Peggy Shumaker
July 20, 2010
Peggy’s prompt for today was to combine a specific time, a specific place, something important to the narrator personally, and some wider concern. We could use prose or poetry.
Peggy’s homework assignment was to focus on one detail of what we had written and expand on it.
David Crouse
David had us practice recognizing scene, reading the starts of stories to us and having us indicate when a scene started. He pointed out that scene involved a specific time and place. Examples he used were from Richard Ford’s “Time and Place,”, Rachel Ingales “Times Like These,” and Sherman Alex’s “The toughest Indian in the world.” He had us close our eyes and then describe the ceiling of the room. None of us noticed the computer projector overhead. Things on the periphery of a scene help give realism to the scene. The then gave us an in-class exercise: write a quiet scene–a conversation, perhaps–with a peripheral event or series of evens that become an annoyance.
David’s homework assignment was to revise what we had written in class.
Jeanne Clark
Jeanne introduced broadsides and then a poetic form called an Aubade. It’s not a verse form, but a content form, and very old. The content involves illicit lovers parting when a watchman (not necessarily a person) warns of dawn. The guidelines she gave us were:
Night is the positive time; daylight is unwelcome.
The parting at daybreak is central.
Another creature beside the lovers must be included. The other creature is often, but not always, a bird.
Our work must include images or sensory details of both night and dawn. Prose or poetry, the form was not important here.
Homework: revise
Our afternoon segment was to visit the UAF Museum and let the exhibits inspire a piece of writing.
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This was my take on the museum assignment:
Death of Blue Babe
(“Blue Babe” is a steppe bison that was killed by a lion, frozen and buried by silt some 36,000 years ago. He was found by a placer miner near Fairbanks, and rests today in the museum at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.)
The bison sniffed the frosty air, his head swinging back and forth as he scanned the snow-covered steppe. Vigilance was part of life, but within the herd it was a shared duty. Here, alone, he felt exposed and vulnerable.
The wind tugged at his thick coat, but could not penetrate to his skin. He spread his nostrils and swiveled his ears, seeking warning of any predator, but the hiss of the blowing snow covered other sounds. Again he turned. Where was the rest of the herd? Sheltering from the wind? Perhaps in the valley to his left?
The narrow stream valley provided little shelter from the biting wind, and no other bison. Instinctively he knew the danger of being alone, but until he found the rest of the herd, he had little choice. Again he paced in a tight circle, seeking the source of every imagined sound.
What was that? One eye caught a blur of motion, and he bolted farther into the little valley. But the snow had drifted deeper here, and as he started to turn back, a sudden weight almost collapsed his hindquarters. Bellowing wildly he bucked and spun, the musk of lion rank in his nostrils. For an instant he was free, plunging though the snow for the mouth of the valley, but out of the thickening storm cam another lion, leaping for his head.
His nose was pulled down, and again weight came on his hindquarters. He hardly felt the pain of claws and teeth. All his attention focused on the demands of his lungs for air. He tried to shake his head, to throw off the weight clamped to his muzzle, but his legs would no longer support even his own weight, and buckled under him. Redness fading to black washed across his world. He never knew when the lions began to feed.
Aubade: a parting at daybreak of two lovers, who traditionally had a watchman to warn them of the approach of Dawn’s Light. It was a tale sung by troubadours of Bliss interrupted.
Assignment: WRITE an Aubade, including another creature and images of Night and Dawn.
Aubade
Night still reigned, wrapped in black silk and regal,
but the cock has crowed, and far to the east,
faint shafts of purple steel rise toward zenith
and reflect back from layered clouds
as my knee whispers softly to you
and the back of my hand pours on you
caressing the soft fur of you, slipping deeper,
exploring last bits of languor and fire.
Rain patters softly, a muted tattoo, a call to quench and cool,
as we dress, embrace in dissolving shadow and,
as strands torn by stretching, slowly part.
–Summer 2010–
Thanks so much for posting these. I’ll read Sue Ann’s in full and comment when my eyes are less sleepy (it’s late!) But I love the opportunity to see Don’s text having heard it in class. I love how tactile and sensual this poem is. Especially, I love the last line. My only discomfort is with the tense of ‘reigned’ in the first line – the way the sequence of tenses works in the following, having ‘reigns’ (present tense) seems more natural to me. I’d be glad to discuss further if it’s not clear why.
