Week 8 - Flash Essay on 'White'

Experiments in Writing – Week 8 Exercise

James Miller

The complete reflection of the whole colour spectrum, white could be the definition of radiant. It’s selfless, holding back nothing of its own. We see green, blue, yellow, red, and every other colour because the surface keeps hold of a precious part of the spectrum and reflects to our eyes what we see as just one individual colour. Not white. White just keeps on giving.

New born lambs, doves of peace and little white rabbits; white can be innocent, serene or just plain cute. White animals have connotations to them above and beyond your average camouflaged creature. And let’s face it, who doesn’t like lambs? The Noah story wouldn’t carry so much hope if it had been the raven he’d sent that delivered the olive leaf; that would be sinister.

Purity, chastity, virtue and wisdom – white does it all. Not many women can justify their white wedding dresses with the original meaning of chastity, but that’s ok, husbands-to-be probably prefer that. The purity of the colour, free from stains or darkened tints, is plain for all to see. Plain as the colour itself. What colour do angels wear? If you’ve not seen one, and I myself admit I haven’t, what colour would you assume angels wear? How about Jesus? How about God? What colour do you think they wear? White robes? White beards? White wings in the bright-white-light of Heaven? For a starter hint, the Pope is one religious figure we’ve all seen, and even his hat is white.

But it’s not all good news. White has had trouble in its past, even now white is straying from virtue. The English Defence League re-start their pseudo-crusade, the K.K.K continue to preach supremacy and hatred. Centuries of white-power and inexcusable crimes of (and against) humanity have been carried out in the name of white. Defining the other by their darker hues; but even the whitest men are a blotchy pinky-cream. Is albino the true genetic state of purity? Probably not. But we’re only human; the true purity of pristine white is beyond the reach of mortal man.

Eric Clapton sits in a white room, and even though the curtains are black and its proximity to a station seems worrying, he takes solace because the shadows run from themselves. The light is white and the white is bright so where would the shadows run to?

But yellow light is the norm. Sunlight and street-lamps glaring down with their drowsy shades of yellow. Moonlight, that’s what the world needs more of. More sonatas too. Howling wolves, baying at the moonlight, twinkling white stars pierce the solid black sky and the world is bathed in a more gentle, peaceful shade. The man in the moon stares down with his comforting face and the dark night feels just a little safer.

White does it all.

Gymnastic Memories - A Performance Poem

My piece for the first assignment in this course is a performance poem based on a memory of a gymnastic competition from my youth. Below you can find the recital for the poem. I hope you enjoy it.

It may be necessary to copy and past the URL into the browser to find the file. It is listed as "Gymnastic Memories".

http://www.mediafire.com/?j2dslo887bpjol2

http://www.mediafire.com/?j2dslo887bpjol2

Week 6 - Prose/Poetry and Prose Poems

I'm aware that I am thus far missing weeks 2 and 5, but in the interests of staying current with my peers I'd like to present two pieces of work of Prose Poems.

Piece 1:

Your bed. Your room. Your door. Locked. Sitting, quietly, knees under the starched cotton covers pulled close up about you, you look toward the window. The sun bathes the distant trees in a soft yellow light, as the gentle breeze sets the world in constant motion. The world behind the glass. A world currently out of reach.

A car window sends the sun’s light reflecting toward the spot where you sit, the glass too far to mirror the solitary star, and all it does is make your eyes hurt. The room is dim.

You look out towards the plush gardens of a retirement home over to the right side of your screen of vision, the transparent portal that allows a view of life outside this place, this room. The garden is kept very well; set-square flower beds and well chosen trees. Artifice in nature as the not-too-tall trees create the illusion that the old-folks are actually in a natural get-away. But their view is like yours, and your view is like theirs. Like you they look through windows, watching the world just happen. Vantage points on vivacious nature, and a view of your fellow spectators; that’s life from one side of the glass.

