It all began with a tweet. A gauntlet thrown my direction, picked up in a moment of weakness: boredom. Who can resist the lure of a challenge when they're bored?
After all, I once wrote a sonnet about roadkill. I'm down with an ode to cheese. When I was a kid, my parents owned a store in Daytona Beach: The Cheese Shoppe. My hastily penned poem might stink like yesterday's Limburger smeared on an old fashioned radiator, but how could I resist it? It'll pair nicely with that other sonnet.
Feel Free to Dis a Brie, But I Think It's Gouda'nuff!
It began as a sonnet on cheddar But a Limburger Limerick is better And there's nothing to lose When singing the bleus - If a lady would sing, you should let her.
Okay, that's not "beautiful." Let's try this again, with a purely autobiographical sonnet.
Cheese Wheel of Life
"I've a craving," I said, "Grilled Havarti on rye, With horseradish--a copious slather!" "But we've just finished dinner," he said, with a sigh. "Chocolate cake!" he said. "Wouldn't you rather--?"
"Well, I might, but we wouldn't," I said, with a wink, Looking down at my over-large belly. And that's when I brought proud Papa to the brink: "Blue cheese! Habanero! And jelly!"
"Gorgonzola?" he asked. "Chocolate and chips?" I nodded and grinned my unbridled delight. "With mangoes and brie? From your ears to my lips!" We danced through the groceries all night.
Now we are three, and oh, sweet Baby Bel-- What pairs well with strained carrots and white zinfandel?
I thought that this might be an excellent exercise for young writers and novice poets, as well as those who are more experienced. As the prompt says, you can use your own, very real back yard - or the one that exists only in your imagination.
First, observe and take inventory.
What does your "back yard" look like? It doesn't have to be a yard, and it doesn't have to be real. It could be the view from your window, if you are an apartment dweller. Maybe it's a community garden. Maybe it's the back yard you'd like to have, some day. Maybe it's the back yard you have today - and the one you'd like to have, some day. Let's take inventory. Write notes and take photos; don't just trust to memory. Mine looks something like this:
There's a ladybug, rescued from a little birdbath in the back yard. She was surrounded by debris, but when I put my finger in the water, her tiny legs began to wriggle. I left her to recover in the shade of the Daikon leaves, in my vegetable garden, where she is protected from birds. Not pictured, but seen within the past few days: crab-like orb-weaver spiders, praying mantises, and a scoliida wasp with blue-black wings and a blood-red body, frantically darting from one squash blossom to the next. Its nest appears to be in the bell at the top of our wind chimes. Perhaps not the wisest or calmest place to start a home.
There's a nice green compost bin, and a holding pen full of brown leaves my husband's collected, that will eventually be mixed into the green scraps. Herman the dog-vomit slime slime mold lives inside the green bin, and now sleeps in the rich soil of my vegetable garden, where he feasts on dead and decaying things.
That raised veggie garden has been a learning experience, and there is a corner garden that is more wild than not - with volunteer holly bushes, crepe myrtles, and a plethora of spider plants and canna lilies that have crept under our fence from the neighbors' back yard.
There are tall trees that shade us and saplings that try to reach the sun through the dappled shade cast by live oaks and Bradford pears.
There is also a sundial and an area laid out with blue rubber tiles to be an outdoor exercise and play area. Because this is a recent project, there are scraps of wood, rocks, glue, and bags of sand and concrete laid around the patio.
This is all visual information.
Pay attention to all five senses!
What do you hear? Birdsong, a lawnmower, children playing on the other side of the fence? A garbage truck, perhaps. A leaf-blower. Cars. A summer breeze, tickling the windchimes. Waking up the scoliid wasp, maybe.
What do you smell? Flowers, compost, petrichor. Earth. Freshly rained on? Or parched?
What do you taste? I pulled a few of the Daikons from the garden - they were in desperate need of thinning. I couldn't resist rinsing one off with water from the outdoor garden hose and biting into that underripe and slightly-too-bitter crunch. A basil leaf. A pinch of fresh oregano.
