Justin - the Best and Absolute Worst so far.

I have heard artists of various stripes say that ranking their pieces is akin to ranking their children.  I found this to be true; it is very difficult for me to pick my favorite, whereas, the worst is a constant nagging noise in the back of my head that will not leave me alone. That being said let me start with the worst.

    Early on in this project, the fourth week, the current president was a candidate that many of us thought was unelectable.  Regardless, he was gaining some popularity and I thought we should write something about him.  It failed, hugely.  It was bad enough that in my write up about the writing I admitted that it was both not funny and that it was probably a swing and a miss.  I tried using actual Trump quotes and placing them in a false interview with a pretty snarky interviewer.  Reading it now, it looks like the kind of thing that a middle or high school kid would piece together when they first started becoming politically aware.  That is, there was an idea of understanding of the problems, but no solutions.  There was no real handling of the problems I was trying to highlight, just sarcastic comments about them.  The bottom line is it was ill conceived and poorly written.  I don’t think I imagined I was going to change anyone’s minds about Trump, so I’m not really sure what I was thinking.  It was the kind of piece that at best would land with half of the readers, and that’s only if it’s done well, which it wasn’t.    I heard an interview recently where a songwriter responded to the compliment that one of his songs had “great lyrics” with “not great but clever.” I think at the beginning I thought the idea was clever, but even as it was published, I knew it was not good, definitely not great, and not even clever.  Those of us who were there talk about it like one might talk about a terrible car accident that they were in; we’re still alive, but we don’t really have anything else good to say about.

It’s harder for me to pick my favorite.  I’ve managed to narrow it down to two pieces that I am fairly proud of.  The first was the conflict ballade, Ballade of the Flood, from May of last year.  More than a year of writing later, this could still be my favorite poem. I managed to capture the imagery and idea and execute the form well.  I prefer strictly formed poems to free verse, and I’m pretty proud of this one.  It was hard writing and in my commentary, I mention that I started with four different concepts before settling on the final idea.  Sometimes poetry flows, sometimes it’s an uphill climb.  This was a climb, but I think it’s better for it or at least I appreciate the result more because it was such a challenge.

The second piece is A Dark Solace from May of this year (maybe May is just a good month for poetry.)  This one was not a climb; it was not a fight.  It flowed quickly, I knew the ideas I wanted to use and the words fell easily into rhythm.  At this point, we had stopped doing commentary on the project blog, so I don’t have a record of the exact process, but I remember the editing of the poem after I had flown through the original draft. There was specific word choices that I changed and I added punctuation (something I comment about intentionally not doing in the ballade.) Also, although it follows a strict form, it is not a fixed form.  I picked the form and my instruction was a poem, written in sestets, at least X amount of stanzas, envoi is allowable.  So, this seems more like my own work than many poems written in a fixed form and I find myself very attached to it.  Also, the poem is about depression, something that I have dealt with intermittently for most of my adult life.  That makes it more personal to me and, although I don’t think good art needs to be about personal issue, I think in this case it helps.

So, that’s that.  Like children, it’s much easier to find the worst than the best, disappointments are heavy and there’s a lot of mediocrity in the middle.  Overall, I wouldn’t give the project up for anything, but next time I get the urge to write about a living politician, I might instead carefully construct a performance piece allegorically bashing my head into a brick wall. 

The links to my top two are below, I am not including a link to the Trump piece, if you want to dig it up, you can, but for my money, it’s best left buried.

http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2016/05/justin-conflict.html

http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2017/05/justin-dark-solace.html

Jason - Previous Posts

The Best Times and Worst of Time

In the time Justin and I have written this blog, there have been some really good pieces, some really bad pieces and a bunch of stuff somewhere in between. This is the nature of the beast. We set up this weekly writing challenge in such a way that on any give week one of us picks the topics while the other picks the style. This has given results that are a little unpredictable. There have been piece that I thought would be funny, that ended up kind of blah and there have been topics with difficult poetry types that have turned out surprisingly good. We have had weeks were the results are wildly different and other where we are so close we use the same color and the same unusual word in a poem. This is all part of the fun.

