Writers Club/ Senior English poem challenge for the week of 11/17

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

Write an "apology poem" like the one above. Use any style. Make it short, vivid, surprising. All seniors and writers club members are invited to post.

Writers Club post for the week of 10/22

OK, gang. The new rules are: shorter pieces, poems and prose pieces of less than a page, should be posted here. Email me longer pieces and I'll continue putting them up on the website.

This week's challenge: spook pieces. Words to get you going: phantom, shadow, heart, macabre, schizophrenia, sepulcher, crypt, maggots, doll.

Senior poem challenge for Wed. 10/22/08

Delight in Disorder
by Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674)

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:–
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distractión,–
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher,–
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly,–
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,–
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,–
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

This is the first older poem I've assigned you folks--from one of the "Cavalier Poets" of the early 17th century. Be sure you understand the meaning of the poem (what's he talking about?). See a word you don't understand? Look it up. Answer one or more of the following questions: Which metaphor(s) do you find most vivid? Why? Can you find the oxymoron? Do you find the poem sexist, seductive, or just plain silly? Any connection to our current dress code issues or general ideas about dress and style? As on the last challenge, respond to at least one person whose posted before you.

Writers Club Challenge

masks, keys, red Mustang, open heart surgery, shoes, damsel in distress, water, holding things together, hide and seek, Dante's Inferno, The Scarlet Letter, Araby, play, plays, playing, snake...

Here are some words and topics from our writing challenges over the past years, and I threw in some of the lit. you folks have been reading in your English classes just for fun. Write a short poem using all or some of these words. Write it and then post so that you don't see anyone else's before you write yours.

And here's a link to that Wordsworth poem I mentioned in my email to you:

"The World Is Too Much With Us" by William Wordsworth

Senior Poem Challenge 10/14/08

Read the poem below by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-present):

A Vast Confusion

Long long I lay in the sands
Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean's speakers
world's voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all life's voices lost in night
And the tape of it
somehow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light

Respond to this poem. If you need a question to answer, try these: What does the poem make you think of? Is this a poem about things falling apart or being put back together? Is it about the future or the past?
Your response should be about 100 words long and include a reference to at least one other person's response. Those who post early, come back later to respond to a post.

Respond to Al's writing here

What does every writer want? Readers. Use this thread to post comments about my writing. All feedback welcome (but be gentle).

World lit. Dante essays coming up!

Sophomores! What will you write your essays about? I'm asking you to write a personal response to the Inferno. What issue from the reading or class discussion has stuck with you, caused you to think, wonder, get riled up, personally involved? Respond here with a brief comment about what your essay will be about and why.

Open poem response

Here is a poem by Simon Ortiz called "A Story of How A Wall Stands":

At Aacqu, there is a wall almost 400 years old which supports hundreds of tons of dirt and bones - it's a graveyard built on a steep incline - and it looks like it's about to fall down the incline but it will not for a long time

My father, who works with stone,
says, "That's just the part you see,
The stones which seem to be
just packed in on the outside,"
and with his hands puts the stone and mud
in place. "Underneath what looks like loose stone,
there is stone woven together."
He ties one hand over the other,
fitting like the bones of his hands
and fingers. "That's what is
Holding it together."

"It is built that carefully,"
he says, "the mud mixed
to a certain texture," patiently
"with the fingers," worked
in the palm of his hand. "So that
placed between the stones, they hold
together for a long, long time."

He tells me those things,
the story of them worked
with his fingers, in the palm
of his hands, working the stone
and the mud until they become
the wall that stands a long, long time.

I love the way Ortiz intertwines the explanation of the ancient wall with the father's work. Is the father repairing the old wall? Or building a new one? There are many walls in the poem. Any comments?