Tuesday

The greenhouse stuff is great and I'll probably talk about things that might happen with them when we meet individually. I'll return them on Tuesday. I  had one of my switch material shackles in mind for that, but the (by and large) compositional response most of you took would, I think, make it a silly shackle.

It would also be great to see more revisions.

Optional shackle. Write the poem in which the speaker is a historical figure writing to correct a misconception held about he or she, or about some matter in the past. This might even be a celebrity. Your speaker wants to correct something or perhaps warn us of something. 

Sign up for an advising time.

The City Planners

Hey guys here is another poem I found by a fellow Canadian. I think it is a wonderful interpretation of the mind-numbing and almost sterile environment of suburbia today.

The City Planner
Margaret Atwood

Cruising these residential Sunday

streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows


give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster


when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.


That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;


guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air


tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows 

Option for Tuesday

Write the poem from the voice of a G/god whose worshippers have forgotten him or her (or it).  This G/god draws its much or all of its power from its subjects awareness of it. This may be an animist G/god that inhabits something in your daily life.  The G/god of something ignored. This poem is a lament.