It takes me a really long time to finish the things I write. That’s why I like this exercise; it forces me to try, fast.
I was trying to invoke the Old Church where us freaks used to congregate, for various reasons, without leaning on standard religion. I was just getting into it when I looked up and saw I only had ten minutes left. I only wish I’d called it Altered Stakes.
I really like Scrying. Partly because I currently have a library book of Edward Hopper’s works, one of which is New York Movie, concentratring on the usherette, waiting, outside of the feature.
I think mine (robotic) is fairly straight forward but in case it’s not - it’s about the first sentient robot having psychological issues. I guess I was inspired by this story of a pet bird that kept over preening, and Data in First Contact dealing with overstimulation from his skin graft. I figure the first artificial intelligence will probably develop a bunch of neuroses. Eliza is a real life infamous chat bot program that pretends to be your therapist.
Ah! I was wondering what literary or mythological reference I was missing! (Kind of obvious now you point it out.)
For “Scrying”, I started with the concept of looking for concealed meaning inside the mundane, something like casting sticks for I Ching or seeing faces in clouds. The metaphor of movie criticism occurred to me pretty quickly, but when I started writing, the speaker of the poem asserted the strong alienation that jumps out in the first stanza. -Don’t know why; I was pretty contented and optimistic when I sat down to write. So I tried to give a general feeling of obligation and compulsion to the act of divination the speaker is attempting in the theater. I had begun the poem feeling that I’d communicate a sense of fulfillment, but that didn’t fit the character I’d drawn, so I tried to portray an emptiness that’s not realistically possible to fill; in other words, that the failure is within the speaker and not in the medium through which he searches.
Cassandra’s Tears was pretty straight forward for me - I used to have a real thing for girls that were, to put it bluntly, damaged and damaging. Even though they never pretended to be anything but, it was easy to ignore the blatant signs and to be hurt by them.
Woeg Thanks, I thought your poem was just on a different level than the rest of us. Everything fit together so perfectly it was like I was rereading a classic.
Thank you - I’ll be honest, I’ve always been jealous of poets who can make beautiful compositions in a free flow context - mine never seem to work out. So I imitate the classics, working on fitting my ideas into a more narrowly defined structure and theme. I’m very tickled that you enjoyed it so!
The poll has closed and we have reached the end of the February 2012 SDMB Poetry Sweatshop. I would first like to congratulate our poets - **Appallinggael, puddleglum, Elendil’s Heir, melodyharmonius, xenophon41, Dr_Doom, Becky 2844, Woeg, Koeeoaddi, Le Ministre de l’au-delà **and jackdavinci - for their outstanding work this month. Take a well deserved bow, all of you!
And it is my pleasure to offer my particular congratulations to Elendil’s Heir, the ‘Poet Laureate of the Straight Dope Message Board’ and author of the beautiful and evocative Olórin. Bravo!
I would also like to take this moment to thank the Mods for their ongoing help and support. I’d like to thank our readers and voters as well - your participation is greatly appreciated.
I hope to run the next Poetry Sweatshop sometime in late April. Meanwhile, for those interested, I’ll be running a Short Fiction contest sometime next week.
And I hope we can continue to discuss and comment on each others’ poems for a while longer.
Many thanks, Ministre, for running this! It was fun.
Should’ve said earlier, I particularly liked “Escape” and “Cassandra’s Tears.” Both had a lot of dramatic punch for their size and were very well-crafted, I thought.
Elendil’s Heir, it is an honor to face defeat from so worthy an opponent
Seriously, great work, and as always, I am really pleased to have been part of the process! Thanks again Le Ministre - count me in for the next one as well!
