The art of seeing, words and images, part 2

My fellow classmates practice shooting portraits at Boardwalk Park
in brief sunshine before afternoon thunderstorms arrive.

If you've read Part 1 of "The Art of Seeing--Words and Images," then you'll know that this workshop taught by Suzette McIntyre and Kerrie Flanagan seemed to light a firecracker of creativity and inspiration in me!!

The class portion of the workshop is two Sunday afternoons and for the second class I was, thanks to antibiotics and a lot of napping, back to my healthy self and armed with completed homework.

Ominous clouds for afternoon storms approach from the west.

To take advantage of a brief interlude of sunshine, we all went out of the gallery to practice shooting portraits in sunshine--while we still had some.

I don't often shoot portraits but I have a far better idea now how to shoot on sunny days than I did before.

Our sunshine and time ran out about the same time and back to the gallery we went to spend the next several hours writing.

Together we baffled and reflected light to achieve a better portrait of Kerrie.

It has been a few years since I've written poetry.  Part of our homework involved the study of Haikus, the Japanese three-line poem with 5-7-5 syllables.

Once I started thinking in 5-7-5 syllables I couldn't stop!  I began to jot down Haiku after Haiku--to the point where my beloved husband, after listening to a kazillion poems began to refer to them as my "Hai-kooks!"

Here are a couple of examples:

Farewell dear winter.

Battle so easily lost.

I had hoped for more.

Sweet bells of my deck

becalmed in afternoon heat,

so seldom silent.

My poor pansy wilts in hot afternoon sunshine.

I wrote about my poor pansies wilting over the pot in hot sunshine:

Revive!  Please!  My fault!

Guilty rescue on the way!

You need water, too.

I wrote about the bunnies clear-cutting my flower gardens:

I yield my garden

without enthusiasm.

Bowing to sharp teeth.

Yellow pansy with lacy edge of morning frost as sun rises.

I wrote about the dark thundering days of storms that brought torrents of rain:

Wild wind blowing hard

rattles teeth & sills & bones,

begging to come in.

And, I wrote about my response to a story in the newspaper:

Kinda exhausts me,

such intractable thinking.

Gives me a headache.

We tried two different poem forms in class:  the Cinquain Pattern that has five lines with 2-4-6-8-2 syllables and sensory poems that use what the name suggests--see, hear, taste, feel/touch and experience.

Here's my Cinquain Poem to correspond with a photo of a rock climber:

Hold tight.

Don't let go yet.

There, just over the rock

it waits, for you to recognize

and love.

And, my sensory poem after seeing an image of a cat whose attention is clearly overhead:

A flutter in the sky, a shadow overhead.

Air displaced by feathers, the cry of Mourning Dove.

Wings, the flavor of air.

Life surges, the sky calls.

The hunt, the leap, the pounce, the kill.

It was a wonderfully creative afternoon and to my surprise came to a close just as my mind was beginning to deflate from working so hard.  

Now the real work began--selecting the images, enlarging and framing them for our gallery show and writing corresponding poetry! Too see my images and read my poems, continue on to Part 3.

For anyone interested in an "Images and Words Workshop" please go to:

www.boardwalkgallery.net or http://www.KerrieFlanagan.com.