Stirred Food Fondling!

Results for the Food Fondling Task of last night! We basically asked people to get on the stage blindfolded and touch up an item of food, then go and write a poem about it. The brave people who volunteered all took their food item home, plus a spoon for the lovely Karen Little whose first stage performance was last night’s Stirred!

Karen Little’s Coconut

Impressed with your

3 ripples

and the milky echo

inside your scratching.

Don’t shy away,

roll against my

palms and

trust me.

 

Sara Ellis’s Tomato

A dull texture, matt.

Cold like a refreshing

Manchester hangover cure.

Its’ warm, leafy protrudence, growing

out of it’s head.

My squashy apple, tickling

my fingerprints.

 

Franco Speziali’s Ginger

Cold in hand, but

receptive of the warmth

my hand offered.

Tough leathery skin,

caressed by my

smooth palm it fit

in so perfectly.

Knotted, with premature

stumps, like limbs,

tiny baby

fingers clothing my

thumb.

Thanks to everyone who came! See you all at the next Stirred, Monday 4th June, theme of FILM! Open mics slots will include films of poets!!!

Selling Sex Exhibition

Thanks to Paula Varjack’s mailing list news I’m planning to check out an online event, created to fit in with the current exhibiton Selling Sex.

Here’s some information from their website, which you can click onto using the above link.

It is a well known fact that the majority of images we consume are created by men, and too often feminism is an easy target for commodification in the wider context of contemporary culture. Titled provocatively – and philosophically – Selling Sex, therefore examines this ‘self-other’ relationship by  featuring all female artists and examining their unique relationships to sex and the female nude.
We all like to believe today that the war of the sexes is less a battle and more a sophisticated dialogue. However, when you consider that only 8% of the work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art is created by women, that the Tate’s female holdings amount to a meagre 15%, and that the statistics are similarly bleak in commercial galleries, it’s a pretty shocking state of affairs.  The facts suggest that the war still needs to happen.

There remain only three industries in which women earn more money than men – pornography, prostitution and modeling. What does that tell us?  The war is hardly won.

Paula Varjack:

At 12:00pm on Wednesday 9th May at Showstudio.com, watch a  very special online edition of Lyrically Challenged with a fierce line up of female poets, mc’s and performance artists, all having created new material especially to coincide with SHOWstudio’s current exhibition Selling Sex.

Check it out!

Vegetable Love

Stirred food and poeming is tomorrow evening! I’ve found a poem by Jo Shapcott called Vegetable Love, about some salad pinning to be eaten. I like the idea of writing a food’s emotions, would an orange be a happy creature? Fruit is generally involved in still life, what would the still life of a banana be in a poem? How do you write a banana into being?

Wendy Cope:

I am a poet of bananas

I am very fond

…I am of very fond bananas

Am I a poet?

Here is an extract from Vegetable Love:

And this is where I´ve lived
the past two weeks, since I was pulled
from the vegetable garden.
I´m wild for him: I want to stay crunchy
enough to madden his hard palate and his tongue,
every sensitive part inside his mouth.
But almost hour by hour now, it seems,
I can feel my outer leaves losing resistance,
as oxygen leaks in, water leaks out
and the same tendency creeps further
and further towards my heart.

Down here there´s not much action,
just me and another, even limper, lettuce
and half an onion. The door opens so many,
so many times a day, but he never opens
the salad drawer where I´m curled in a corner.

I am off to write of the longings of a tomato.

Stirred Food and Poetry

So, we are but a weekend and a day away from Stirred Foody Poetry Event. I would like to share some strange food inspired poems. Here is a group written cinquain piece, thanks to my MA poetry group who were part of writing it!

Fast Food Cinquains

 

Big Mac

Dreams, filled with oil

Burger-I’m lovin’ it

Gherkin, burpin’, ketchup fingers

Red smile.

 

Bucket

Crammed with fast food

Swimming with transfat death

Dig in, your greasy, naked grave

Your choice!

 

Deep fried

Heads in blankets

Bathing to crisp fluffed skin

Stuff me til I’m stuffed to bursting

Burping.

 

The darker side of the food chain guys!

Stirred @ Sandbar 7.30pm Monday 7th May

Day 30: Elegy

Hello,

I am sad napowrimo is over for another year, this year’s has been especially good with the community of facebook going on. I thought I’d finish on a short elegy. It’s made up of quotes from The Story of the Wreck of the Titanic: Eye witness accounts from 1912. Ed. by Marshall Everett. I skimmed and quote selected for this piece, but I wanted to make it longer and use more quotes at some latter point.

I never saw myself as fascinated by the Titanic, I remember my Dad going to watch Kate and Leo version at the cinema with my Mum, and telling me the plot line. When I retold it to my younger sister I added loads of excitement to the narrative, because I couldn’t do it emotional justice as in ‘he saved her by letting her float on the door’, it was more like, ‘he saved her from the colliding icebergs!’ Then I saw this shop window when passing on Piccadilly:

 

I went in and brought the book that this piece is stolen from:

Titanic Elegy

 

The sea had never seemed

so calm and glassy

Smooth under the hand of the air,

the perfectly clear sky

Weightless. A black mass ahead….

A sharp, grinding noise as if

Someone had drawn a giant finger

all along the side. I felt a shock.

I thought merely that a large wave

had struck the ship.