The ambiguity that I was aiming for with this piece of writing is in whom the person is that is viewing the events, where they are and what their situation is. I want readers to question why the spectator seems to long to be outside – can he/she not get there? Is the person trapped or locked in? I’ve tried to keep it as poetic as I can, using some devices such as alliteration, rhythmic sentence structure and repetition.

Piece 2:

And so it happened. The wreckage and broken glass. The blood stains the street.

I approached the scene. Red metal, green paint, concrete. The flashing blue lights.

Witnesses gather. Mumbles and murmurs abound. Who’s fault was this mess?

Then I heard a name. Katie, or Carly was it? Was hers the red car?

It’s not her car now. It’s no-one’s car now, just junk. A piece of scrap steel.

An ambulance comes. Mr. Green-Car seems alive. At least one made it.

They lay him down, still. A mask covers his anguish. He might not make it.

The police question. What did the witnesses see? I didn’t see it.

I just heard the screams. A young girl who just saw death. And it happened here.

It was her I heard. She didn’t know what to do. Hysterics took her.

I ran, and ran fast. The shrieks demanded interest. And interest it got.

Fifty-ish gathered. Or maybe even sixty. Sixty rubber-necks.

The cars are removed. The shattered glass remains still. Mr. Green-Car breathes.

The crowd starts to wane. Sobs soften and tears dry up. Well at least for now.

Cleaners clear the road. Shards of metal and glass go. The scene becomes clean.

But I won’t forget. The mingled reds in my mind. The horrible sight.

But what of Katie? And what of her family? I will never know.

I’m hoping that it’s not immediately noticeable that this poem is actually 17 haikus, laid out in a haiku format – 5/7/5.

It has the feel of a montage or collage of images, with little flow between the snap-shots of information, stinted like haikus can be. The subject matter actually derived from the thought process, the decision to just play around with the haiku format put two words in my mind: broken and fragmented. A car crash seemed to fit well.

Week 4 - Performance Poetry

The following poem I composed mainly through thinking of my favourite aspect of performance poetry; rapid shifts in rhythm, pace and the impact of the sounds. The creative process can effectively be reduced to: "What is a good subject for building tension and leading up to a change in pace? A bomb!"

The poem does have a natural way of being read and the pace does pick up, but ideally it would be heard rather than read, it may be worth reading it out loud if you want to get an idea somewhat closer to what I had in mind with the piece. See what you think...

The dust lies undisturbed.

It’s cliché I know,

But you weren’t there:

so,

I’ll tell you what happened.

Sat in the centre

Of an arid test ground

The small black pack of

Explosives and fuses

Lay dormant waiting for the green light.

The wait became tense

Hence my own nervous tears

The culmination of years upon years

Of science and madness,

Indulgence of fears

But the dust lies undisturbed.

The signal to go,

get this show on the road

and start the test.

Fizz…

The fuses catch light

And the bright dusty ground

Is silent, save for the fizzling sound

As the tension is building and everyone’s wondering

Will this be the next deadly weapon we’ve found?

The fuse ever changing, turns black from the white

And the goggles go on to protect our eye-sight

And the nervous sweat runs

From the fore of my head

And the hope that this fails

And we keep peace instead

That we don’t have to use

These machines that abuse

That we don’t have to kill

Have diplomacy still

And we’ll talk of the matter

Instead of the clatter

Of shooting and shrieking,

Of foul gases reeking

Of acidic rain and untold new pain,

Of the hurt and destruction with nothing to gain –

BANG.

The dust is disturbed.

Week 3 - Word Games?

Acrostic matrix poem.

The Little Green Man

Top-House, Eaves,

Leg I Tape Tied Locks Exam,

Grip Radio (Electric), Etched North.

Man Are Never

Them. Hello! Er…

Leave. I There Turned Looking; End.

Glasses Rest Excuses, Else Nothing

More Apprenticeship. Nappy

Touched - Head End,

Linesman In Three, Tracksuit; Late English.

