Weak 287 Unconscious Mutterings

Unconscious Mutterings ~ link
Word & Thought Associations

here's mine:

1. Memory :: card
2. Original :: Kentucky Fried
3. Exclusively :: yours
4. Listings :: Real Estate
5. Bucket :: seats
6. Knight :: Sir Lancelot
7. Dusty :: Baker
8. Choice :: Pro
9. Sunglight :: *I'm going to take a wild assed guess that they mean "sunlight" and say:: bright
10. Change of plans :: life

Words of Interest

This weekend I came across a couple of words I'm intrigued with...

1. biduous - (pronounced bid-u-us) N. lasting two days.

2. dilogy - (pronounced dil-eji) N. intentional ambiguity; emphatic repetition of words, etc.

WEEK 286 - Unconscious Mutterings

Unconscious Mutterings ~ link
Word & Thought Associations
here's mine:

1. Flicker :: Picker
2. Styling :: Hair
3. Episode :: TV
4. Sexier :: Hot
5. Studious :: Grad
6. Mushroom :: Toad Stool
7. 8 minutes :: Mile
8. Bald :: Shine
9. Immunity :: AT&T
10. Sectioned :: Ortange

Unconscious Mutterings Week 245

Unconscious Mutterings ~ link

Word & Thought Associations

here's mine:

1. Intimidated :: Bully
2. Brush :: Fuller
3. Masquerade :: Party
4. Procedure :: Surgical
5. Tattoos :: Heart
6. Square :: Root
7. Tuck :: Away
8. Boyfriend :: Lover
9. Badass:: Dog
10. Thousand :: Island

Word Joy

"Three cheers for a poet who handles words with the intent joy of a little kid playing with blocks." ~ X.J. Kennedy

Week 284 Unconscious Mutterings

Unconscious Mutterings ~ link
Word & Thought Associations
here's mine:

• Notification :: Registered mail
• Cheat :: sheet
• Top Ten:: songs
• Draft :: dodger
• Unbelievable :: fucking
• Cheap :: seats
• Spontaneous :: combustion
• Harass :: neighbor
• Lipstick :: pink
• Transpire :: [nothing comes to my mind]

The word on a word...

The word immunity is such a conflicting word. It has an almost godlike quality about it. Immunity gives and Immunity takes.

For instance… immunity or lack thereof can be the difference between sickness or health.

If you've done something wrong, immunity can relieve you of undesirable consequences. Here it adds by subtraction.

I picture Immunity (capitalized out of respect) as the horizontal bar on the scales of justice weighing one thing against another. It’s a pretty heady word.

Lovingly supporting my vice

mood: cautious
listening to: nothing


One of the great things about my wife (and there are many) is her helpful eye for great poetry words. Keep in mind that Cathy is not particularly enamored by poetry itself, but is highly supportive of my vice. In the morning drive into the city the other day (she’s reading a book while I’m driving- she feels safer that way) she pauses and announces she has a perfectly awesome poetry word for me to work into some future creation. The word was "Kudzu" a fast growing vine indigenous to eastern Asia which evidently has been successfully introduced into the southern U.S. This is not a first occurrence; she has also e-mailed me words during the day.

I am appreciative of this on two levels. First, the words are in fact wonderful discoveries. It’s like she’s panning for gold and comes up with these precious finds. Besides the nature of her selections being top notch, the very fact that she considers their value in a poetic sense against her otherwise minuscule interest in poetry says this is an act of love and support. That says a lot!

On another note, I've added a couple of poems previously published elsewhere to my web site.
You can see them at michaelawells.com . If you visit the site, please take a moment to sign the guest book. Thanks!

Gamers will 'w00t' over word of the year - Internet- msnbc.com

Gamers will 'w00t' over word of the year - Internet- msnbc.com: " Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to 'w00t.' 'W00t,' a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness, topped all other terms in the Springfield dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007."

Poets and Evolution of Language

For me, poetry, more than any other form of literature has brought to the forefront a greater awareness of the dependence of language upon external factors. This underscores a dynamic of human communications that surprisingly make language subservient to both pictorial and emotional whims, and adds a layer of complexity that amazingly is evolutionary in nature.

