Archive for July, 2010
Poem: Soardough
Posted by Angela Brett in Old Stuff, The Afterlife, Writing Cards and Letters on July 11, 2010
By request, here is the pantoum that restarted it all. I wrote it in 15 minutes during a workshop on pantoums at the Geneva Writers’ Conference in 2006 after a long time without writing, and the positive reception it received convinced me that I could still write if I tried. Two barren years later, it inspired me to embark on the Writing Cards and Letters project to so that I’d try more often. I still haven’t come up with a good name for it.
I dreamed I was flying around on a biscuit
raised by the bakers of the bread of life,
their hands cleansed by hand, and not sterile.
Many hands make gloves expensive.
Raised by the bakers of the bread of life,
I put bread in the shivering hands of the poor.
Many hands make gloves expensive.
I wish I could have done more.
I put bread in the shivering hands of the poor.
They ate, and wept in gratitude, and came back hungry.
I wish I could have done more.
By serving their need I prolonged it.
They ate, and wept in gratitude, and came back hungry.
They could not bake their own bread without flour.
By serving their need, I prolonged it,
I added dark minutes to their darkest hour.
They could not bake their own bread without flour.
I have flour, sugar, chocolate chips.
I added minutes to their darkest hour.
I dreamed. I was flying around on a biscuit.
Video: Chemistry
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on July 4, 2010
Well, my last six months are over, without the rules really having been adhered to, and I’m still alive. On the subject of Still Alive, Steam is now available on the Mac so I finally played all the way through Portal on the very Mac that sang Still Alive for my last video (the older Mac only lip-synched, although it was perfectly capable of singing.) And on the subject of my last video, that wasn’t my last video after all, because here’s a new one. It’s a ‘performance‘ of the scientific love poem Chemistry, which I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters and revised for a challenge on Fictionaut.
It’s one of those things that was meant to be simple but resulted in my buying lipstick, cotton swabs, a T-shirt, nerd specs and two fake moustaches, and breaking a wine glass which I never used anyway. I bought the moustaches in New Zealand because I couldn’t find any here. While I was there I recorded another video, which is not quite finished yet, so watch this space.
To save you a click, here are the words and study guide, mostly cut and pasted from other posts but with some irrelevant bits taken out and other bits added: