An Artistic Work of Writing that Usually is Rhythmic
and has Stanzas
As a child, I was curious about our world
I was curious about dinosaurs and royalty and
how to apply blush without turning into a clown (an important skill which is
still unknown)
Why do kings don crowns?
Why do snow rabbits and caribou think a tundra is a good
crash pad, whilst woodlands swarm with ladybugs and frogs?
My longing for wisdom was not bound by things I
could touch, nor things that could actually occur
I thought about archaic myths and dark night sky
Hydras that spit liquid rock
UFO’s
If I would allow, my imagination had no limits
Floating for hours among cosmic junk I would
swim though a burning galaxy and run around Saturn’s rings. I would find a
shooting star and fly straight on ‘till morning to a land I’d only known from
books and films, with lost boys and villains with hooks for hands.
And mountains
Lots and lots of mountains
Obviously, living in Illinois, land of Lincoln and flat
ground, climbing a mountain was a fantasy.
I’d switch out corn and soy for a mountain any day.
In my mind I could climb a mountain, no, triumph against a
mountain as if it was nothing. I probably thought that if I stood atop a mountain
I could watch stars spring into sight and light dim into ground and tiny cars
winding around roads far away.
I probably thought I would find a goblin and a pot of gold
on a mountain’s top
But I didn’t. I found books about topography. And Italian
royal court, and astronomy, and frogs
And that was just as good.
I found that writing a poem
without the letter “e” to be a real challenge. I had to pick each word
carefully and make it really count in order to make the poem convey what I
wanted it to. When I edited my poem, a lot of the time I found I had put in a
really elaborate word when I didn’t need to. I edited it a lot, but even now it
can come off (in my opinion) kind of weird and/or too flowery and elaborate. I
quickly realized that talking about what will happen now can be more
complicated, and can demand the letter “e” more, than talking about time gone
by. In addition to leaving out “e” I would periodically leave out another
letter, like “u” or an “a” when I could have totally left it in. I did write
the word “the” a lot out of habit, and then have to go back and edit my poem. I
found that a writing a good poem without the letter “e” took much more time
than I had thought it would. I knew that the letter “e” and the other banned
letter are critical, but I hadn’t realized quite how widely utilized they are. Writing
the poem can be likened to putting together a puzzle, and it reminded me a lot
of a cryptogram (http://www.cryptograms.org) . In
a cryptogram, you have to figure out every letter in a word, only from knowing
how often each letter will occur and it can really highlight how often a letter
can appear in a word or chunk of text.
** The following text has no letter
restrictions **
I also made an art
project to go with my poem. I liked the idea of it opening like a book and the
inside of the “book” having pictures of a few of the things I talk about in
the poem.
~ Ally