Since poetry is generally regarded as the best words in the best order, such focus on word economy greater exposes each word to scrutiny, thus providing greater focus upon meaning. Individual words stand out far more in poetry than say fiction or essay or any other written communication endeavor.

It is amazing to me how the centenaries of language evolution must have progressed as man sought to find common quotients in expression. The transference from cryptic drawings to word sounds and the vastness of vocabulary expansion seems to me nothing short of phenomenal. There can be no mistaking this was an evolutionary process and it seems to me somewhat odd to think that even today this evolution is still in process right under our noses.

Is not the very articulation of metaphorical usage pushing the envelope of language? It seems to me the answer is yes, and in that context poets have a significant role to play in moving and shaking the language of our culture. The question I have, is which side of the curve are poets more often on? Are we ahead of the curve pulling language, or are we behind the curve pushing the cultural change of language as the read them in society today?

Wordplay

Di-vis-i-ble

Chopped up.
Grade school math.
One divided four times into four parts.
Broken into four pieces.
Able to be divided.
Three Musketeer bar in four pieces.
Four separate and visible parts.
Four syllables.
Four flavors in one scoop.

Spacing Out P o e t r y

I've been thinking about the dimensional aspects of poetry upon a page. Not only the poem itself within the boarders of the page but the lineage as well.

There are times when the visual impact of poetry is obvious. An example would be Golria Vando's New Shoes and An Old Flame. However, not every poem is dependent upon the kind of tedious spacing of letters /words that are required to achieve what Vando did here.

How important is the visual appeal of a poem on a page to the average reader? What contributes to an appealing layout of words on a page? What kinds of things are turn-offs? Are these questions trite?

Sometimes when I am journaling and not working on poetry drafts (because I often do that in my journal as well) I will catch myself writing in stanzas. Almost without a second thought at times breaking lines much as I would consider line breaks in a poem draft. Go figure.

Dream, Dream Go Away....

Thanks Jilly for the link to the gem If only Bush would have read a little poetry first ... ~0~

Worked on rewrites of two drafts this morning. One was a pretty rough draft. The other was in much better form. They both progressed well in my rewrites this morning.

I hate it when I am writing and I am drawn to a word I am particularly fond of, but know in this instance, a better would for the purpose at hand exists.

A few words I am particularly fond of:

• embellish
• portal
• poignant
• endowment
• precipitous
• supercilious
• conciliatory
• bane

*Note: none of these had anything to do with poems I was rewriting. They are just a few works that I am especially fond of.

~0~

Dream: Okay, I had this dream the other night ( I won't go into all the details) and I was in a parking lot at an apartment complex. My wife and I were carrying things in (I think we just moved in) and I was gathering up all these clothes in the back seat... the clean and the dirty together, like I was trying to get them all, or at least as many as I could at once. They kept falling and flopping around as I tried to gather or swoop them up in my arms and I realized there were all these sharp (kitchen type) knives among them.... but I kept right on going.

I'm sure some wise dream interpreter out there is going to tell me what this all means. What I think it means is that sometime in the near future this will find a way into a poem I write.

Nothing ~ X.J. Kennedy

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh,
a gold of lemon, root and rind,
she sifts in sunlight down the stairs
with nothing on. Nor on her mind.
~ X. J. Kennedy from Nude Descending a Staircase

David Halberstam

David Halberstam on Poetry... "I came to it gradually as an adult when I found that people I respected — Bobby Kennedy, whom I covered as a young man — loved poetry. I mean, really. He quoted it naturally. He found comfort in poetry, and that was important to me."

Halberstam on President Bush... "Very simply, it's a national tragedy. It's not just a tragedy for him, that he will have gone down as such a failure. It's a great national tragedy to have at that moment somebody who has been so deeply, so much in over his head. It's so sad for us, as a country, for him. It's really dark out there. And we have a year and a half to go. This will be seen as a tragic moment in American life."