What do you feel? Focus on touch, not emotion. Did you wander the back yard barefoot? I can't, these days - well, I risk a foot full of pricklers from the carpet of weeds that winds its way through the grass, if I do. Still, barefoot girl that I am, at heart, I do risk it. I hop from one sun-warmed paving stone to another, avoiding the pricklers and the river rocks, the bits of broken stone. I let my toes sink into the cool, soft dirt while I try not to think of what might be wriggling underfoot. I dig in a mud puddle with a stick and transfer an earthworm to the garden, marveling at how fast they are when they're trying to get away.
What symbols or themes begin to emerge?
Glancing through what I've written, I see a whole ecosystem. But unless I want to write an epic poem, I may try to narrow my focus to something like "birth" and "death" - how new life emerges and is nourished by the old, the dying; how it breaks down and builds up before becoming part of the cycle, itself. That may lead outside the garden, into the philosophical. Sometimes, a "back yard poem" strays from the back yard and explores uncharted territory. Follow where your thoughts lead.
Or I may focus on something even smaller.
Sunny and yellow Herman, Eukaryotic, Greets the squash blossoms.
Silly little Haiku! But it's a start. Start small; start big. They key is to start.
Elegy at the Bird Bath
Lady, who told you you could swim? You were meant to fly; Not to float upon your own reflection Waiting for a clever robin, Or a hungry, ill-tempered jay To pluck you from the placid pool - Cool on a bright, June morning - To pick you, all blushing red And speckle-freckled For their breakfast appetizer.
Lady, you were meant to bring me luck. To dine, yourself, on sweet little aphids. Oh, how they rejoice at your downfall! But Heaven helps those who pray for their prey - The mantis exacts swift vengeance, Leaving the summer squash un-nibbled. And I have pre-empted the robin's repast - A wriggling earthworm, uprooted, Dumped beneath the Daikons, unaware Of criss-cross shadows, a netted sky, Shielding it from the watchful jay.
Now, it's your turn. Please give this a try, then share your poems in a comment or link to one in your own blog. I look forward to reading yours, too!
Absolutes: we deal in
Black and white.
Color – once vibrant – now
Dimmed to dull gray
Effluence – our
Flaws flowing, fulgent –
Garish graffiti on our souls.
Have mercy.
It’s ironic:
Justice, blind, can’t see
Keenly how, by their absence,
Lacunae have tipped the scales –
Making chaos out of order.
Not till the eleventh hour – Ostensibly, too late –
Practically past all hope,
Questioning the who, what, where, and why of it
Restores her sight, and now
Shows clearly how
Tenacious tendrils of apathy
Unseen, like dandelion roots or
Varicose vines,
Wrap around the wooden heart –
Xylophagus. Rot, in the end, reduced to
Zero.
Let me make it very clear from the start: I appreciate it when friends fact-check what I post. I don’t appreciate long, drawn-out, circular, unproductive “political debates” with people who think politics is a sport, but I do appreciate friends who keep me honest on those rare occasions when I post utter rubbish on Facebook. It happens to us all, sometimes.
Assuming we’re breathing.
A few days ago, I posted a link – a direct link to a primary source of information – Donald Trump, Jr’s own tweet that so comically led people to mock him for calling Governor Abbott a Democrat. Governor Abbott, as any Texan knows, is not a Democrat. He’s not much of a governor, either, but that’s not the issue right now. Here’s the original tweet, in Donald Trump, Jr’s own words (I’m including the image for those who don’t have Twitter, and if you click on it – assuming he hasn’t deleted it – it will take you straight to the original source.)
I live in Texas. I’d love to see Ted Cruz resign; he’s a disgrace. Wanting to “cancel” Ted Cruz shouldn’t even be a partisan matter at this point, and he should be thoroughly investigated for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Three major Texas newspapers have called for Ted Cruz to resign.
Texans died during the winter storm and massive power grid failures in February. Texas Republicans and Democrats were fairly united on one thing: They were not impressed when Cruz fled the disaster area to the warmer climate of Cancun, Mexico. They weren’t impressed when he tried to blame his poor judgment on his 10 and 12 year old daughters, claiming he was “trying to be a good dad” by taking them to Cancun during a school break. They were even less impressed when his wife’s texts, complaining of the bitter cold and inviting friends to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, at just $309 a night, were “leaked” by a friend. Apparently, no one wanted to be seen traveling with them during the pandemic.
Anyway… here’s where the “fact checkers” come in: They marked my post “partly false.”
