OK Dreamer
Prompts for May
I’m calling, Dad, to say I’m fine really, and to share something that happened while Lolo and I were out walking.
We had ventured down to the farmhouse and I was preoccupied with two things, making sure Lolo was safe from cars and looking at the grass to figure out when I need to cut it again. Eyes on Lolo, check. Eyes on the grass, check. While I was looking, a presence made itself known. I saw the colors first, red and white. It was Madame. She was standing by the back door in one of her kitchen dresses.
I’d gotten a glimpse of her shoes and her bare legs and her dress but it took a moment to register. I thought, Is that? and when I looked again, I saw the back door, the ivy climbing, and the century-old brick steps. And there was that too, the house upright in its weathering, in the airy atmosphere under the trees, a once bustling house fragile in disrepair yet breathing out history full throttle, a wooden house with brick steps, the top back porch step making a flat surface stretching across the place where she had stood season after season.
What does it feel like? To be here around people and they can’t see you.
I have the papers you wrote, with a flourish, unabashed. You were absolutely right to admire your own handwriting.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about poetry, in books and online. One book stands out and it’s Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf, 2009) by Stephanie Burt, a professor of English at Harvard. She wrote it, she says, for people who read poems in “glossy magazines” and wonder if that’s all there is to poetry. In all seriousness, what she conveys for any [poetry] reader goes far beyond that. I can’t recommend it enough. Burt’s erudite observations are revelatory, and like clear direct verse, free.
As for the trade paper’s physicality, Graywolf’s production is clever. Close Calls is wide and curiously tall, a combination that provides the pages with thumb-sized margins and plenty of room for the healthy font size to peruse and linger along Burt’s surveys of select poets, including Rae Armantrout, John Ashberry, Laura Kasischke, and James Merrill. In total, they’re almost thirty of them, poets who know words like everyone knows air.
Regarding reader-usability and comfort, the book’s neither heavy nor cumbersome, and I would know as I’ve tested it out on several occasions with it propped on my stomach and chest, on sofa, chair, and bed. This is a good feeling.
Without a doubt, I know you have books that make you feel like this.
fiction/the house was open and from inside drifted the smells of roast in a slow cooker. fact/I wrote a poem after dinner.
Lore
on the beach snow blows
up to you in the cold
—Y waves, Y of all people, WAVES
Y typically reserved, a seal
-ed envelope
why not Y, yes why
not Y too
no return to sender precious
face, tomorrow, today,
baby, we’re fucked,
perspiration plaster and peonies
we’ve been ruled out and shot off, unduly,
bye now bye, good
seeing you sweet-smelling
clothes in the back of the station
wagon radio music scratching over
the ocean coming
its glorious waves kept coming
in summer again
hello hello
your coming to visit us
is blue and violet, purple and red
like history’s flowers
the women and men
from other countries know what
I mean distant
shores American
shelf
you X and you Z tipsy and swearing
on the prettiest
thing you’ve seen
watching nothing not not freeze,
nothing out of
place watching everybody
want to burn
Stories.
A friend took me to New York.
When we got there, we parked on Broadway because that’s where his father lived.
Stories.
The orchids had new, lonely times.
Harriet was not there. Occasionally, the stranger thought to look after them.
Stories of another sort.
Two videos on YouTube, you may have seen them. A famous David Lynch video about what it’s like doing transcendental meditation and it’s connection to being creative. I watch it and never tire of it. Then there’s the video about a little boy sitting in what appears to be a family kitchen. His mother’s filming him and asks him questions off camera. She says he is an Indigo Child. Actually, I don’t think she says that; it must be in the title. Their conversation reveals how she sees this nature in him and believes it to be true. Some might write that off as hippie but I’m believing it wholly, word for word. When the kid’s talking, he’s coming from what feels like the same place David Lynch describes. There’s a word for that place and it has four letters.
About that transcendental meditation thing. A lot of what takes place when I’m writing are long silent passages where I’m sitting with words, bringing the language inside as far as it can go, dropping any preconceptions, and having no plans, watching whatever appears flip around, stand straight up, or turn completely upside down. When I get to that place, I’m writing and I’m not there. Nothing is there, except what’s inside coming out.
write your face down until it turns into a poem until it turns into a sycamore until it turns into a story set in Kansas & Oz
There’s a Michel Gondry film, I think it’s up to something around Criterion these days maybe, with the translated name Maya, Give Me A Title. It’s animated by hand, was for his daughter. She inspired it and is in it, and you can tell she’s inherited his love of imagining grandly. There’s already a sequel. You can find interviews with him talking about the work and showing the film’s figures he cut out from paper. Michel made it all and used stop animation to have movement just so. Then he filled it with dreams.
about Prompts for May
In the coming weeks, I’m redesigning the frequency and number of posts. You’ll see shorter, off-the-cuff posts with one to two prompts each time, occurring casually on no set days. As always, thanks for reading.
the prompts
You can go anywhere with a prompt.
a poem
fiction
memoir
essay
If you’re reading Cloud 8 for the first time, check out the Welcome post, which details how Cloud 8 works and how it encourages you to participate. If you write from a prompt and feel like sharing, post it in the comments. It’s a pretty good way to establish consistent writing and let other writers hear your voice.
Cloud 8 is free. And if you’d like to contribute, monthly subscriptions are two dollars.
image
Arto Pitkänen watercolors
Lolamademedance photograph