Red Wheelbarrow Anthology

Showcasing the writing and visual art of UCSC.

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Writing Prompt

Write a story in which your main character struggles with their percieved identity through another individual’s perception of them. Think about how this character’s percieved perception of themselves and the perception of themselves through the other individual’s thoughts differ and how this might affect both your character and the individual that they are interacting with. Get creative! This can be in any medium that piques your interest, good luck!

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Writing Prompt

“Write a story that starts with the line “I don’t understand” 

The story must include at least three of the following: 

-thick fog

-a red, wool scarf

-the novel “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

-a bloody knife

- a shattered mirror

The story must include at least one of the following lines:

“When I finally stop, I am empty”

“I had never seen anything more beautiful and yet so...”

“And suddenly, she knew.” 

From there, feel free to get as creative as you want! This can be in any form, poetry, flash fiction, etc. as long as it tells some sort of story. Good luck!

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Creative Prompt

Produce a creative piece—in visual, written, or mixed media—that disturbs the process of consumption, either by making the piece formally difficult to read or capable of being read in multiple ways. Try experimenting with troubling or interesting methods of re-sequencing written elements, with spatial orientation and entry points for visual aspects of the work, or both.

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Creative Prompt

Produce a multimedia piece in whatever forms you prefer or find interesting. For example, make a collage mixing images and text, or produce a piece of writing responding to or interacting with a drawing or photograph.

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Creative Prompt

Do a few minutes of cursory research on quantum physics, then produce a piece that draws conceptual imagery from its basic or general principles to explore a topic of interest to you in concrete, material terms.

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Creative Prompt

In any medium, express your thoughts/feelings about the idea of flesh as something that both connects and separates us from one another.

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Book Review

In its variety and length, Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012) is a difficult book to encompass and consider in a summative view, but the reasons for this issues directly from what it has to offer. This is the case not only because it spans the poet’s entire career, but also because the tone and style developed over the course of the poet’s lifetime remains highly consistent throughout the book. Simply put, Gilbert works in a highly philosophical register and offers the reader a poetic project that engages profoundly with concepts of the massive and the microscopic, the eternal and the minimally fleeting, and all the ways they blend and meet.

As far as lessons of poetic influence go, Gilbert’s work is important and worth reading because of its development of a poetic mode that takes on those meeting points in a unique material relation to language. Throughout Collected Poems, he shows a stunning precision of structure and poetic design. When reading the poems, it takes little effort to imagine each word being read in a maddeningly glacial but rewardingly deliberate pace, as if each one were a boulder being lifted and placed gently down. They abound with metaphors that tie love, pain, and life’s ephemerality to felt concepts of weight, gravity, and infinity. In the process, the latter impart the former with a sense of incalculable importance. What is communicated often feels beyond processing rationally at all, but instead sinks into the body and soul in ways to be grasped slowly, only later. Stone, architecture, archaeology, ancient history, the soul, metaphysics, memory, the divine, a paradoxical sense of concrete transcendence—all of these form a difficult but pleasing conceptual vocabulary which distinguishes Gilbert and contributes to the collective poetic project as a whole. This conceptually heavy and formally intense style could, itself, be described, with the title of one of Gilbert’s poems, as a ”forgotten dialect of the heart,” or perhaps as an attempt at its rediscovery and reinvention in poetry.

As this line of description no doubt suggests, the ideas and feelings that course through Collected Poems are in some way conceptually abstract. It is impressive that, somehow, poems full of mechanistic language that often turn on notions of “explicating” or “translating,” and talk of “vocabularies,” “apparatuses,” architecture or superstructure, and “iteration,” remain affectively and perceptually urgent and genuinely human. This feat is, perhaps, what allows that sense of mechanism to become, clearly, language’s own. That, in Gilbert’s poems, language is language and poems are not reflections of the world but their own material substance and moment is both striking and exciting. This allows such formally weighty and unwieldy words to take on the vibrancy and liveliness of all the worldly details we encounter in the poems’ content. The ominously surreal and the genuinely emotional come together and lose distinction in such a “dialect,” making for a form of expression that imparts something precious and difficult. Gilbert’s poetry often feels philosophically cold or rigid yet also heady, both concrete and abstract, accessible at times and puzzling at others. But the reward of it rests in the space between the two—an obtuse statement of my own that only this book might require to be described well. A refreshing and challenging book to work through, Collected Poems calls for intermittent rereading, a great deal of thought, likely a great deal of one’s own writing, and a fine-tuned examination of its minute and singular components to even approach seeing its totality it all.

*As it is of a collected works, this review can, of course, be read as a recommendation for any of Gilbert’s books.

