the descriptions into their exercise.
(Also I probably radically misheard some people's descriptions. Doesn't matter for this purpose.)
1) green background, large mouth with blender-like mechanical points, crescent shape
2) translucent body, prostrate, bright yellow flame ascending into eyes everywhere, observing
3) naked supine looks like her back could be a violin, aqua socks radiate old green chair glass with stripes reminiscent of an old childhood house books stacked can't see face red road
4) three women, kimono, hairpin, man, painting
*5) foreground, big tree, springtime, by side of the road, in the distance a town, red-brown buildings; countryside somewhere
6) lifesize poems waiting in darkness to be told where to move
7) tall tower, narrow, dark door, sparse grass around, small stones look like figures of men, wispy clouds, overburdened eagle flying, skies grey, darkening like a storm is coming, in distance a white mountain.
some machines tear through the green
(what's green and brown and red and goes a hundred miles an hour? a forest in a blender)
but need it always be this way?
why not machines of loving grace
I envision steel guardian-gardeners, both sword and plow
to rebuild and protect the wild places
oh eve, go tell adam, we got to build a new garden
not just garden but forest, weaving tantra of ecosystem, trees and vines and birds and animals
tapestry web of life in all its messy glory
the path where I go running goes through woods, not a garden; fallen trees, muddy holes, a rocky stream, nothing orderly
I want to roam freely over forested mountains
(maybe we always think forest and mountain together because those were the hard ones to cut down, the only ones left now?)
are the woods behind my grandfather's house still there? so many trees cut down since I was a boy.
are we smart enough or are we too smart for our own good
(it has yet to be proven that intelligence has any long-term survival value for a species)
I remember flying back into Baltimore sitting next to a woman from Las Vegas, who bought me a drink and told me how green the East Coast was