It’s important to understand that the only thing I wrote was a sarcastic, “Who knew Gov. Abbott was a Democrat?” as an intro, with a direct link to Donald Trump, Jr’s own tweet. I certainly did not claim that Governor Abbott was a Democrat. And I only linked to Donald Trump, Jr’s own words. I’ll cop to sarcasm and snark, here, but not to lying:
So, how is this “partly false”? Here’s what they have to say, when you click “See Why”:
Had I written a whole news article claiming that Donald Trump, Jr was an idiot who truly believed that Governor Abbott was a Democrat, as opposed to being an angry weasel who cannot write a proper sentence and shouldn’t be allowed to wield an apostrophe, then I could see their point, too. I certainly wouldn’t argue that Donald Trump, Jr. was an eloquent rhetorician who brilliantly expressed what he was trying to say in his tweet. I also wouldn’t argue, as some have uncharitably done, that he looked high when he posted it. He clearly needs the likes of writer Alexis Tereszcuk to decipher for us mere mortals what he was trying, inadequately, to say.
But apparently, it’s not my annoyance over his laughable ineptitude and misuse of the English language that bothered the “independent fact checkers” Facebook uses. It is mind-bogglingly weird that they seem to be fact-checking Donald Trump, Jr’s own tweet, in his own words, to say that he didn’t mean to say what he clearly said and still hasn’t bothered to delete.
I’m assuming he’s allowed to delete his own tweets? He is a private citizen, right – not a government official using Twitter to conduct official business, as his father and so many other politicians seem to think is appropriate? He could say, like Britney Spears, “Ooops, I did it again!” and write whatever the hell it was he actually meant to write. That is, if he didn’t mean to write what he did write, rather than…
It’s like one of those Escher drawings.
I sent in an appeal, but only as a matter of principle. I told Lead Stories that I truly don’t care if they ever remove the “False Information” overlay – it’s funnier this way, and highlights the inadequacies of social media’s attempts at automated content moderation. I would applaud their efforts, but there is still so much truly dangerous misinformation being spread online about COVID19, so much racist, misogynistic, hate-filled garbage, so many fake and fraudulent accounts, so many bait-and-switch advertisers – just so many other, more important things that Facebook deliberately ignores despite repeated reports, that I wrote, “it calls the credibility and worthiness of your own efforts into question, when there is so much more false information on Facebook, dangerously misleading bunk on Facebook, that I submit reports on, and am told, “This does not violate our Community Standards.”
I was blogging when Blogger, co-founded by Medium’s founder, Ev Williams, was still a baby. You might say that I’ve come full circle. You’ll see, in a moment, how little has changed in the past two decades.
Blogging in the “Olden Days”: A reflection on how things have changed in 15 years of blogging
There Are Adults Who Haven’t Been Alive as Long as I’ve Been Blogging
One of my first blog posts was me trying to define what the heck “blogging” was — I didn’t imagine anyone else would read it, and no one knew back then that “the Internet is forever.”
At some point, before the term “vanity surfing” was coined, I searched for my own name and found a mention in The Hindustan Times, where my definition of blogging was quoted and I was referred to as a “veteran blogger.” Once I stopped laughing and realized what a venerable publication that really was, and not some little fly-by-night website like my own, I was stunned. I wrote to their tech columnist, Deepak Mankar, and confessed to him that I was anything but a veteran blogger, but thanked him for the compliment of quoting me in the newspaper and calling me one.
Neither of us can find that clip, now — but at least I made a friend!
Before There Was Blogging
Mark Zuckerberg did not invent “social media.”
My first online chat happened on CompuServe in 1981, and by 1989, I was working as an unpaid moderator (SysOp) on GEnie. The Writers’ Ink RoundTable — the first to “hire” me — had a forum, a chat room, and a place to store files. I’d say it was at least as much of a “social network” as any overcrowded, contentious platform we think of as such, today. And somewhere in between, there were independent little user-run “bulletin boards” (BBSes) that had chats, online games, and more. Your parents weren’t running around with the dinosaurs, kids.
GEnie LiveWire Magazine
I See Dead Trees
In the early days of the commercial Internet (around 1994–2002), there were printed directories of websites, categorized like the Yellow Pages, and sold in brick and mortar bookstores. I had no idea, until tonight, that I was featured in one of them!