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Creative Prompt

Think back to when you were younger. Write about a moment in your childhood that has had a lasting impression on you.

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Creative Prompt

Beginning with A and ending with Z, write something composed of sentences that begin with each letter of the alphabet. Try it with your name. Or any name. Or any word at all.

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Weekly Update

At last, Red Wheelbarrow is sending the book to the printers! We are excited to get the book to all of you this month. We would all like to thank our contributors, donators, and supportive student peers for making this book possible.

But remember: though the book is finalized, you may always send us your work to be published on our blog! We review work sent to the blog on a rolling basis and we have a standing order for submissions. So send us your work to get it seen by Red Wheelbarrow's followers.

If you are interested in joining the Red Wheelbarrow staff for the coming school year, please send an email to ucscredwheelbarrow.gmail.com expressing your interest. All interested persons, regardless of discipline, are welcome!

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Creative Prompt

Make a list of five things you're afraid of happening to you. Then write a story in which one of them happens to your character...

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Book Excerpt - The Gunslinger by Remy Dixon

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Creative Prompt

In the medium of your choice, construct a portrait of the world around you. It can be as big or as small as you choose. Just be sure to consider that you are sharing this perspective with your intended audience.

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Creative Prompt

Produce a written or visual creative piece about people watching, its pleasures and discontents.

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Orange by Maria Ikonomou 

(http://marianicoleart.tumblr.com)

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Im Krebsgang by Mary Allen

"I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything."  -Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish

       “It’s like in this old, edgy French noir film I saw once,” he said, and I was only half listening, my nose pressed into the spine of a book; something about Germany’s post-WWII-guilt.

        “In this film,” he said, “there’s this couple on the top floor of their apartment building, uh, fucking.”

         My notes said Im Krebsgang, a novel by Günter Grass.  The title is defined by the author as “scuttling backward to move forward.” Next to the title I have drawn and arrow and in quotes, “scouring the wreckage of history for therapeutic insight.” Like some sort of collective, national PTSD.  I imagined a whole generation of young Germans moving backward toward a source of trauma they had no hand in creating.

         “And the whole building, you know, the whole apartment complex, they can hear it. Not them exactly, but, the rhythm, you know, of them fucking, on their very squeaky mattress.”

          A few days later I would google “Im Krebsgang” and find the english translation, crabwalk.  I think of being a small child on my hands and feet, tummy facing up toward the sky, scuttling backward across the asphalt of my elementary school’s playground, head tilted back so I could see the world flipped over.

         “And so,” he continued, “the camera in this film pans to all of the different floors of this building, and everyone is doing things in that rhythm.  Some guy vacuuming, a lady chopping carrots, a mother rocking her baby to sleep - all to the same rhythm of this couple on the top floor, getting it on.”  He grinned and giggled.  I laughed along with him, tuning into the broken air vents of the library cooling system thud-thud-thudding along, a firm, steady pounding permeating every other noise in the building. It was a pattern we loved because it kept us moving. And as long as I saw him in the library, worked with him behind the desk, we kept to that rhythm.  Me and him and everyone and everything and always thud-thud-thudding along to the beat from the ceiling above.  

           When I think about Im Krebsgang, I think about crabs moving backward to move on, never knowing the way the world might seem if they could just turn around.  And I have been a crab since the morning I found out about how his shell was cracked wide open by a sleepy driver on the highway and whenever it was I saw him last, maybe it was a Tuesday, that would be the last time. And I scuttle back into my memory trying to think of the last thing he said to me and I can never ever find it, but every time I hear the broken thud-thud-thudding air vents in the library, all I can think of is him.

           But the thing is, when his shell broke open and his time scuttling backward was over for good, forever, all at once he became everything I have for so long desired to be.   He was no longer a crab, but a fish floating freely in the deep water, watching the waves crash upon the shore like lovers’ lips in the dark; sudden and violent, yet predictable.  The foam from the wave consumed every creature, every crab like me, every grain of sand and scattered us just slightly.  And for just a moment, everything looked just the same as everything had always looked. But it was not the same.  Never had the shore been arranged as it was in that moment, and never would it be placed in such a way ever again.  And this was beautiful and this was perfect and this was right because this was the only way it could be.  And surely it would change again with the next steady crash but that was somewhere way off in the distance that no one could manage to see. That was all there was and all there would ever be, and that was just fine.  And maybe he is out there watching; bobbing gently to the rhythms that keep sweeping us away.

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Creative Prompt

Produce a written or visual creative piece that nontraditionally, critically, or humorously plays with and reexamines the concept of God(s) in a way you relate to or find interesting.