Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
But first: I’m sad to say that Michael Twentythree, one of my friends and one of the most well-known figures in the Phoenix creative community, passed away unexpectedly last week. Michael and Joanna welcomed me into their creative spaces, the way they welcomed everyone into their creative spaces, but they also welcomed me into their many homes. Whether it was their own backyard for First Friday Night Live rehearsals, or the Firehouse when I lived in a bungalow next door, or Miami, Arizona, where the Twentythrees are also much-beloved personalities, they always extended kindness to me.
Michael leaves behind his wife and son. Please consider donating to cover his family’s expenses – he had just lost his insurance coverage before the abrupt health episode which ultimately took his life.
Thank you for any contributions. Let’s talk about poetry. After all, that’s how I got to know the Firehouse and Michael’s family in the first place.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
Hello! Thanks for being here! I’m sorry I wasn’t last week, due to sickness, but I’m feeling a lot better now and upright and writing away again.
While I was feverish, I watched A Chorus Line, which, unlike other movie-musicals of the era, is almost grim in its realism. I expected something more akin to All That Jazz, the 1979 Bob Fosse movie that made me scared to take Ambien because what if I hallucinate Pippin? But A Chorus Line is unwhimsical. There’s no dream ballet. There’s plenty of fantasy but it’s rendered in dialogue, with compassion but also with a resigned cynicism that feels contemporary. As a quick aside: they try to do some Flashdancey, totally-cool-eighties guitar riffs and stuff in the Chorus Line movie that simply DO NOT WORK.
Anyway. While I was sick, I desperately wanted to watch The Shining, and after being talked out of it, I settled on A Chorus Line, figuring it would be familiar but also new. Almost all of the fantastic elements in the movie are courtesy of neat mirror tricks. Characters multiply and transform and time-travel and have conversations with themselves in mirrors that reflect all manner of realities. And also, it makes the sequins look extra cool.
I love and fear mirrors. You’ll never catch me playing Bloody Mary or otherwise approaching a mirror at night. My vanity mirror reflects different images depending on where you are in my apartment. From my bed, it shows the bathroom doorframe (I keep the bathroom door closed at night so the mirror doesn’t show me a dark, scary room while I try to sleep). If you glance at my vanity from the living room, the mirror perfectly frames a large poster of the Virgin Mary that hangs in my room. The first time I discovered this, I was a little jump-scared.
I have another mirror in my bedroom, hanging on the wall, which is technically Halloween decor. I got it at Target. It’s a cheap cardboard-and-plastic mirror made to look like the moon. It isn’t practical, which I love. The way it’s situated, it can sometimes reflect what’s outside my window, so I see New York buildings and green trees reflected on the moon.
These are the thoughts that have all led to today’s exercise.
Exercise: Mirror Image
Gather your materials: a pen/paper or your computer, and a mirror. The size and type of mirror is up to you; different kinds will create different results. The only real criteria: it needs to be small enough that you can reposition it.
Take your mirror to a place where you’ll be able to sit and write, and rest it against a surface. It can look directly up at the sky. It can sit on a bookshelf. It can lean against a tree trunk or sit on the ledge of a building. Whatever.
Look into your mirror. What can you see? Describe the scene as it looks in the mirror, which might mean writing words in reverse, or talking about people driving down the left-hand side of the road. If you can see segments of something, only describe the segments. Don’t assume you really know what is outside the frame of the mirror. If your mirror reflects a different mirrored surface, if it creates a secondary mirrored world, you’re allowed to write about that, too.
Look into your mirror some more. What can’t you see? What is left out of frame? Treat the view inside your mirror as the only thing that really exists, and imagine what might be beyond it. You can be realistic, or not. If you are reflecting your mirror up at the sky, imagine what is out-of-frame and blowing the clouds across your mirror. If you have aimed your mirror at a part of your home, imagine a new version of your house that extends out from the mirror’s reflection.
Write a poem about this world – the world that exists in the mirror, and your imagination. You can be a “character” or entity in the poem, or you can just describe the world itself. If you want, look at yourself in the mirror, and try to write about your “mirror self” as a different person than your poet self.