from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

hmmm... addendum to yesterday

OK. I admit it. That was a tough one. I'm doing it too – wouldn't be fair otherwise – and blimey, decided that maybe 6 qs is enough.

I do hope some of you are getting on better than I am.

I notice how easy it is to make something banal, or clever-clever, or straight-conversational, from a series of qs and as. It's much harder to have q and a work off each other like wind and tide to produce something elemental, dynamic and whole (so far, anyway).

I guess I did make it obvious that you're looking for wacky off-beat answers, the unpredictable surprises that come from a freewheeling imagination, rather than logical sense-making rational responses? (Easy to say, isn't it? – something about letting your imagination doing the work and trusting that it can, rather than forcing anything.) It's in the 'gaps' that we often find the most surprising creative possibilities.

Do feel free to bin, rearrange, reorder, invert and etc etc any qs and as that you've found, when it comes to tomorrow's poem-making.

I've not quite so many as 10. How on earth I'll turn what I do have into a poem, I don't know!

But these might have some mileage for me:

Q. What's in a black hole?

A1. The sound of one hand clapping
A2. The only certainty is the Queen's Speech
A3. The rush of stale air that precedes every Underground train's entry
A4. Out pours a clamour of chacking jackdaws, their black beaks full of nothing and everything
A5. 'Set the controls for the heart of the sun...'
A6. Forgetfulness and memory.

Q. What's for supper?

A1. Whatever's in the black hole...



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