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.

White-Walls Tale

I  walk beneath the halls of old
and in due time I felt as though
the world above was as below,
yet I could not see the truth be told
past all the gloom and all the mold.
She is a vision from a long time ago,
all fairy dust and sunset glow,
yet she is not worth her weight in gold.

She is goddess broken,
earthen vessel cracked and torn,
a ship wrecked upon the shore,
stone heart delicate and soft spoken,
her face and eyes well worn
her dreams diminish into folklore.

R-Log week 6

Crystal Muns
Week 6 log

Feb 11

  • 5 hours reading
  • 3 hours writing


Feb 12

  • 6 hours reading
  • 1.5 hashing out thoughts in journal


Feb 13

  • 3 hours in Montesano (day time)
  • 1 hour writing
  • 4 hours reading


Feb 14

  • 3 hours of reading


Feb 15

  • 4.5 hours in Hoquiam (derive) + Note taking
  • 1.5 hours writing
  • 2 hours reading
  • 2 hour researching things in my not-knowing notebook that pertain to my reading


Feb 16

  • 4 hours reading


Total hours this week:  40.5

Readings this week:

  1. Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art
  2. Industrial Ruins
  3. The Origin of the Urban Crisis

Hope in the Ruins —Bachelardian reverie #2

I come from broken buildings
all crumpled over in despair.
I come from penniless pockets
and broken dreams, It’s a hard
round world, constant infinity,
the you is I,
and I is U
and we are nowhere near
a true end.

The world is broken, bruised an
fair. She is that porcelain vase that
all to unwittingly we break,
yet still life continues.

Nature claims what
we lay wasted, she puts
to use the weak and weary walls
and soon they too are the womb of
life, they thought they would never be.

We are the ruins of
this modernity, we too
can be reborn, the
stones are not alone
and neither are we.

I suppose,
what I’m getting at
would be that.

From ruination comes new life,

So lick the ruins and don’t think twice.

La Vogue’s

You’ve come a long way
from the pet roaches behind the table
there in back, where they hissed in their tank
and the scent of damp wood clung to our nostrils.

You’ve come a long way
from gigs that brought the ceiling down
on  70’s garb and silly teenagers
experiencing a music “scene” for the first time.

There are no more flannel shirts, or western boots
or kindly old men talking through mush-mouthed words
that only our father seemed to understand. Those days
are gone much like our childhood,

yet still…..

you’ve come a long way and at least you’re still standing.
They won’t kill you off like your neighbor who burnt down behind your eyes.
No,You’re made of tougher things then that, and
you have a way about you that charms,
rather than repels.

You’ve dressed in new attire now,

The old memories are here,
your bones are still yours,
though you seem to have a new addiction,
to caffeine and the bean.

Heart of Decay

These streets are narrow leading

me on to the gates of heaven or hell,

(It is what you make of it)

and decasia slips through

the floor boards, trickling onto

my toes and pouring into the

hole within my heart.

 

“Creee-eee-k”, the doors swing wide,

I stumble in the darkness feeling round

for the familiarity of wooden panel or

switch,

…..useless.

My senses refocus, and sihloets begin

to appear in the night only to be whisked

away from me by the harsh glare of

the flashlight coming to life for the

flicker of an instant, only to be snuffed

out like the flames it impersonates.

Drift on in this mildewed dream,

and try telling me that there is any

other way of being as natual

as the fall from grace, and the

return to nature.

R week 5 Bachelardian Reverie

Ungendered

The Femininity of words,

is lost on the trickling of the brook,

which can be defiled of lifted up

by her opposite.

 

Scilence! the gender doesn’t matter

It’s how you frame the picture, be it

by candle and moon light, with a dust of rose,

or a cold unfeeling corridor leading

to the masters study.

 

Apollo and Aphrodite,

conflict upon the page,

all that they stand for: the follies

of men, and the desire’s of women,

sensual and soft.

 

Taking a step back through the mirror though,

I find myself (silly american), honched over text

ungendered, I find myself at a loss to make the

earth and the sky wed like the french would have them,

instead they sit on the page, two things with

a lack of love between them.

 

I can not make the words undergo a shot-gun wedding,

nor can I force them to just jump off a cliff together, with

the hopes that maybe at the bottom they’d merge,

Word don’t work like that.

 

Words,

Sun and moon. Night and day.

fire and Ice. girl and boy.

Sol y Luna, Noche y día,

fuego y hielo, chica y chico.

Funny how the gentle man

barges through the door before

the lady has a chance to take

even the first step.

 

 

R week 5 log

February 4th

2 hours – Yoga/peer review @ Evergreen
2 hours – Reading the book Ruins
1 hours – Writing

February 5th

3 hours – derive to downtown Aberdeen -taking pictures of old structures along the waterfront    and chatting with other locals, and taking notes.

1 hour – writing about experience in town/ crafting half designed poems……needs more tweaking.

2 hours- reading

February 6th

4 hours reading

1 hour writing in journal

2 hours of online research into other ruins and urban wildscapes

February 7th

5 hours of derive and giving a tour of downtown Aberdeen

February 8th

3 hours reading

4 hours of Night time derive in Montesano + note taking + photography

2 hours of writing/editing

February 9th

3 hours of reading

2 hours of writing/editing

Totals

This week: 37

Cumulative total: ?

Reading List:

  • Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art
  • Disturbing Structure: Reading the Ruin by Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell
  • Urban Wildscapes by Jorgensen, Anna, Keenan, Richard

R is for Ruin

Winter

Field Study Proposal

On this one month long feild study titled R is for Ruins, I will be taking an in depth look into what it means to be in a state of ruin or be in ruinicity. This means that I will be taking a good hard look at not only our conventional concept of ruins but I will be looking at society, culture, art, and self as a ruin or in the process of being in ruins. I plan to look at multiple texts but two titles that will be following me will be the book called Urban Wildscapes and another titled Industrial Ruins. I plan to incorporate poetry and artistic mediums in order to convey the ruination of Grays Harbor County, with a few situations or in depth looks into similar cases of ruination.

 

ABCs and 123s – weekly log and field notes

[catlist tags=r-logs date=yes excerpt=yes excerpt_size=30]

Bachelardian Reverie

[catlist tags=r-bachelard date=yes excerpt=yes excerpt_size=30]

Poetry

[catlist tags=r-poetry excerpt=yes excerpt_size=30]

Poetry Observed

 

Term Paper Abstract

Read full term paper

 

R – Practice weekly log post

“If in the late twentieth century, as Lyotard has claimed, architecture and philosophy lie in ruins, leaving us only with the option of a ‘writing of the ruins’ as a kind of micrology, then the question arises whether the tradition of modernist thought all the way into postmodernism is overshadowed by the catastrophic imagination and imaginary of ruins that has accompanied the trajectory of modernity since the eighteenth century.”       ~Andreas Huyssen

A thought provoking quote for the day.