Next up, I thought I’d ask your editing help.
Think if this as a meme for the poetically inclined. It will score you big karma points and maybe a “thank you for all the support” in my first published chapbook. Here’s the meme: After reading Street Sounds v3, answer the follow-up questions.
It’s an editing collaboration!
She strides in torn hose and high heels, and teeters slightly down the chilly urban street.
Morning traffic slows for lights; walkers swerve to avoid her wildly waving arms.
I watch her ashy fingers forming shapes as I pass by – American Sign or gibberish,
I cannot tell. What does she hear as she speaks in her own silence?
Is she threatening herself or me? Answering her bitter internal voices?
I believe hopeless hearts survive by sharing.
I believe the lost are rescued by communion and wither with seclusion.
I imagine her first home:
Two parents, one deaf, one not. Maybe both could hear.
Soon they learn her world – her finger-speak – and they take care to curb
their sounds so she doesn’t feel alone. And then one day her signs turn sour.
She speaks, but not to them — she signs to someone they cannot see.
They try to force her eyes so she can read their love, but she squeezes them shut,
so they cannot make her hear. Now she spends her days in a double-bubble wrap
of deafness and psychosis. Her soundless world protects her reality -
when she closes her eyes, no one can join her.
Her street sounds are only heard by me.
1) What is the poem about? If you were to describe it in one sentence, what would you say?
2) Is the message spelled out too explicitly?
3) Am I being poetic — otherwise known as vague?
4) What mood does the poem convey?
Can this be true? A chance to travel internationally – free – for writing only three sentences? You bet!
From Go Ahead Tours:
“You’ve likely heard of haikus, limericks and six-word memoirs. Well, now just three sentences could be your ticket to win a free Go Ahead tour to the destination of your choice!
Share your favorite international travel story with us in 3 sentences (approximately 75 words or 450 characters), and you’ll be automatically entered to win a trip for two on any Go Ahead tour (a value of $3,000).*”
Hurry – it ends in two days! Expired.
I’ve discovered I can only read The Sun in short spurts. Occasionally in the letters section, a reader will say they find the content too depressing, and I struggle with this too. It’s powerful and real, and it can be difficult to read.
But reading a few pages at a time works, and allows me to absorb the information slowly, and appreciate the beauty of the writing.
This month, in his Notebook, Sy quoted poet Jimmy Santiago Baca:
“I think if anybody stays close to their loneliness, they’re always staying close to the edge. So when I’m by myself, which is a necessity when you’re a writer, I have to constantly deal with that bleak, despairing feeling. It’s a funny thing about loneliness. No matter what you try to do to fill it, you can never fill it. At the end of the day it looks at you and measures you exactly. We do an awful lot of things — at least, I do — to try to escape it. But when I can blend and merge with the loneliness, there’s an extraordinary feeling of fulfillment nothing else can compare with.”
Now I don’t feel so alone, although I’ll always tread the loneliness line. Do you?
Every time I think, “There’s nothing I can use here,” and start to unsubscribe from a writing focused newsletter, this happens – something fun emerges.
I use my laptop wallpaper to reflect my current state, so it’s always changing: when I decided to use a red poppy for my new year intentions, I saw it each morning as I sat down to type and when I craved snow, Santa Fe winter hills gave me vicarious chills. (I must still be craving snow.)
But change is coming because in today’s Writer’s Digest email came this gift – inspirational sayings to download and use. Electronic muses…who knew?
I’m torn between London and Thoreau. Which would you choose?
I’ve gone back in for additional revision: I focused on using stronger, clearer words, cutting unneeded language, and did some reformatting. I read it out loud, and still like the title.
This is the third version, the first draft is here and the second here. Next time, I’ll hit Sonya’s 5 Strategies for Taking Your Writing from Draft to Poem.
I like the results, although I don’t like not putting my efforts out immediately. I guess I’m an immediate gratification kind of person. Yea, that’s always been my downfall, so this is a good way to work on that.
Comments, snide or otherwise, are welcome. :-)
Street Sounds v3 ______________________________________
She strides in torn hose and high heels, and teeters slightly down the chilly urban street.
Morning traffic slows for lights; walkers swerve to avoid her wildly waving arms.
I watch her ashy fingers forming shapes as I pass by – American Sign or gibberish,
I cannot tell. What does she hear as she speaks in her own silence?
Is she threatening herself or me? Answering her bitter internal voices?
I believe hopeless hearts survive by sharing.
I believe the lost are rescued by communion and wither with seclusion.
I imagine her first home:
Two parents, one deaf, one not. Maybe both could hear.
Soon they learn her world – her finger-speak – and they take care to curb
their sounds so she doesn’t feel alone. And then one day her signs turn sour.
She speaks, but not to them — she signs to someone they cannot see.
They try to force her eyes so she can read their love, but she squeezes them shut,
so they cannot make her hear. Now she spends her days in a double-bubble wrap
of deafness and psychosis. Her soundless world protects her reality -
when she closes her eyes, no one can join her.
Her street sounds are only heard by me.
Geez, there are a lot of “I” sentences visually in the first stanza, aren’t there? Well, next time I’ll work on that.
