Experiments

I tried seriously working with pastels and colored pencils Tuesday. The first piece is half of Edie Sedgwick's face (I did half because I can only do profiles freehand), done with pastels and charcoal (charcoal for the eye makeup). I love pastels because they just melt onto the page and are very intense in terms of color. They are messy though! The second piece is of a Dogue de Bordeaux, or French Mastiff, done in colored pencil. I like pencils because they are easy to control, but it takes a lot of pressure to get the color to pop. I think French Mastiffs are one of the most beautiful dog breeds out there. I wish I could do their coat justice:

I normally don't use rhyme in my poems, but I'm trying to incorporate more formal elements into my free verse stuff. Here is a somewhat rhymed poem I wrote on Monday or Tuesday:

Across the Hall
To I., with much love

He collects soda cans
and he collects hair.
He’d rather collect dishes than
step out and see me there.
I still scrape fat off his pan
and wipe his cutlery with care,
with hope that soon I can say
“No matter how much you collect,
you can’t disappear.”


I don't know if I want to expand on this one or not. I'm going to mull over it.

After reading this following poem for the first time, my heart stopped. Every poem should have a shift in the ending, and this ending is just devastating. Countee Cullen belonged to the Harlem Renaissance school of poetry along with uber-famous poet Langston Hughes. I adore Cullen and my admiration for him began with this poem:

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Balimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.