Author Archives: Crystal Poor

About Crystal Poor

I am a crafty and creative woman who is interested in poetry, art, long walks on beaches, and poking dead things on beaches with a stick. I have in recent years graduated from The Evergreen State College, got married, and am leading a fairly productive life outside in the world I love. It isn't always rainbows and butterflies but it's a good life, and I will keep creating things for as long as I live.

Week 3 Log

April 15th

  • 2hrs reading

  • 2 hours  Monday class yoga session

April 16th

  • 3 hours working with photography/ getting acquainted with the new Photoshop

  • .5 hr – Reading and Responding to Seminar Passes

  • 1hr experimenting with sonnets

April 17th

  • 1hr self-meditation

  • 0.5 hrs free writing on meditation

  • 2hrs constructing poetry from abstract thoughts from med. and free writing

  • 2 hrs reading

April 18th

  • 5 hrs of reading

  • 1hr of writing


April 19th

  • 3 hrs of reading

  • 1hr of writing

  • 1hr of trip planning for next week


April 20th

  • 4 hrs reading

  • 2 hrs online research into ghost towns of WA, OR, and ID

  • .5 hours —Wordpress work

April 21st

  • .5 hour – Word Press Work

Totals

This week: 32hrs

Reading List:

  • Industrial ruins

  • Ruins

  • Meditation in a new york minute

  • Zen Master Raven

  • Guide to the ruins: poems  by Howard Nemerov

Gutted

 

Finding the calm between stones
And lost paths through forgotten streets
Humming for promise when alone
This is where her heart and pavement meet.

The shops are closed
The shelves all bare
Now memories superimposed
Are all that we can find there.

There’s no more sugar
And no more spice,
We’ve all but lost what
We thought of as “nice”

Broken Buick,
Gutted Dodge,
Sit pretty on the sideline
Next to yester years news.

Yet here is where she finds herself
Her cooing lullaby,
Is the silence
The stillness
She catches in her eye.

 

Memories and Apocalypse

 

My mind,

Stained with the scent

Of fallout vapor,

Incineration of the ideal,

 

The perfection of the

Synapses misappropriated

With age of Metamorphosis

And the reality is

Idyllic in its disintegration.

 

We long for what can never be,

What waits in the ruin,

Beneath the fallen monuments

The salvation of a race

Might be had.

A brief history of Hoquiam and Aberdeen

I was looking back and decided that It would be beneficial to post a short history of industry in Hoquiam and Aberdeen, with links to more in depth histories at the bottom so as to better understand some of the confines by which my poetry was crafted.

Hoquiam and Aberdeen are two small towns located in Grays Harbor County, WA. The predominant industry of the area has been that of Timber. As of recent years, with new forestry laws, the logging industry has suffered a massive decline in the area. With the closing of Weyerhaeuser (the most prominent lumber mill in the area) the over all prosperity of the area headed for a steep decline as unemployment rates on the harbor soared. Though this was not the first bust within the last decade or so. Lamb industries had closed it’s door just a few years before Weyerhaeuser, leaving a lot of machinists and other such laborers to be without job. Some found a temporary home at Weyerhaeuser, just to end up in the same predicament all over again. A few years after Weyerhaeuser closed, the paper mill eventually followed, leaving many more with out jobs. It has only been in the past two years that select parts of Weyerhaeuser and the Grays Harbor Paper Mill have been re-opened, but the damage to the area is already done. The jobless rate is sky high, and many people have long since left the area. It has pretty much become that those too poor to leave and those lucky enough to have a job that are left. Not many people actively choose to move here due to the lack of financial security that the harbor offers. It’s sad really, the area has so much potential.

I hope this helps a bit.

http://youtu.be/GmYb–ufczE

Links

photos from the slideshow pt1

Photos from the slideshow pt2

History of Hoquiam

History of Aberdeen

Weyerhaeuser Closes

More about Grays Harbor

 

R week 8 log

February 25th

  • 5hrs reading
  • 3hr writing and experimenting with different poetic formats

February 26th

  • 5hrs writing
  • 1hr – experimenting with html for presentation
  • 1hr with different freeware for video capture for poetry observed project

February 27th

  • 2 hrs rewriting and formulating a script for P.O proj.
  • 3 hrs of reading
  • 2hrs constructing poetry from abstract thoughts

 

February 28st

  • 1 hrs of reading
  • 5 hrs. of video recording and editing (freewear can be a pain)
  • 1hr of writing

March 1st

  • 5hrs of reading
  • 1hr more working out technical bugs!

