Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Writer Wednesday: #poetry Book Review: With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All WomenWith Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've never reviewed poetry before, so when LaForge contacted me asking for a review, I thought I'd give it a shot. I've certainly read and written my share of poetry and then some.

In one of the many poetry classes I was subjected to in college, a wise professor gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever been given regarding the writing of poetry, and it has stuck with me to this day. My dear professor said, "You can write the most aesthetically beautiful line in the English language, but if it doesn't make sense, it doesn't work." I wish I could afford to send LaForge to his class for a semester.

Although her poetry is mostly devoid of the flowery language that so often entraps young poets, she stumbles instead on flaunting her own superior intellect. No doubt she has a fine grasp of the English language and all its intricacies, and surely she is as brilliant as she so ardently strives to convince us, (over and over, pounding it in with her convoluted sentences where meaning is smothered, obscured, and at times completely lost), but often the tangential nature of her writing leads us so far into metaphor and memory amid the soliloquy we can't remember what she's trying to say, if anything. See what I did there? Confusing, eh? Think sentences like that, with a lot more big words.

Amid the confusion, you will find a few gems, poems that make sense from start to finish and do not meander on to different topics or flounder in empty, albeit quite intelligent sounding, rhetoric. She has some brilliant insights and quite memorable lines that ring so true as to be breath-taking. It is a pity that instead of staying with the sparse clarity of those lines, she instead chose to wax overly-philosophical or abruptly change tack and end the poem with some handful of lines completely unrelated to the majority of the poem. Too many times I found myself reading and rereading the same lines trying to find some comprehension, or figure out how they related to the poem or what they meant, only to conclude that they meant little (other than that the poet knew many large words and wanted to string as many of them together as possible).

Okay, so maybe I'm just not smart enough to read this kind of poetry. But I really just want to understand what I'm reading, whatever it is. As my wise professor once told me of writing, I believe to be equally true in my own reading experience. It doesn't have to be beautiful. It just has to make sense.



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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

#scrapbooking Pagemaps challenge: Sun and Sand

Another pagemaps challenge this week. I am still scrapbooking my Florida trip from a year and a half ago. I did take a year long scrapping break in there, but it's just about impossible for me to scrap trips because I take literally hundreds of pictures. But I'm doing my best.

This week, I followed the Pagemaps sketch and tried to do a layout pretty close to the sketch for their contest. Here is the sketch, and my take on it.

If you are looking for some great sketches, check out the pagemaps website. They run contests on their blog all the time, too. Usually a ton of people enter, but it's good motivation to get a page done. Head over there to enter the contest, or check out their website for tons and tons of free sketches.

For this page, I used the following supplies:
Pattern paper-DCWV and Target
Pen: Zig
Stickers: Miss Elizabeth's (Blue shell), ATD (Title), Making Memories (words), Jolee's (pink glitter shell), other (quote bubble, fish)

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Scrappy Sunday? A few days early

Okay, I know I've been terrible about blogging, and really, I haven't had much time for the creative life lately. But, I did manage to do a few scrapbook pages while house sitting last week. Here is one I did for the contest over at one of my favorite sites, Pagemaps.com. I love using their sketches. Here is the one for this contest.


And here is my take on it. I used mostly the same product line for everything, ATD. There are a few exceptions, of course. Love, elsie did the embossed pine green paper, which I love. And the film canisters are from a photo-realistic pack I had. I didn't have many supplies, so I actually have to add a few extras, some brads and ribbon at least. But here's what I could do while not at home. I don't like exposed journaling, so it's tucked away in the envelope to the left of the campfire pic. I wrote on the three tags peeking out.