OctPoWriMo 2023:Facing Our Fears
Arachnophobia: It was kind of funny during the second week of ModPo during office hours, I found that all the poems were about spiders. For today’s poem, write a response to one of the poems below. You can reply to it in any way you would like. Do you agree with it, disagree, have something to add? Maybe you want to talk to the spider in the poem, let it know how you feel.
“Alone and in a Circumstance”
by Emily Dickinson
Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled
And so much more at Home than I
Immediately grew
I felt myself a visitor
And hurriedly withdrew —
Revisiting my late abode
with articles of claim
I found it quietly assumed
as a Gymnasium
Where Tax asleep and Title off
The inmates of the Air
Perpetual presumption took
As each were special Heir –
If any strike me on the street
I can return the Blow —
If any take my property
According to the Law
The Statute is my Learned friend
But what redress can be
For an offence not here nor there
So not in Equity —
That Larceny of time and mind
The marrow of the Day
By spider, or forbid it Lord
That I should specify —
(copied from ModPo)
A Noiseless Patient Spider
By Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
(copied from Poetry Foundation)
Tattoo
by Wallace Stevens
The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there–
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.
It may be fun to respond to one of the poems copying the form of one of the others. Or you could respond to the poem in the form of a Golden Shovel. In Terrance Hayes’s poem “Golden Shovel” which was the first golden shovel poem, he used Gwendolyn Brooks’s entire poem “We Real Cool” for the ending words of each line. You may want to choose just a line or two from the poem you choose.
Writober 2023
Today’s image prompt could be seen as a UFO cliché, but is it? What else could be happening? And who’s that guy just sanding there with his hands in his pockets?
Halloween Photography Challenge
Please link to your creations in the comments. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Of course the perfect peril for today is Arachnophobia from 1990. It stars Jeff Daniels and John Goodman and was directed by Frank Marshall. A fun scary spider movie for those who do not have arachnophobia. Or, for those of you who like those creature movies that are so bad they’re funny, there’s always Ice Spiders. Because when I think giant spiders, I think ski movie. 🎃
Experience Writing 
Laura De Bernardi
Flies in Webs
It was love at first sight, some years back
Struck by the eye of the blackbird –
Wallace Stevens in full flight.
But now some of that love is fading
Reading his “Tattoo” – finding it fanciful
Striving a little too hard for effect.
The light is like a spider
Crawling here and there, he said.
No, the spider spins a web to catch
A fly, whereas light does no such thing.
Light, these days, there’s way too much of it.
Lights shining on Russia/Ukraine, on Israel/Gaza.
I am considering war Mr Wallace, which you
Did not do, back then in 1916, why?
People were dying, are dying
Likes flies, trapped, dying of starvation
Snuffed out, needing you, then, now
To tell the story of the why.
Not offer me harmonics of words
However pleasing, it’s not enough
Now, my love is fading now.
Wanting another kind of poetry now,
That speaks to me of my life now
Caught in webs, spinning out of control.
Mourning you, mourning those who
Will not see another morning
Mourning the light of morning.
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I really liked the turn in your poem with “Light these days, there’s way to much of it.” Surprising, and you took it to an unexpected place.
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Thanks, Maria, all your comments are much appreciated – you offer a few words – but the right words – prompting me to try again.
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