Day Two ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2023

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a B-movie poem. Our family has a tradition of watching a B-movie every Saturday night. Some of them are kind of funny, some of them are so bad they're good, and some of them are just torture (until I inevitably fall asleep from boredom). And some of them have excellent titles like The Tingler, Kingdom of the Spiders, Teenagers From Outer Space, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies.” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo suggestion today involves an exercise based on Paul Celan, to produce surrealist statements from a list of words, including fog, miracle, mercurial, ghost, quahog, and others, then fashioning a poem from those surreal phrases. I must confess the surrealist statement portion of today's NaPoWriMo exercise did not appeal to me, so I merely wrote a B-movie poem using some of the words from Maureen's list, and attempting a surreal feeling of sorts. Nevertheless, still a poem melding the prompts. Again, a curtal sonnet today. Creature from the Black Lagoon Out of the fog’s thin skin I rise, thick green armor, mosaic of iridescent quahog shells, like some mercurial ghost, freak miracle. I seek human women, you say, thinking I am somehow hell-bent on kidnapping mammals to slake some thirst too gruesome for you to imagine. No. My motive is simpler, more innocent than you may first fathom, dear friends. Like most visitors to this seacoast town, please know                                                         I’m just a tourist. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Here's what Alan wrote me about his poem today: "I did not find today’s prompts that helpful, Vince, but I did struggle. Taking the surrealism invited by one prompt and thinking of B movies from the other prompt led to this attempt." Harryhausen The sun does not clap as the sky can. Let hearing provide what orientation sight cannot. Light penetrates at varying intensity. Whose voice carries from element to element? Without flesh, the skeletons can only chatter. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Thanks, Alan. This brought to mind one of my favorite movies as a child: Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Here is a video of the famous skeleton sword-battle scene from that movie, animated by the master Ray Harryhausen. Still fun! And here is Harryhausen himself with one of those stop-motion skeletons. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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