Grandstand Red, Except Everyone Needed

Meant About Next

I found this exercise quite strange. The process seems very mechanical and requires next-to no real input from me. I found that adding punctuation in places actually added some poetic resonance to the rather arbitrary combinations of words. One surprising and simultaneously vexing quality of using a novel for the process is that words that share a context and meaning can work well together, for example the third “stanza” has the majority of its words taken from an extended few paragraphs about football, and as such work well together. The vexation comes in the fact that once two or more words come up that work well together, it is easy to desire a third or fourth word that will complete some sort of meaning. It is not unnatural to desire coherence. For example, “Grandstand Red, Except Everyone…” could have ended in a much better “N” word than “Needed” and some sort of meaning could have been gained.

It’s certainly an interesting experiment to try, I’ve found myself placing meaning and importance on particular couples or groups of words (hence the punctuation), and there does seem to be some poetics in the composition.

2.

Westminster Bridge is a road to show more fair:

Westminster, Middlesex Bank, soul who could pass by

London, England. For over 600 years in its majesty:

Kingston. Proposals for a bridge, like a garment, wear,

Were opposed by the Corporation, morning; silent, bare,

Opposition in 1722 and after a theatre, and temples lie,

Received parliamentary approval, and to the sky;

Westminster Bridge, designed in the smokeless air.

1739-1750; beautifully steep.

The City of London responded; valley, rock, or hill:

London Bridge and widening it felt calm, so deep!

Blackfriars Bridge which opens his own sweet will:

Bridge (1759), Battersea Bridge; houses seem asleep.

Autobiographical writing

Something rash, crazy, ambitious, dangerous, surprising, or uncanny. Well, I can offer ambitious and surprising, but you won’t find the others here.

Everybody needs distractions, escapism, hobbies. The work required for success, given typical notions of the word, can be a chore sometimes, so in my first year of university I decided to use some leisure time to test myself, to prove to myself that many years of guitar playing - while I should have been working - have actually produced results. So, my experiment was to write and record an instrumental track, something that I could be proud of, something vaguely material that I could look back on, and listen to, and tell myself; that rocks.

In March 2009 a friend of mine sent me a drum and bass track he’d made, I told him it was ok, but I was going to improve it for him. It was a fairly long and arduous process, finding some good recording software, setting up amplifiers, mixers, foot-pedals and finally the Vintage Metal Axxe itself. If you’ve not tried to write music before it can be hard to understand the process involved, especially when you want to fill a five-and-a-half minute backing track with varied and interesting passages, whilst constrained to only one instrument. Thankfully, the guitar was versatile enough for the job.

You may at this point be thinking, “this isn’t really experimentation”, and in a sense you’d be right. I can play a guitar, I understand musical concepts. The reason this particular endeavour was new territory is that I’d never recorded a track that’s solely my own.

Certainly not a hybrid of two vastly conflicting genres; drum n’ bass, with metal.

Have you heard a drum n’ bass/metal instrumental before? Thought not, neither had I. Interestingly, working with the backing track forced me into new areas, moving away from the guitar playing I’ve known for years into new scales, new techniques; and I was relishing it. I’d get frustrated when something wasn’t working right, overjoyed when it did work, and sometimes just stumble upon new ways to make the music interesting, to make it exciting. A few of the sections just came from nowhere, just playing around to the backing track and realising “hey, that sounds pretty cool”. Writing out sections that had worked, recording for twenty minutes at a time, and just playing around ended up producing some musical phrases, riffs and licks that I’m immensely proud of.

The final result took about a day to nail; recording software can be a real bitch if you’re not used to it. But finally, it took shape. Arabic scales, tapped passages, speed arpeggios and some weird rhythm work produced a track that to this day I’m still proud of, and I still play along with. I find it hilarious that I’m listed on my own iTunes. It may not have been a typical experiment, and you may have no interest in anything you’ve just read, but it was a personal endeavour to test myself, to push myself into new territories, and that to me is experimentation. This time, it paid off.