From Writer’s Internet Sourcebook, by Levin, Michael Graubart (1997)
My first website, Scraps & Scribbles, or The Writer’s Corner, was a writing site. It was, as the book above says, “a list of links.” I only started it because I wanted to learn HTML, and all the websites back in 1994 or so consisted of rudimentary lists of programmers’ CD collections. That seemed awfully boring, so I focused on what I knew and started a writing site. There weren’t many, back then. But let me tell you in my own words —from nearly 20 years ago:
Tuesday, April 17, 2001
A Short History of Scraps & Scribbles
When I first started Scraps & Scribbles (originally called The Writers Corner), several years ago*, my main goal was to learn HTML. That didn’t seem like reason enough to add clutter to the Internet, and I couldn’t see me doing another one of those “Hello world, this is me, isn’t my CD collection just the kewlest?” personal home pages.
I was determined, from the start, to provide links to some of the best writing resources on the Internet — not just to collections of other people’s favorite links, but to sites containing primary content of interest to writers and readers.
Turned out to be a fairly time-consuming endeavor. And there weren’t 50 gazillion writers’ sites on the Internet then, as there are now. Just finding some of them proved to be a daunting task.
Always, tucked into a deep corner in the back of my mind, was this nagging feeling that some of that “primary content” really ought to be written by me. The other nagging feeling, not quite relegated to that dark corner of the mental basement, was that I was already spending too much time online! (Anyone here remember the movie, “The Beast in the Cellar”?) Anyway…
Flash forward to January 2001. I discovered two “new” things to play around with, and threw myself into them with zeal. The first was the “pay-per-click” writing sites, like Epinions and Themestream. I wouldn’t have found Themestream, if not for the fact that Epinions temporarily shut down while their site was being redesigned.
Don’t ask me what’s addictive about writing for a site that pays a measly $.02 or less each time someone reads your work. Even though technically it’s worth less than a token payment, like contributor’s copies of a print anthology, it’s money. Legal tender. In four months and 40+ articles, I earned a whole hour’s wages. (I do write for a living.) I’ll never see a penny of it, either. Themestream sent out an announcement last week, saying that the company would cease operations on Friday the 13th (how appropriate) and that it would be highly unlikely that they would be able to pay all their creditors — or their contributors.
But you know what? Thanks in part to Themestream, I finally put my money where my mouth was, got off my duff, and started writing something besides user’s guides — and now I’m able to move most of those articles to my own Web site. I finally have some of that primary content, not just great links, and it’s mine!
The second thing I discovered to play with on the Internet was Weblogs (like this one!). nPorta’s Logs (www.nporta.com) are probably the easiest and fastest to set up and maintain. And they’re easy to change or delete, as well.
Two others are more robust, but these are sites dedicated to “blogging” and don’t offer the same useful, customizable news features, or the handheld/wireless-friendly design offered by nPorta.
Blogger (www.blogger.com) and Xanga (www.xanga.com) are definitely worth a look. I would recommend Blogger to anyone who wants to integrate their log into their own personal Web site (and has FTP access to upload and download their own files). I would suggest Xanga for anyone who might want to set up a free Web site or log but who doesn’t necessarily want to become an HTML guru in the process. Here are some samples, if you’re curious: my Blogger page, integrated into Scraps & Scribbles (http://users.ev1.net/~hjahangiri/blog/dayjournal.html) and my Xanga page (not integrated into the Scraps & Scribbles site, but linking to it; http://www.xanga.com/HollyJahangiri)
I Am NOT a Publisher!
So don’t ask me to publish your writing on my site. I’d be delighted to do it, but I can live without all the potential legal complications.
I will, however, add links to other people’s writing sites. If you send me an email with the subject:
LINK for Scraps and Scribbles
I will add a link to your site, provided:
(a) You include your name, email address, URL, and a brief description (no more than 3–5 lines) of your work; and
(b) Your content is not inappropriate (pornographic, hate-mongering, racist, scatological, etc.) Mild erotica, strong opinions (clearly stated as your own and not argued with specious logic), diverse political/religious views, and such are, of course, fine.
* Scraps & Scribbles has been around, in one form or another, since 1994. Debbie Ridpath Ohi (whom I met in GEnie’s Writer’s Ink RoundTable a couple of years before that) was just beginning to build Inkspot into the deservedly popular writers’ site it was soon to become; and her site was one of the very first links added to mine.