David Halberstam journalist, and author of scores of books died Monday at the age of 73. Halberstam, who a Pulitzer in 1964, for his reporting on the Vietnam War was the passenger in a car that was broadsided by another vehicle.

Universality of poetry

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” ~ Aristotle

Today's bits and pieces:

• Poet Nikki Giovanni reciting poem at Virginia Tech Vigil
• In an interesting shift - the British have backed off the use of the phrase 'war on terror' citing the phrase strengthens terrorists by making them feel part of a bigger struggle. A member of Tony Blair's Cabinet brought into the open a quiet shift away from the U.S. view on combating extremist groups saying, "In the U.K., we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives." What an interesting shift from on of President Bush's favorite phrases.
• A roundup of 5 poetry bestsellers.

What constitutes poetry anyway...

"A Poetries Symposium" April 5-7 at the University of Iowa hopes to expand the public understanding of what constitutes poetry.

"Poetries" will encourage participants to think of poetry as a wide range of cultural and language phenomena, not just the masterpieces one might study in English class. Poetic texts exist in unexpected places:

• like greeting cards
• scrapbooks,
• on posters
• or in messages read at weddings

" Such poetry has value, even if it wouldn't make a poetry anthology or a discussion of great art," said Mike Chasar, a UI graduate student in English and co-organizer of the event.

More information and event schedule here

Top News- Children's Book Stirs Battle With Single Word - AOL News

Top News- Children's Book Stirs Battle With Single Word - AOL News

Oh my God.... This is great. A book that won the Newberry Medal and the author uses the word Scrotum on the first page. Why, because she likes the way it sounds and because it conjured up an image of "...something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

But people are getting their panties all twisted. Take Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.” She said, “This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,”

In the story, Lucky, the main character hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum. Anyone who sees this as something Howard Sternish has a pretty vivid imagination.

The Year 2006 In Words

From my project I started on December 31, 2006



In all, the red and blue states were not so static—
As a sagging democracy, we have a lot to learn
About spreading it. And why
Do we want others to have it, yet emigrants are a code word
Rioting through our heads in fear— grabbing up our food
Crashing our schools and hospitals stealing what jobs
We still have in this global economy of circular motion?
The more things change for the worse, the more we hear “stay-the-course”
We need a plan, all of us, to deal with it all…
Gruesome body counts, stock market, crude oil and health care costs
Ascending rugged terrain of news charts—
Who are the terrorists? The lines are blurrier than ever.
Neocons fashion themselves as saviors.
Religious extremists chant with fervor.
A jihad in denomination is still a jihad.
A global warming to the sounds of war is calling us to redeploy
And some what withdrawal now!
Where are our battles? Who? What do we fight?
Illegal aliens? Civil Union? Stem-cell research?
What really ticks the clock of doom? Any of these?
Or nuclear tests by a nation teetering on instability
While another thinks proliferation their birthright
And we beg to argue from the weakness of a hypocrite.
We talk about the issue of bilateral verses unilateral discourse
Yet the critical issue might as well be the unidentifiable liquid
Upon the moon. Insane as is was 2006 is history.

The Year in Words

I was thinking for words or phrases that seemed to define the year we are ending. I thought I'd compile a list of say 25 with the idea in mind of say in a week or two coming back to the list and using it as the basis of creating a poem to represent the positive and negative energies that made up 2006. However, I thought that I truly want the selections to represent universality So I though for the next week, in addition to my own list, I wold tally up those anyone else cared to suggest and then settle on the 25 most mentioned. So, this is audience participation time. Between now and the 7th of January, give me your list in the comments. Please, no proper names. Just words and short two or three word phrases. Here is mine for starters:

1. global economy
2. global warming
3. emigrant
4. illegal alien
5. withdrawal
6. stem cell research
7. stay-the-course
8. body count
9. health care costs
10. stock market
11. bilateral talks
12. nuclear tests
13. nuclear proliferation
14. liquid on the moon
15. red states / blue states
16. jihad
17. religious extremists
18. neocon
19. spreading democracy
20. truthiness
21. need a plan
22. terrorists
23. crude oil
24. redeploy
25. civil union