Medusa's Head

I'm a little concerned to post this, thinking my husband may put two and two together about his Valentine surprise. But I don't think he reads my blog. I found the motherload of vintage valentines , and some of them are just too awesome. Heart on barbeque spit? Amazing. These scans aren't good enough to use as clip art, but they are fantastic inspiration.

Thanks CRWROWPPS for this posting: Alimentum Poetry Contest is seeking fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry all around the subject of food. Alimentum is the only literary journal all about food. http://www.alimentumjournal.com/submissions.html Submissions open September 1, 2009 and closes December 1, 2009. Submit up to 3unpublished poems related to the subject of food or drink. Five-poem limit on poetry submissions. Do not consider previously published work. $15 entry fee which includes a one-year subscription. Snail mail only. First prize $500 and publication for a single poem. Send to: Alimentum Poetry Contest PO Box 210028 Nashville, TN 37221 Deadline: December, 1, 2009 I don't have a food poem, but I'm reminded of Thomas Lux's "Refrigerator, 1957" which I think is an amazing poem. I'm really tempted to write a poem for Nutella.

I had to post something new. I was recently challenged to write a new chapbook in one month. Day 20, and I have 4 poems. Failure? We'll see. Anyway, one of the ideas I had for knocking out this ridiculous number of poems was to do pop haiku. I love the mix of the static, the contemplative, the classic form with the hectic, frenetic, undeliberated, the unending flow of pop life. Maybe the haiku can do something for Pop. But I suck at haiku! So you try it. Here's a contest if you're interested in doing on about a Nintendo game: http://kotaku.com/gaming/flackery/metroid-prime-2-echoes-haiku-contest-26589.php

Ok, so it may be a gimic, but I love this thing I found while shopping for Xmas presents for my cousin. Why this was on a gift list for men ages 30-40, I'll never know, but who cares: "Unleash potassium-rich projectile warfare with the insidious potato pellet gun! Punch the barrel into a standard-issue potato, break off a pellet and bring it! Mostly harmless, the potato gun can shoot pellets up to 50 feet. Potato not included." $5.95 http://www.x-tremegeek.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?sk=MX72143&productID=11553 This poem is a poem about people behaving strangely. Why they are compelled to do it, who they are, what the results of the attack are, that's up to you, but I love the idea of an adult picking something totally innocuous and making a weapon out of it. Of course, by itself, a thrown potato could be pretty dangerous. It's like, potato cannon, light. So maybe I would think of something actually dangerous and then the weapon would be something relat...

The Negative Superman The Obscene Jester is a pretty interesting performance art blog I read from time to time. While I was catching up on my blog readership yesterday, I came across an intriguing idea in the blog describing a musical art performance. http://obscenejester.typepad.com/home/2008/09/loudly-loudly-c.html The blog was talking about Peter Lorre, who inspired the album performed. The blog suggested that the character actor who had been typecast as a villain was an example of a “negative superman,” sharing such ranks with Vincent Prince, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff—the famous somewhat tragic villains of early horror. The term "negative superman" has the ringing tone of film theory about it, but I haven’t been very successful tracking it down. Still, it’s a compelling idea—the negative superman. The ubermensch evil one? The archvillain? I think what is perhaps most interesting about the character is the idea that these actors—aging, fallible typecast actors—play the...

Often in lyric poetry we get wrapped up in ourselves--what is true to us. I think it is much more interesting to lie outrageously. Check out this issue of Blackbird online. It has a feature, "Tracking the Muse," with commentary by various poets about their process. Here's a link to Jehanne Dubrow's "Notes Toward a Nonexistent Poet." http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/features/muse/dubrow_j.htm It is great. She starts off suggesting you lie a little bit about yourself, making up an experience you never had, like a childhood overseas. But she progresses toward creating a whole fictional poet and writing poems for her. While the amount of research needed for a whole book of works by a fictional poet might be a little more than a Wednesday afternoon will permit, you could pick a person you know and write a poem as them, or as a famous person, or as a made-up person. My poet is Sara Johnston. She's from North Carolina, daughter of an Airforce captain, and her ...

Alberto Rios teaches a Magical Realism class at ASU where the capstone of the class is to make a magical realist object. An example one of my classmates made was a bread noose. Tasty. Mine was a lame "Hairbrush," with hair where the brush should be. (For more on magical realism, Tito built a website with neat facts: http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/magicalrealism/ ) What I’ve realized recently is that many objects hold a magical realist text within their name. I was thinking about the stiletto shoe, which compares the traditional, thin steel heel of the shoe with a thin knife of the same name. It made me think how many objects, particularly clothing objects, bear names that keep them only a step away from being absurd: the Peter Pan collar, the bell sleeve, the pencil skirt. The interesting thing about these pieces of clothing is that they get their name from a strong resemblance to the absurd objects their name implies—these are absurd objects realized and normalized in the...

> Politics, Collage and Poetry I'd like to thank Aimee of Vint Condition http://www.vintcondition.blogspot.com/ fame for introducing me to Polyvore . http://www.polyvore.com/ I realize this is an ugly collage, so I'll make this post as untechnical as possible. Politics is like a collage. Poetry is like a collage. Political poetry is often not, but is more like the rantings of insane or crotchety or both older person on a street corner who smells bad. The idea behind this poem prompt is that you would pick something from the headlines that you might like to blog about, but that you think might be a very poor poem. Perhaps you have tried to write this poem, like my attempt at "Felix Pie's Twisted Testicle." Maybe you failed miserably. Polyvore is a neat little internet photo collecting and editing doo -dad that allows you to trawl the web, pick images revolving around your headline and compile them in a collage. You can add fashionable accessories if you wi...

Harnessing the Power of Symbolic Objects for Good Some things I love about this photo: 1. Color 2. Allegorical Content 3. Center of Focus Here is a palette of colors: aqua, deep cadet, dove gray, spackle white, matte steel, and yellow. Everything is cool, working toward a cohesive tone. It all belongs to the same landscape, a particular mood. In this one image we have a seagull, an anchor, a boat, and the sea. All of these are literal things that are found in each other’s company, but they are all also supercharged with meaning when taken out of their ordinary context and say, for example, dropped into a Biblical quote or a Victorian morality story. What I love about this collection of symbols is that they act as themselves rather than the things they stand in for, so the immediate response is to the thing itself. The center of focus on this photo is interesting—it works in some ways like a triptych. The seagull immediately gets attention, having the most animation, but the anchor is i...

Verneuil Process A fairly technical procedure for making gems, the verneuil process involves grinding up the raw material, superheating it, and dripping it onto an “earthen support rod.” The end result of the process is a “boule” at the tip of all the accumulated melted matter that crystallizes into the manmade ruby/whatever, which is broken off the support rod and sinter cone to be faceted and sold. For more information on this process, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verneuil_process Applying a similar process to create a poem is not new. Many poets suggest taking a favorite line of poetry, writing a poem using the “stolen” line as a first line, and then knocking the line off the finished poem. I was once in a workshop with C.D. Wright where she changed this up a little bit by taking a line at random out of a novel. My thought is that the “support rod” for a poem doesn’t need to be literary. A line of directions, journalism, one stolen from a sibling’s diary or the letter of a famou...