I would like to tell you I always enjoy the process, but the truth is sometimes it is really hard. I would like to tell you it is always rewarding, but there are times I have gotten to the end and I thought, not really happy with that. There is lesson to be learned from even these.

I have to say I hesitate to tell you about the worst week’s writing, for fear of stirring some political rants, but in my mind, of all the work I have done, one piece falls to the bottom. It was meant to be funny, but the jokes didn’t really fly then and they certainly are less funny now. It was supposed to have a historical bent and while the quotes are historical quotes, they didn’t really fit together as well as I had hoped. Of all the pieces we have posted, if I was allowed to remove one, this would be the one I would remove. This travesty was the 5 minute play on Trump.

To start with I was pretty excited about this piece. I thought doing a piece where I placed Trump, who was a candidate it appeared destined to lose, in the midst of past presidents would be funny. I could lampoon him a little bit with his own words and I could include great presidential quotes. I thought I would place him in the midst of Jefferson, Lincoln and Eisenhower, that I would be able to look up a few quotes by each of these guys and the piece would weave itself together. In short, that did not happen. The characters didn’t easily talk to each other, the quotes were often so tied to their time, they had to be bent to work together. There was no banter. They didn’t talk to each other and they never really talked to me. Worse, I couldn’t strike that balance of genuinely funny with Trump. I knew not everyone would agree with my handling of him, but if you do it right you should walk away with people saying, at least is was funny. He came off as mean or stupid, pompous and war mongering, but never funny. So I made him a character Trump supporters would hate that I had written him so and Trump haters would point at and say see, but not laughing, not seeing it as funny. This was not just a miss, it was a miss I took extra long to write and I would have no idea how to fix even today.

If I am telling you about the difficulty, the disaster, I think it is important to write about the magic that sometimes happens. There is a moment that you can not create, that there is no ritual to summon, that happens so very rarely, but you wish it would happen all the time. It is a moment when you are writing a piece and you lose yourself to it, that you stop wrestling the word to the paper and instead they reveal themselves. When you are done you feel almost as if the writing come from somewhere else. There are nuances and details steeped with meaning that even as you read them, read the very words you wrote, you are taken by them. You wonder how you could have written them. For all of the assignments, for all the works, both easy and difficult, this has happened only completely to me once.

It started as a simple piece, a letter meant to be written to an inanimate object. I don’t know how to tell you about it, so I will tell you what was going on as I wrote. It had been just a few months since my wife had passed away and I desperately wanted to know why. I was hurting. So, as I wrote a piece to a spruce tree, written from the master violin maker who was cutting it down, I was, in a way giving reason to my own experience. I started with research, but by the second or third paragraph I was no longer writing, the words were writing themselves and I was crying a grieving in a way I need so much at the time. Additionally, I found when I shared this with people it helped them grieve, too. I don’t know if it was because they saw my pain, felt there own, or somehow got an answer they themselves were looking for. Even now, it is the kind of writing I wish I could do all the time, but I fear it was a special piece written at a difficult time, just when I needed it most.

You can find that piece here: http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2016/02/letter-jason.html

Jason - Procrastinate

Studies Wasted

In knew in just two weeks there’d be a coming test
So days in study spent so I could do my best
The time it came and went, so new ideas were born
Like never do today what you could do tomorn

Times

Sometimes I work the trials to articulate
Hard times trying my thoughts to domesticate
Two times I have my body Incarcerate
Life times are spent while I Procrastinate

Deadline

Supposed to publish Friday five o’clock
I’d like to claim my brain the words did block
And oh to claim the lines were hard and hazy
But truth be told I failed because I’m lazy

Justin - Procrastination

Three Poems for Procrastination

 
1: An Octave

Why save until to tomorrow
What you can do today
But if you’ve time to borrow
Then take a break I say
A little time to play
And lay aside life’s sorrow
From toil walk away
‘Twill still be there tomorrow
 
2: A Limerick

Though admitting this flaw with a blush
Smart time use I often off brush
Looming deadlines cause panic
Then I’m off running manic
Oh, the rushing can be such a rush
 
3: A Quatrain

I waited too long to start this
More effort and it would have rhyme
But I waited too long to start this
And now I’m plum out of minutes

Justin - White Privilege

I struggle with the words

“I AM NOT PRIVILEGED” I want to scream

I have struggled

I have lived in low income housing

I have lived on state aid

I have swept the yard for needles left by junkies so my daughter can go out and play

I struggle with the words and with the definition

How broad can we define privilege before we err in not saying racism?

