Religious poetry, especially if it is about “sacred spaces,” usually focuses on nature as the godly place. But I don’t think the Lord is absent from the city. And where the Lord is, the ground is sacred.
And of course, the statement about standing on holy ground is what the Lord said to Moses from the Burning Bush.
(The following was originally published on my LiveJournal blog. Transferred to ScribblerWorks on 4/4/2017.)
COMMENTS FROM LIVEJOURNAL
kalimac Sep. 6th, 2011 09:27 pm (UTC)
Remember CSL’s response to TS Eliot’s claim that Hamlet was “most certainly an artistic failure.” He said: “If this is failure, then failure is better than success.”
scribblerworks Sep. 6th, 2011 09:55 pm (UTC)
Exactly!
This poem was written when I was in graduate school. I had been having a pen-pal correspondence and we’d been discussing poetry, formal and free-form. He contended that formal poetry could not be spontaneous, and that free-form poetry was more immediate.
My reaction was to write two poems: a free-form poem, which was actually very calculated and planned out, and this villanelle, which other than laying out the requirements of the form was written rather spontaneously. It seemed to pour itself out.
The image for the form (this is actually the third image I’ve used to back this poem) is one taken by my friend Michael O. Sajbel.
This poem was inspired by a specific morning. I’d spent the night with my best friend: we’d built a tent from blankets in her back yard, and slept out there in the summer night, watching the bats circling above the tall trees. Then, very early, her father woke us, long before dawn, and we drove out to the lake. We launched the family motorboat, and her father took us out to the center of the lake. It was like glass, so calm, so quite. And he taught me to fish.
This poem was inspired by late winter nights in Michigan when I was growing up. Particularly returning home after midnight New Year’s Eve services. Empty streets, new-fallen snow, ice frozen on branches….
As with my other spec scripts, the tide of time has passed this Law & Order spec script by, so it’s offered up as yet another writing sample.
What happens when a district attorney is the victim of a crime, specifically an attempted homicide? What do the people around that person do, how do they handle it? Those questions were behind part of this tale: I blow up Jack McCoy’s motorcycle in the teaser.
When the investigation leads to the actual bomber, District Attorney Branch takes on the prosecution of the case. Since McCoy was the victim, he can’t prosecute it himself, after all.
But there is a secondary crime behind the bombing, and Jack and Alex go after that criminal.
As for the crime that provoked the bombing, the case that takes the second half of the story, it is based on a real case of embezzlement connected to a Nigerian email scam. If you thought that no one ever falls for those, you thought wrong; it does happen alas. I have considerably fictionalized the circumstances, however.
Since this script is out-of-date, the following list of characters indicates who is in this story.
Lt. Anita Van Buren; Det. Joe Fontana; Det. Ed Green; ADA Jack McCoy; ADA Alex Borgia; DA Arthur Branch.
As always, this is just a writing sample.
All characters belong to Wolf Films and Universal Studios.
I’ve been considering putting this blog up for some time, so that I would have a good place to put shorter fiction that I just wanted to make available and which did not fit into the context of the Arveniem materials. I’m planning on posting short fiction, of course, and possibly chapters of works written for fun. No charge for these.
I also plan on posting some of my longer poetry. I have some pieces that are too long for the type of graphical presentation I’ve been doing with the shorter poems. And then there are some that I don’t want to present that way.
I hope you will find it all interesting. I will endeavor to entertain you!
(Originally posted on LiveJournal)
I’m still in San Diego, with two days of Comic Con to survive. My feet want to fall off, and my knees stiffen up very easily. I briefly sat out in the sun this afternoon before I was going to leave, and the hot sun on my black slacks soothed the knees for a little bit. Enough to get me a bit further, but man, it’s an endurance test. One weekend spent standing and walking a lot, followed by another five days of a more intensive version of the same (concrete convention floor under occasional carpeting).
Wednesday was the Preview Night, which involved a lot of waiting in line for people. And it inspired a bit of silliness in me, in the form of a short story. Short enough to post here. For your amusement….
Thousands and thousands of people converged upon the city of San Diego. The sun shone brightly, and heat from the solar rays accumulated in the sidewalks, seeping upward through sneakers, flip-flops, sandals, boots, mocassins and assorted other foot gear. The population of a city descended from the sky by airplane, rolled through the streets by automobile or bus or train. All this human traffic gathered for the annual Comic Con International. The arrivals were annoyed by the scarcity of parking spots. That the city’s baseball team was playing an important game at the ballpark across the street from the Convention Center meant nothing to these visitors. The Exhibit Hall held the mystical Kaabah for the pilgrims, a kaabah that was different for each.
Lines upon lines formed of weary but eager pedestrians. Lines for Hall H (the Hollywood Hall). Lines for registration pick-up. Lines for the television shows preview. But most important of all, lines to enter the Exhibit Hall. This, the fabled Preview Night meant that the tens of thousands who possessed four-day passes would have access to the Exhibit Hall prior to the official opening of Comic Con. It promised first access to all the storied treasures that were to be offered.
From one end to the other, the mighty Convention Center stretched a full quarter mile. And every attendee faced the prospect of multiple transits end to end during the Con. They faced it without fear or trepidation, accepting it as a necessity for Comic Con.
The wait was long, for although registration, where attendees could pick up their pass badges, opened at three (actually earlier, as mercy was taken on the patient flocks of fans), the Hall was not due to open until six. The long line was folded back on itself in the broad air-conditioned corridors of the upper level of the Center.
And then the magic happened! Movement! The line moved forward. The polite red-shirted Elite security shepherded the eager fans into neat lines. The line snaked forward, away and back in a bend and then around a corner.
Dutifully, the patient attendees followed instructions and marched down the bayside corridor to some access point in the region of Hall G.
But one lone attendee, who hobbled slowly forward on sore feet, with stiff knees, paused as she watched the eager fans disappear in the distance. Then she heard the walkee-talkee of an orange-shirted convention staff member crackle. The voice that came through was oddly accented, unlike any foreign influence she had ever heard. “Loading in of groceries completed. Excellent supplies this year. Lipid rich.”
She stopped in her tracks. What had she overheard? A sensation of horror crept over her. After all, the line had been disappearing in a direction removed from the usual access to the Exhibit Hall. But … surely those thousands of attendees were not the groceries mentioned!
She walked stiffly over to the windows that stared out at the bay. The glare of the westering sun distorted everything. But, just when she had decided she was imagining things, the windows rattled from a massive displacement of air. She thought she saw a shadowed saucer shape, but then it was gone.
However, when she did finally get down to the Exhibit Hall, it was gloriously spare in population. The exhibitors smiled cheerfully, since the humidity had not risen noticably. She walked the aisles without bumping others, and scored a number of the special exclusives, since the numbers clustered round the booths were strangely low.
Happy and satiated at the end of the evening, she passed two more staffers and heard one comment to the other, “If it keeps the fire marshal away, it is worth it to deal with those alien carnivores.”
******
Just to be clear… this IS a work of fiction. 😀
sartorias – Jul. 25th, 2009
LOL!!!!
scribblerworks – Jul. 27th, 2009
Thank you!
Actually, it wasn’t as hot in San Diego this year as it has been. But even so, the humidity of so many bodies on the Exhibit Hall floor can get pretty fierce.
But the lines —!
(Originally posted on LiveJournal)
I’m goofing around with that title. “Underground” because this fragment used to be “buried” in some boxes with ancient papers, and it was also going to be about Hades’ abduction of Persephone, taking her to his realm (under ground).
Way back when, sometime after I finished “The Marble Don” (about Don Juan), I got inspired to try tackling more narrative poetry. Well, maybe “inspired” is too big a word for it. “The Marble Don” was inspired. “Hades’ Bride” (the following fragment) only got as far as 18 lines. And I suspect, they’re rather over-wrought ones. I’m posting the fragment without having even really read through it closely – exposing my “youthful” follies (well, grad school follies) to the world.
I don’t even recall if I had a real vision or feel for the story I was launching. Somehow, I think not. The Don Juan poem had bubbled up from an idea that I carried around for me for some time, until I finally had to get it out. The story of Persephone, not so much. I think I just decided that it could make an interesting topic for a narrative poem, and so I launched myself into it. I don’t know that I had a sense of the core character, Persephone. That’s probably why it never got past the beginning.
Well, here goes, exposing the raw verse. I expect I’m going to cringe over this. But sometimes, writers need that sting of bald revelation.
****
“Hades’ Bride”
To Nysa’s Vale, where Hades from the dark
maintains a private gate, where sunlight shines
on flower jewels, each blossom petal bright
with silver dew, where sparkling water stands
in quiet joy, reflecting back the sky’s
bright sapphire light, to Nysa’s Vale did come
Persephone, her grain-gold strands of hair
adorned with crimson flowers freshly picked.
Perambulating flower, child of earth,
Fair Demeter’s one daughter, sired by Zeus,
as graceful as a reed by silver stream,
she bent and bowed before a dancing breeze
to gather in her arms the fragrant gems,
the blooming bounty of the fertile soil.
Away above on flying steeds of cloud
far-seeing Helios espied her there
within the Vale, and saw her gentle form
sight-echoed on the mountain-shadowed pool.
****
Hmm. Well, not so bad that I want to wad it up and toss it, but it does seem a bit… “much”. I’ll have to think about it. I’d certainly appreciate initial reactions. Having recopied it, I find the stirrings of interest coming up. A possible outlook and focus. A way to make something of it. But I need to think about it some more.
Comments
sartorias – Mar. 19th, 2009
Basically it’s a setup, so it’s hard to see where it’s going . . . kind of an establishing shot, before we actually get much story. The pretty vale–P is gathering flowers–Helios takes a look and likes.
Getting more specific, I think it takes too long to set that up. There’s a lot of repetition both of words and ideas that (I think) might better be tightened, especially over-used phrases like ‘graceful as a reed’ and ‘sparking water’–especially when sparkling water usually doesn’t sparkle when it’s quiescent. It gleams, but the sparkle comes in its movement. Quiet joy I don’t think is effective–water isn’t joyous or anything else, it’s water–if you’re going to use joy, let us see the cause of the joy, then the reaction means something. I mean, it’s too powerful a word to use as a descriptor without motive, if that makes any sense.
I tend to think ‘flower jewels’s is almost too much, possible because ‘blossom petal’ seems way too much: blossoms are petals, so why two words when one will do? ‘bright with silver dew’ is another of those phrases that appear in a lot of poems–is there a way to get that lovely image with fresher word combos? Especially when we have ‘bright sapphire light’ right after, again, bright light being pretty common. and the word ‘bright’ doesn’t support a lot of repetition imo.
I love grain-gold strands of hair.
I love perambulating flower, child of earth
(so I don’t think you need the graceful as a reed)
dancing breezes and silver streams are more phrases we see a lot–and if the breeze is ‘dancing’ how is the water still?
I am ambivalent about fragrant gems, just because I’m getting the image of hard jewels with smells attached, but another reader might really like that. But I think you could get rid of ‘blooming bounty of fertile soil’ and not lose anything by it–we’ve already heard a whole lot about these flowers, and so that is implied.
I also think getting rid of ‘sight’ before echoed sounds and looks better, but again, I aint no poet, not me, so if a real poet comes along and says, “You’re totally wrong,” I’ll cop to it.
scribblerworks – Mar. 19th, 2009
Ooo. Ah. Ouch. (Walking on hot coals!) Heh.
Seriously, I appreciate this feedback! It is just as I thought, then. Over-wrought, and too facilely put together (hence all the trite usages).
“Fertile soil” I shall probably need to keep in some fashion, since once her daughter is kidnapped, Demeter stops paying attention to her job and crops, etc. begin to fail.
Heh. If I were evaluating this objectively now, and it was someone else’s piece, I might be inclined to think “the writer thinks she is too clever by half”. I guess the best I could say of this is that I can rattle off iambic pentameter without much labor. The manuscript for this has no corrections or changes on it at all. Very raw, very much “first draft”.
Thanks for the critique — it will be VERY usefull when I pick this up again.
sartorias – Mar. 19th, 2009
Definitely tie that fertile soil in, then, yep!
(Originally posted on LiveJournal)
So, now that I am launching into a new era of my life (having at last left Jeopardy! and its fine folks behind me), I have to do some major reorganizing in the apartment. Over the course of 18 years as a researcher, I’d collected a very nice selection of reference books on various topics. And now they’ve come home. Where I don’t have enough shelves. So I have to sort through still more things, to put more into storage, to make space for the reference books I want available in the apartment.
Anyway, on the bedroom closet shelf there’s been a largish box of papers sitting there for many years. So this weekend, I pulled it down and started sorting through it. A lot of it was 12 year old financial records that could now be thrown out. Some of the things were old Christmas cards – which were fun to read through (before parting with many of them). Old pictures of friends with their families (What fun to look at a picture and go “Well, that child just graduated from high school!”).
In the midst of all this, were several sheets of paper as precious to me as gold leaf! The original manuscripts of a handful of poems. Some of these poems were composed for specific friends. I know I’d copied them out for the friends, but I had not gotten them into the “Poetry Book” (a notebook with poems written out in a fair hand) or gotten them typed into the computer. They were, in effect, lost to me… and frankly, I feared they were lost forever. That was a real disappointment to me for quite a long time.
But….. HERE THEY WERE!
Oh, joy! Oh, rapture!
Yes, I’m going to get them typed onto the computer quickly. And a couple of them, I want to find free images for backgrounds to them, to put them up on my website (along with the ones already there — though I really want to redo the backgrounds and lettering on those).
Seriously, it was something that gnawed at me, that I’d lost those manuscripts. I knew the poems were good. A couple of other ones, I had copied them onto the computer. But there’s something about the original manuscript that holds a magic for me. The page I worked on, trying out phrases in my head before writing them down. Little tweaks and adjustments. The physical object brings the experience back to me. It’s precious.
Comments
wellinghall – Jul. 8th, 2008
scribblerworks – Jul. 9th, 2008
sartorias – Jul. 8th, 2008
scribblerworks – Jul. 9th, 2008
I have recently created a Patreon page, where I will be posting about my works-in-progress, and indeed sharing draft chapters as things move forward.
I want to express my deepest thanks to those who have joined the Gold Level of my noble Patrons.
Bradley Rader