Not much has changed, has it?
I may even have found that definition of a weblog that earned me a mention in The Hindustan Times:
What, you ask, is a Weblog? A Weblog might be a virtual journal, a daily news update, a group’s bulletin board, or a feature of a Web site. You’re reading a Weblog right now; I use it to post update notices and other tidbits to Scraps & Scribbles, and I can do it from any PC that’s connected to the Internet, any time. This Weblog was created using Blogger (www.blogger.com). Blogger lets me create and use my own template, so that my Weblog can be seamlessly integrated into my own Web site. I’m not forced to use someone else’s idea of a cool layout; every element is under my control. I can archive messages, too.
I was lazy; I just wanted a way to update the contents of my website without having to log in, download and edit pages, save and re-upload them — there had to be a better way. And that was what I found appealing about Blogger. I could integrate it into my own website, with a little effort, and then update things on the fly, from anywhere.
And while I was working, full-time, as a technical writer, designing Windows Help for PCs, and teaching others how to code HTML, other writers moved in and dominated this writing “niche.” Now in 2020, the whole topic of “writing” is so broad that it’s no longer a niche at all, and doesn’t even count as a topic on some websites and indices. We’re all writers, now; writing about writing is so “meta.” But I digress.
Back in the Olden Days
Once upon a time, we had “web rings.” These were little bits of code people set up that would act as Previous and Next buttons, but instead of taking you to the next post or page in the blog, Next would take you to the next site in the ring. This is how we turned blogging “social.”
What Ever Happened To Webrings?
Once upon a time, we had “web rings.” These were little bits of code people set up that would act as Previous and Next buttons, but instead of taking you to the next post or page in the blog, Next would take you to the next site in the ring. This is how we turned blogging “social.”
And then there were “blogrolls.” I kept asking developers to make mine cinnamon with extra vanilla icing, but they just rolled their eyes and tried to explain that’s not what a “blogroll” meant.
Sometimes, it’s fun to play dumb. Till someone believes you are.
Rules, Rules — We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Rules!
Sharon Hurley Hall wrote, of blogging in the "olden days," “We were excited about this new way of sharing our writing and we blogged regularly. There were no rules about how long posts should be or what should be included. There were no images, for the most part. It was just you, your words, and your fellow bloggers.”
Except that’s not how I remember it. Some of us were excited about this new frontier and its lack of rules, but others were excited to invent and pontificate at length about what the rules of blogging were, or ought to be. It was almost as if they had nothing else to write about, so they had to tell everyone else how not to write. I have criticized and satirized these early “listicles” to death, and I urge you to hold fast to the notion that there ought not to be any rules but good writing.
By “good writing,” I simply mean “that which does not bore the reader to tears and make them beg for death.”
The Internet is full of some of the laziest people I’ve ever run across. They seem to honestly believe that they can earn money doing absolutely nothing — or by “blogging,” but their definition of it is not Sharon’s or mine, and doesn’t involve writing original material. It means using cheap software and tricks to scrape and spin other people’s content, sell ad space, and earn revenues by getting all their friends to click on the ads.
It means shoveling half that cash back into someone else’s $497 web training program on how to do it faster and better.
Or, maybe, they actually did believe they could get rich quick by blogging, and this is why there are 15,973,456,002,009 abandoned blogs and disillusioned former bloggers working in retail and claiming that “blogging is dead.”
Blogging makes great business sense if you have a product to sell and plenty to say about that product. If the product is paper, maybe you write about sustainable forestry or less stinky methods of producing paper products. If you’re selling antivirus software, you’ll never run out of cybersecurity topics to write about. But you do need to be an expert, or hire an excellent freelance writer like Sharon Hurley Hall who understands enough about the topic to write credibly about it, or you’ll just end up looking foolish.
We all know by now, surely, that only a small percentage of writers get filthy rich, and none of them do it in their sleep. But those folks who keep on churning out crap like, “I Made $34,982 on My Last Medium Story, and You Can, Too!” are just getting rich off P.T. Barnum’s “suckers.”
In the end, though, those of us who started out blogging for the fun of it, or just to enjoy honing our writing skills on topics of our own choosing, will still be around. Medium feels like that “old school blogging.” There is a community, here, comprised of writers who support and care about one another as people.