If we call privilege undeserved advantage how far can we go?

When my rights are left intact, is that undeserved?

Shouldn’t we look at the rights violation and not the one treated as he should?

I struggle with the words and the definition and with the idea

This privilege is bad; this privilege should bring guilt,

Yet I did not ask for this privilege; why am I blamed?

I struggle with the words, the definition, and the idea because I don’t want to struggle with the issue.

And I don’t have to,

Because I am white,

And that is my privilege.

I can pretend I am not privileged while I am waved past the receipt checker at Wal-Mart while all of the “brown people” are stopped

I can pretend it is not privilege when I drive through the streets not afraid of being targeted

I can pretend I am not privileged, because I didn’t choose it

But I am privileged

And until I am fighting and pushing and screaming so that everyone feels as privileged as me

I am part of the problem

Even if I ignore it

As is my privilege

White Privledge - Jason

EDGE

How do I write about an platform I was given, a dais I never had to step up on, an EDGE I was born into and on top of. An EDGE. Do I give a mock complaint about the responsibility of this position? Do I call it a great white albatross, that the EDGE is a plank? A great board on which I stand, with humbled legs. I don’t feel the waves licking at my feet, taste the salty water, look long into the horizon or into the deep. I see no line, no EDGE, demarking some great drop off.

How could I write about the standing in the shadow of this EDGE, my EDGE. I have never felt the hug of the creeping dark. I have never had the color of my skin keep me from being lifted up. No! I don’t have any experience with that.

I can’t imagine the EDGE of a of a Klansman's rope binding me to a gnarled tree. The EDGE of a racist’s knife cutting me in fear and hate. That is not my life, not my blood. I can’t pretend to understand. I can’t pretend I have heard the stories from my mother and grandmother. That is an EDGE I can not cross.

Yet that EDGE I have been given is the the flip side of that EDGE that hungrily bites. I would love to tell you my story and my success was gained by the virtue of my hard work. Yes, there were sweat and tears in the process, but if I claim the prize as completely mine, I would be ignoring the historical and societal EDGE I have been given.

You might be tempted to think, hasn’t that EDGE been erased. It is 2017 and that EDGE in history, that divide between slaves and emancipation happened more than 150 years ago. Erosion should have worn in down to nearly nothing. But that pretends it was laws alone that propagated such a thing, but I still remember that first flight after the 9/11 attack. The coils of nerves, responding when the EDGE of the seat belt engaged, the EDGE of the wings moved, when the EDGE of the Hijab which rounded the corner. A Muslim who we all warily watched. No, that EDGE was alive and well, baked into some biological urge to see the other and prepare for war. Stand on the EDGE, the wall of our hearts that separated us.

You too might feel that EDGE when you turn down the music you are blasting in your car, when you see the shade of the drive beside you. You might feel that EDGE when you hope the sound of the doors locking is not that loud, when a group of black youths walk by. The invisible border springing up.

See I can’t control that privilege, that EDGE, I have been given. I can’t walk to the EDGE of this elevation and step over the EDGE to become what I am not, to look like what I am not, to live what I have not. No, while I may recognize the injustice, I can not control the EDGE given to me by the color of my skin, by the fact that most of those around me look like me and so have a bias to to trust me.

What I can control, though, is this other thing, the impact of my EDGE on other people, the snake inside me, which wants to strike or recoil from those different than me. I can acknowledge that I am in a situation where usually the favor is mine, the EDGE is mine, and try to not to put that on the back of those who are different than me.