March 2nd

  • 3hrs of writing

March 3rd

  • .5 hour – Word Press Work
  • 3 hours of final editing, filming, and bug fixing.

Totals

This week: 41.5hrs

Overall: 154 hrs

Reading List:

  • Industrial ruins
  • Reading in the Brain
  • Unoriginal Genius
  • The Poetics of Reverie
  • Ruins

R -Poetry Observed

Dreams of Digitial Ruination

 

Click, click,
{My memory}
Click, Click,

S
C
R
O
L
L

Click, click
Delete?

{So you want to delete that,
too bad,}

My mind is not silicon or circuitry,
but it dreams in digital,
html, css, binary, and flash flowers flow.

From my memory to code,
I become the web,
the intangible,
the fleeting,
and impermanent.

Quickly I am reduced to ruins by the next
update, catch me if you can.

I am the digital age
made flesh and blood by
fate and timing,
I am the foundation
that will inevitably crumble,
I will be lost to time,
but I’ve made my
mark,
I hit the target,
and I flew farther then
my predecessors thought
was possible,

I am the beginning of something more,
that surpasses time,
My memory lives on.

Week 8 Bachelard —Wheeler Ave.

Wheeler Ave.

Her wooden bones ache with the arthritis of
winters countless embraces, snuggled up
with the cobwebs and forgotten frames,
she’s become lonely in her old age.

If you take the time and talk with her
you‘ll soon come to find, that once upon
a time she had a family, cozy nights listening
to the radio while a summer breeze floating
through the back door.

She fights the Alzheimer’s
of her own existence.

Little Nowhere

Little Nowhere

Some times there is a hope in the rot,
Sometimes the roach is just another sign that we’re alive,
The frailty of ruined frames draw power
from ones own insecurities,
Shove it away,
Shove it away,
What makes them live?

Downward glances,
and unstable footing,
they reflect the instability of structure,
the town is lost in their eyes,
Why can’t they see through mine?
They could always just take them.
It’s not a lost cause!
It just can’t be,
as those in the bar proclaim
after being laid off yet again.

 

r- Week 7 log

February 18th

  • 4hrs reading
  • 1hr writing and experimenting with different poetic formats

February 19th

  • 5hrs in Aberdeen and Hoquiam +writing notes while there + photography
  • 1hr – Reading and Responding to Seminar Passes
  • 1hr experimenting with sonnets

February 20th

  • 2hr self-meditation “how am I a ruin?”
  • 0.5 hrs free writing on meditation
  • 2hrs constructing poetry from abstract thoughts from med. and free writing

 

February 21st

  • 1 hrs of reading
  • 5 hrs. Touring through the Hoquiam and Aberdeen area with Rhys + discussion of the area
  • 1hr of writing

February 22nd

  • 5hrs of reading
  • 1hr of writing

February 23rd

  • 3 hrs of experimenting with poetic forms
  • 2hrs of reading

February 24th

  • .5 hour – Word Press Work

Totals

This week: 35hrs

Reading List:

  • Industrial ruins
  • Reading in the Brain
  • Unoriginal Genius
  • The Poetics of Reverie
  • Ruins

“A Whole Vanished Universe” -R week 7 Bachalard

“A Whole Vanished Universe”

There is a certain smell that clings to these old places,
it isn’t something easily defined by word or rhyme
it is something particular to that time.
It evokes those secret places
that hide within the many faces
Hanging upon the wall. It would be a crime
to forget and so we remember one more time
all the haunts, the musty wood, the shoe leather, the loss of faces.

Cedar bones pile upon the shores
their smell seeping into the memories of an
old logging town, it’s in the blood now.
The heart that lies in these old stores
Wafts up and into the lungs where it began
a journey back, back to the sweat of brow.