taratv: what else is on?

i am just a picture frame

2012-01-31T11:02:00.000-05:00

music: civil twilight

It's interesting what filters can do to a photograph. Here I've got a photo that's very abstract, and perhaps without seeing the other below (which has applied filters for blurring lines and shapes), one might have a hard time seeing that it's a woman and a dog. Anyway, just more explorations of images and what they elicit from people (even myself!).

To follow with this idea of how a filter can change what we see, here is another writing prompt from The Poet's Companion:

Write an exhaustively detailed account, in prose, of something that happened to you. Then go back and try cutting out various things to see what happens. Cut out every other sentence, or every fourth word, or every second noun. Play with the results, and put them into lines.

Cutting out or adding in words definitely alters what we see, not only physically on the page (longer lines, different poem shape) but what we see emotionally (a cooking pot empty is not the same as a cooking pot filled with water, or pasta, or fill-in-the-blank).

watching the stars slide down to meet their end

2012-01-30T10:05:00.001-05:00

music: marina & the diamonds

self-portrait

I've been reading a few craft books over the last weeks and thought I'd share some of the exercises in case anyone gets an itch to write. So! First prompt, from The Poet's Companion:

Write a letter to someone who is dead. In it, make a confession.

Letters like these are a bit (or all) about self-discovery. Sometimes, we take the same story and write it in different ways. A letter's subject matter could easily turn into a poem, then.

About the picture to the above right: When I thought I wanted to be a photographer, I took some design classes that required me to learn how to use computer art programs. As I'd prefer not to butcher my friends and family, I took photos of myself to use for practice; "artsy" self-portraits, I call them. In my grad work this semester, I am exploring images and words; combining them, replacing one for the other, and so on. Made me think of these self-portraits and what, if anything, I could use them for in this study.