Day 29: Pizza Poem Recipe Rustica

Using Carluccio’s recipe for Pizza Rustica I’ve superimposed a poem. It is a poem about making a poem, which seems an appropriate penultimate poem for the end of this month of making poems. If you are interested in the original recipe it is the very end of the page that I’ve linked Carluccio to. I used The Telegraphs free recipe booklet to steal the recipe originally!

Pizza Poem

To make the poem,

Put the words into a bowl

Or pile into a mould.

Make a well in your mind.

Mix the air with a little speech

And add to the well with

The facts, the assonance, the half rhyme

And rhyme, the salt and pepper of

Punctuation. Gradually incorporate the

Vocabulary and mix with your hands,

To make a smooth set of stanzas.

Cover and leave to rest for several weeks.

 

Heat the editor to 200C, gas 6. Meanwhile,

Mix the critical, the cut with the ingredients

And season with imaginative leaps.

 

Roll out your first draft onto a well inked

Printer and ensure the paper is in alignment

With a margin three centimetres deep.

Spoon the poem to your readers, spreading it evenly.

Roll out the rest of the drafts to make the final,

Brush it up with another edit and position

Your nerves. Press your mouth near the microphone

And purse your lips to let the poem escape.

 

Bask for your three minutes in your poem, then

Lower yourself back to your seat, and bask

For a further fifteen minutes in your heads clamour.

Read your poem while warm and fresh,

Or leave to gather dust on your desktop

Before remembering to serve it to various zines.

Day 28: Haikubes

Hello, today me and Belinda Johnston have been playing with haikubes. First you roll to decide your theme:

Then you roll to decide your words! But I thought I wouldn’t stick too firmly to what I rolled, so for this one I tried to rearrange my words and then work around them:

A regret about….

Wet grass, moonlight flies

The simple science of before

stars flock, whispering.

 

Then for this one I simply re -rolled one set of cubes several times to select words that worked for my theme, I’ve edited it slightly since writing it:

A reflection on…..

Rivers chase his past

water-body, those lips bay

light as childhood.

 

And then this last one I selected a few words and constructed it around the theme: 

A dream about our world….

Those parallel worlds

That lie inside our embraced,

lurid dreams of ice.

 

Belinda and I approached the haiku making differently, her haikus started to make more sense in the sounds she was creating, whereas mine became like fully formed sentences! Here are hers:

A regret about….

this ass smooth here hand

honestly hard limbs sleeping

touching thugs hot flock.

 

My Future

glancing skies empty

pluck ugly into me with

gleeful shines glancing, shape you.

 

Theme of family:

 

Day 27: Pastiche

Last week I revised up on my T.S Eliot knowledge for a reading group, and have become addicted to listening to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  on youtube. Having listened to it several times yesterday morning I began writing a pastiche of it. Here it is:

Have you heard the choirs singing?

In the street the clock is ticking

Marking off the hours as they march

Onwards towards the darkening of the sky

Come Christmas among the dimming streets

They will knock, in groups, in twos and threes

They will lift their voices in soprano,

In tenor, contralto, in the air,

which absorbs their notes.

I stop at Sainsbury’s and buy a cream cake box

Wonder what it costs for a parking slot

We hard boil the eggs

I will wake upon my mobile’s high pitched chime

Buy very many bottles of red wine.

We hard boil the eggs, and peel their shells

We will dress up, go hear the wedding bells.

I have served at many wedding tables

Arranged the decorated chairs that flounce

As if they were another set of bridesmaids

And I’ve refilled the glasses of the couples

Who mutter to each other, then become jovial

Who eat the three course meal, then dance

To hey Macarena, and old tuned romance.

On the stage the bel canto sings, I sip and wait

And think of other things.

Day 26: Haiku

I began an elegy today, but had to leave it, it wasn’t going anywhere good quickly. So I resorted to stringing some on-the-spot haikus together. Hay (na) kus escape me as well, maybe on the last day of napowrimo I can pull together all the prompts I’ve missed, ie, a cento, an elegy, an epithalamion, hay(na)kus, a lullaby, etc lol.

Landing

 

The floating birds peck

At the water’s surface sheen

Dipping like my thoughts.

 

A plastic bagged beach

I collect cheap mementos

My arms flap, seagulls

 

Their eyes in my head

A wind-curved world of wet sand

Crossing, car park perch

 

I open my mouth

A screech falls from my lips, lands

By my strong webbed feet.

TWO POEM DAY! Cento

 Ok well I thought since the prompt was another stolen poem I would give it a bash, a ten line poem using lines from other poems, I used the poetry foundation site and will link to all poems used in order below where I have contracted lines I will use an elipsis in order for the reader to follow where i nicked things from, i would reccomend reading all these poems, I just picked poets I sort of knew  (I clicked through the various related themes of love and desire etc and did know some of these, I mean the Keats and such)and discovered a wealth of cracking lines. If you click on the line it will take you to the full version.

 

When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes…then I shall find you.

whose drinking patterns and extravagance of personal feeling are a lot like mine,

We will plant eggplants & celery together

Assume the languid posture of pleasure mixed with guile.

One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you and nothing happened.

And on thy cheeks a fading rose fast withereth too.

the void of an hour seeps out, infects the slit of a cut I haven’t the wit to fix

shall it be male or female? say the cells,  and drop the plum like fire from the flesh.

And you and I … talked of poetry.

Come to me in the silence of the night; come in the speaking silence of a dream;

love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,

You around me for once, you beneath me, above me –

Whoever you are holding me now in hand, without one thing all will be useless,

thank Heaven! the crisis, the danger, is past,

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous