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elaz-ivero · 3 years

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Poetry Fieldnotes ||Broken Artists Collective||

[image description: a block print with a bright red border around a greyish blue grainy image. Atop it is a pair of discoloured hands, palms facing forward, red and outstretched. Above the hands in white Garamond font are the words, Broken Artists Collective and in smaller font, and other poems. /end id]

Over the past week, I may or may not have fully embraced the concept of a broken artist finding myself unable to conjure up a single creative thought unless I'm lying on the floor surrounded by scrawlings and broken-spined books. For a long time, I have been trying to cater my work to a series of magazines that clearly yearn for a very specific 'type' of poetry that I am incapable of producing. These poems are ones that applied pressure, the ones that were crammed into inattentive submission boxes and were returned in empty emails.

Here are the poems,

[image description: a photograph of a boy laying down looking upward, a lit cigarette stands upright in his mouth and his features are overlayed with the shadows of ferns and other plants. He wears an orange collared shirt and around him are the words in white Garamond font, Floor Bound Echo Location. /end id]

Floor-bound Echolocation is a disjointed 403-word prose poem that is a coalesce of liminal spaces, chaotic ingenuity and a reversal of grief. Like many of my poems, it describes a series of small events and feels more like a corrupted scene from a novel than a stand-alone poem. It's a short tale of a brother and sister cleaning out the garage-workspace of their genius, estranged and recently deceased cousin. It opens as follows...

All the lines are in lowercase and of sporadic length, every so often a single random word is isolated and highlighted. These are the words that were isolated throughout the poem.

//enigma //a test of patience //satisfied //memorized

I adore this poem and it feels strangely personal (my own experiences often slip into my work unconsciously like fears finding their place in dreams) as a creative I fear the idea that a lot of my work and unwritten ideas will never be read or known. The poem focuses on one of the cousin's creations, a geometric pattern drawn in chalk on the concrete floor. This pattern, its design obsessive and laid out like a triggerless trap takes over the narrative of the poem. The characters wash it away and the pattern, the physical manifestation of this dead cousins genius clings to the idea of being appreciated, recognized.

[image description: a boy sits up against a wall in a barren green and blue-tinted room, to the right of the image, is a window showing trees outside and beneath it a gas heater is attached to the wall. The boy's wearing a similar orange shirt and on the wall beside him are words, 'it blends and swirls with the oiled water and tidals along the length of the driveway to passer-by's what remains of it asks, begs, to be, memorised.' /end id]

I wrote 'floor-bound...' in a day and made subsequent edits over the course of a couple of days, I tend to write out my ideas and make minor changes to word choice and sentence length before I add in the details that make each poem unique. The isolation of individual letters was a way to almost mimic the process of looking in a cluttered space you'll see something recognizable and latch onto it.

Status: Submitted

[image description: A girl with long black hair, olive skin and a tired solemn expression face forward, an unlit cigarette held loosely in her mouth. She stands in a red elevator, the doors are closed and on the left on the image is the metal switchboard showing she has reached level 12. On her right is the word, 'Peephole'. /end id]

Peephole is a mirrored poem and is split into 'Inside', and 'Outside' with Inside, aligned to the left and Outside, aligned to the right, they are reflective of each other, mirrored. Peephole is about a young drunk woman staying inside her boyfriend's cramped apartment inspired by the 43-Square-Foot rooms in South Korea and an image from the article below inspired the entirety of this poem.

She, aware that the apartment seems to reject her, steps out into the hallway, the 'Outside' which feels apocalyptic with a burning wining sun and a ghost standing by the elevator, a personification of her sickness silently assessing how she is still alive and if she could find her way home in this state. The women in turn assess how this hallway faintly reminds her of the one from 'The Shining' leading into a breaking of the fourth wall.

[image description: A photograph that looks similar to a corrupted piece of film, tinted red and showing a woman's profile looking toward the right. Words on the left of the image read, 'I take an imaginary drag as if setting the scene of some ninety's horror, slasher, mounting suspense with the final girl, alone, a lonely lamb how easy would it be to just end a film right here.' /end id]

The tone of the poem is gritty, realistic and almost elusive in its design. I love writing poems without intending to care about its audience, with no closure, no clarity, no kindness. This poem is an amalgamation of all the recent media I've consumed, 'The Shining', Final Girl, Wikipedia dives into the housing crisis and psychological horror. I love writing poems that reflect a blend of culture, using language as a way to implement distinctive voices in my writing.

[image description: Another room tinted green, on the bottom of the image head barely in frame is a women looking off into the distance, above the cigarrete she holds red smoke reflecting in the shine on her face twirls and unfurls. Text reads, 'Tiger balm and salt, "kapuahi ahi" his whisper hurts my ears and sounds like, toungue on velvet, tooth in cheek.' /end id]

Status: Submitted

[image description: a close up of a brides face covered by a sheer veil in front of a black background, her eyes are tinted with red eyeshadow and she looks forward with a bored stare. Large text in the upper left-hand corner reads, 'Chekhov'. /end id]

Chekhov, my most recent poem is- as the title suggests- from the perspective of a gun, a woman on her wedding day is left at the altar by a cheating groom and hunts him down in the orchard venue with an heirloom of a gun. I love the perspective of this poem, the way it slowly reveals the origin of the 'voice' and grows darker and darker as the wedding dress soils and darkens with dirt and blood. Few of my poems spur from ideas rather than images but the idea of a furious bride filled with anguish and horror brought this poem to life.

[image description: a young bride looking behind her as she runs toward a patch of dark trees in the middle of a field. One hand holds up the edge of her white dress, it's evening. Text on the left-hand side of the image reads, 'Darling when my steel feels soft, revoke your vows and kiss something just as cold and cocky. /end id]

This poem is split into three stanzas, before the wedding, during and the evolving aftermath. I feel like I could extend this into a short story saving the strange gunpoint perspective till the final scene.

Status: Completing

[image description: A black and white image of a boy looking up, his expression a mix of horror and fear while blades point down at him and hold steady inches from his neck. The image is a still from "Ivan the Terrible" by Sergei Eisenstein. Text aside it reads, 'The Sound of Hamlet Rehearsed. /end id]

The sound of Hamlet Rehearsed, inspired by my own recent exploration of scriptwriting and theatre. The sound of Hamlet Rehearsed is about a boy being held accountable during a faux court hearing, on stage on opening night. The narrative slowly switches from fiction to reality as it dawns on him that the punishment is about to be dealt and he struggles with understanding how much of his reaction is performance or authentic. It's structured in a sporadic unbroken series of words and moments.

Tone-deaf touchtone tipping point Ziplock bags and scented zip ties off script the boards atop the trap door tremble imagine the conductor beneath torch amongst teeth briefly making out direction from diction.

Status: Editing

Those are the poems I've been working on! I'm not going to write any more poetry until I come to my poetry course next trimester and instead are going to focus on short stories (I'm developing two right now, three-course meal and Wren versus the Russian Government) and continuing by Worldbuilding Diaries series.

-E

#poetry #brokenartistscollective #wip #bac #amwriting #writeblr #poems #poets on tumblr #writing #writeblogging

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