I may contribute a verse?

Written by Megan

When Amanda began this project, we sat in our old sunny room as she worked on ideas for the name of her blog.  Coming up with names for things is sort of like being a popcorn popper--you plug into your idea outlet (and hope, as always, that it doesn't short or blow you up) and begin warming up the kernels that are rattling around inside your brain.  They start popping.  Unfortunately, in this situation you're not just the popcorn popper, you're also the person who has to eat the popcorn, and your corn kernels didn't come from a factory with excellent quality control policies, you just found them on the side of the road mostly, so nearly all of them, as they pop into form, are really only fit for the garbage can--they're burnt or half-popped or they're dead bugs.

Anyway, she was working on popping a batch of idea-corn, looking for the one that was edible, and she came up with Create the Day, a more specified, less overtly violent version of seizing it.  The title fit the project, and yet the project has plenty of room to grow within the title.  For example, it suddenly finds itself fitting me as a co-creator (the aptness!).

In a not-so-strange coincidence (as far as coincidences go), only a few days before Amanda granted me the boon of joining her here, I was watching John Keating whisper "carpe....carpe....carpe...diem" in the ears of his students.  I had decided to re-watch Dead Poets Society in preparation for a lesson I was teaching on poetry.

Aside from reminding me of the bitter shortness of this sweet life, the movie reminded me of something about poetry, about words hunted and herded and strung so carefully in order to say something.  Not to be cute, as Keating says, but to express real human passion--love, beauty, romance, the things we stay alive for:  These things are not naturally occurring scientific phenomena.  As a friend of mine recently put it, "there is no atom of empathy, no base-pair sequence of beauty."  These things that we stay alive for won't just rain down on us, we can't buy them in the vitamin aisle, and we won't blunder into them in blind and howling wanderings.  These are the things, not that we take from life, but the things we create and contribute.  And that is why I love this project.  It sums up the whole point of being alive.

I will try to create and contribute everyday,  and relate the best and worst of those experiences on this blog every other week perhaps.  In parting, here is a black-out poem I created during that lesson on poetry, rewritten rather than photographed because I made a mess of the original and I like the look of it in quasi-stanzas.

Morocco

As this village retreats
amid bread ovens and the sounds of braying,

pay attention--

When the sun sets
the mountaintops drift to prayer.


P.S. For more on black-out poetry (or, you know, just something on black-out poetry) visit artist-author Austin Kleon's page here: black-out poetry.