the cassandra pages

Some Views of the Park

Sunny afternoon, Park Lafontaine 7/25/11

The past few days, I've been experimenting with different drawing techniques for foliage, searching out a shorthand that captures the rhythm, busyness, and emotional tone of trees and shrubs at different times of the day. I've been thinking about this problem for years, and keep coming back to it, but now I have a bit more time to explore possibilities. These are just some initial sketches done with my Lamy fountain pen, quickly. I'll move on to washes and broader areas of ink and contrast, but I'm curious how far one can go with just a pen.

Early evening, 7/26/11

 

Night, 7/27/11

the micro city 7/14/11

1.

At the community garden
Christiane and I kill crimson bugs
on last year's Easter lilies
each a drop of blood
plucked from unstained white

 

2.

City full of food
the bare fridge accuses me
with its open mouth.

 

3.

The sparrows instruct
their lessons about beauty:
hop from dusty streets
to the gold locust branches

Red house and hydrangeas

 

the micro city 7/12/11

1.

French city, July --

workers vanish and with them

frantic l'heure de pointe*

 

 

2.

Circus tents-- gold, blue

beyond the highway balanced

on its concrete stilts

 

 

*rush hour

commute

The Monday commute/
the bio bus heading east /
clanging bike locks west/
the city steams, reluctant/
to work away the summer 

#tanka

Please follow my new Twitter feed, "the micro city"

Tiresias

A closed wooden door,/

face veiled by lace, with hair/

and beard of ivy/

#haiku

 

Inspired by my months of writing micropoems (Jan 2011, April 2010, April 2009) and by Dave's Morning Porch, Jean's Trail  Mix, Fiona's small stones, as well as by the ongoing work of the Urban Sketchers, I'm giving some thought to writing them more often and more intentionally, under the heading "The Micro City," but with a twist: some of the posts would be drawings of urban microcosms. I don't want to commit to keeping up another blog, and definitely not a daily one, and I don't want to divert my energy from this one. But I like the name and wonder if it might attract some readers who don't want to wade through the typically long posts that Cassandra is apt to write. I also like the focus on small observations in an urban environment; urban haiku, so to speak, is different at times from its nature-inspired parent but no less concentrated, and certainly doesn't need to be negative; there's abundant beauty and fascination in the city. I see it as a kind of poetic version of street photography that may encourage other city dwellers to look around themselves a bit more closely.

Part of my motivation is that we just got smartphones, which are actually little computers. With a couple of trips coming up, where I really don't want to take my laptop, I'd like to still post short messages and images. It's weird, typing on a tiny virtual keyboard, and will definitely keep my output down to 140 characters or less!

So far as micropoetry poetry/haiku readers on Twitter and FB go, I think these are different audiences from the blog; a discussion on Dave's FB page indicates that might be the case. Maybe it should be a shadow blog that extracts just the Micro City posts and keeps them in one place. Any thoughts or ideas?