I’ll post my joke-aubade-sonnet in another comment.
Thanks again,
Ela
Ela,
You are entirely correct regarding the tense. My original did read “reigns”. Must have fallen asleep at the keyboard. Too late. at night.
Don
(btw, the title is supposed to hint at the joke/double entendre – my husband was a farm boy decades ago and what he describes of the raging adolescent energy seems to reflect what gets depicted in a lot of ‘western’ novels also.)
Aubade of an Adolescent Farm Boy
The night is old, the candle’s burning down:
soon dawn will break the membrane of my focus
and force me to relinquish this home ground,
this love embrace, this only gainful focus.
I’m wedded to this pen, this art, this muse,
but secretly – night wombs our stolen amours –
by day, time is not mine (if not mine, whose?)
a drudgery of never-ending chores.
I grudge the cow her milking, grudge the hens
even to receive their eggs, I grudge the range
its constant thirst for wood, I grudge the pens
their mucking and their homonym’s exchange.
By night, I hold my pen, and hold it cheap
to win these hours of love at cost of sleep.
7/20/2010 UAF Museum Writing
I have been too long in Alaska to be unaffected by anything here. I have shot a lynx, skinned and butchered moose, bear and snowshoe hare. I have traveled by snow shoes, skis, dogsled, helicopter, snowgo, Argo, riverboat, canoe, tail draggers and a rebuilt WWII ambulance called “The Blue Goose.”
I have harvested wild plants and berries and coaxed potatoes, tomatoes, cole crops, summer squash and more from poor soil. My yogurt for lunch today was flavored with low bush cranberry jam even though I don’t culture my own yogurt anymore.
As a therapist I have heard the stories of Native people suffering inter-generational trauma. Original Alaska artist paintings, prints and artifacts of beads and ivory adorn my home, crippling my urge to downsize. Etcetera, etcetera. The exhibits overwhelm me with stories. But what wrenched my heart here today today were not objects, but words.
The words were not spoken or written by Alaskans. They were penned by a woman from Key West, Florida less than a week ago on the uppermost page of a notebook inviting visitors to comment on the exhibit, “Forced to Leave.” She wrote she had been a missionary in Japan. She knew of the internment of Japanese Americans; but she had never known about the removal of Aleut Alaskans from their ancestral home during that time.
Tears filled my eyes when I read her parting words, “Never Again!” The next writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, also a woman, acknowledged her ignorance and expressed appreciation that the museum tells the story. She opined this story must be told more widely “like on public TV.” To what end? I wonder. I’ve seen it preaching to the choir on public TV.
My husband asks me if I think the world is progressing and then we argue about “progress.” I tell him I think there are more people in the world with more knowledge and more resources than in the past. But, I say each generation must learn the great moral lessons of life for itself and so often we learn too late because our learning depends on irreparable mistakes. The Aleut people never returned to the islands of their ancestors, apologies and token reparation notwithstanding.
What mistakes are we making today that will evoke, “Never Again!” a generation or two hence? What, I wonder, are the views of these two writers — welcome and appreciated visitors to Alaska and to our museum — on immigration or on “Muslims?” The words of a song popular among “Baby Boomers” in their youth, “When will we ever learn . . .?” burn my brain as I daily delete fear-mongering emailed “forwards” from Baby Boomer correspondents — mostly relatives of my husband and myself since we have cocooned ourselves with like-minded liberal friends and get our news from public radio and television and the mainstream press.
Still, I am grateful to Cathy of Key West and Laurel of St. Paul for their kind words, for their appreciation and for the optimistic “Never Again!”
Subarctic Aubade
Lifted out of a two-year retirement at six a. m.
I am set down at nine among poets and writers
assigned to write an “aubade.” I consider
my love from whom I disentangled my body
hours ago. He slumbers on, the soft stutter
of his snore as silent as Berkeley’s falling tree.
Outside the window open over his head the
sub-arctic summer day, undistinguished from night,
sprinkles a gentle rain on the marigolds and
good-naturedly ruffles the choke cherry tree.
Alas, no somnolence goes unbroken for long.
A dog will bark. A chainsaw will spark into action
in chorus with the back-up beep of an excavator
chewing into the formerly empty lot next door.
My love will rise and ply himself with coffee. Then
he’ll go out to greet our new neighbor with civility.