Splashing with a Sea-bourne Spirit

A Splash from the sea into these halls brought along a survivor called Rebecka Stock, a.k.a. Seabourne. A wonderful tête-à-tête with this strong, lyrical poetess is an amazing insight into the spirit of what is commonly called the human race. A long battle, a victory in verse. Join me as we celebrate Life with Seabourne, at this wonderful poetry community called SplashHall.

Soft Words:What winds blew you to SplashHall?
Seabourne: I was lucky enough to meet Deb in person, was brave enough to show her my work and it is due to her encouragement that I came and will stay. Even if I despair of ever writing the way Dublin steve does, even if I do tend to write unmetered stuff that rhymes.

Soft Words:What keeps you here?
Seabourne: The people here are just great. I get somewhat protective of my stuff, but the people who post here are so wonderful they can step on my toes anytime.

Soft Words:Your favorite forum(s)?
Seabourne: I really like the Ax. There’s nothing better then unmasked criticism. There’s nothing wrong with unmasked admiration either.

Soft Words:Your favorite Splashers?
Seabourne: Well that would be a flat even draw between Arti and Lady Sunshine.

Soft Words:When did you start writing?
Seabourne: When I retired due to Parkinson’s disease from University of Missouri. I was project leader for direct patient care applications (2000).

Soft Words:How much do you use the Ax? How much has the Ax helped you?
Seabourne: As I said the Ax is remarkable. Sometimes it feels like the people are getting too personal, which bothers me... The whole point of this country was to have the right to disagree. So why does everyone think their way is the only way?
I think only the writing should be critiqued. I have also discovered that I often need a translator. I remember when my sister found out I had taken a job for the university as a programmer. She asked,” Are there any other people who work with you?" I responded, “Yes." She said “Good I'm glad you’ll have someone who can understand what you are saying. As for me, while i recognize your words as English, that’s all the understanding I have."
I know I’m not in the same poetic wave as many of you are, but I have discovered that people like it! Well maybe not in the Ax but then I’m not posting there to feel good, I want to know how it can be Perfect! ( the big problem is there’s different versions of perfect for each person)

Soft Words:What reading would you recommend?
Seabourne: Well, let me tell you a short story about my mother, a librarian-English teacher in an inner city school. One of her students came to her and asked her for the meaning of a word. She said ok, i'll tell you but you have to look it up and tell me if i;'m right. The student agreed and looked at her with admiration when she was correct in the definition.
So the student asked another definition, and the same procedure was repeated a third time. After that the student asked her "Mrs. Snyder, have you read this whole book?" as he pointed to the dictionary.
In other words I don’t think it matters what you read as long as you do.

Soft Words:What do you think are the strongest influences on your writing?
Seabourne: Undoubtedly, my grandfather and grandmother who lived at Triangle Glen. Grandmother was a poet who had no interest in ever being published, and wrote for herself and to save her memories of life for future generations.

Soft Words:What inspires you to write?
Seabourne: It can be anything, the sound of a bird, someone’s nickname, the antic of an animal, and of course emotion (they are not all mine)

Soft Words:What are your other interests, hobbies and passions?
Seabourne: I used to teach hunt seat and beginners to ride. I asked for no money, I just wanted kids to have the horsey experience as I did when I was their age

Soft Words:You once mentioned you were writing a book of poetry. How is it coming along?
Seabourne: They are photo poems, and I have chosen to distribute them to close friends and family

Soft Words:How much does poetry rule your life?
Seabourne: It rules when I "hear” the words I have to stop and write. Since my surgery I've not "heard" anything, so Lightning Bugs and Abuse were my words, not the "heard" ones like Petals in the wind. Also I seem to have my most creative moments at night!

Soft Words:You've sent me a couple of chapters from your novel. I love the autobiographical storyline, as much as I've read of it. When do you think it will be ready for us to buy?
Seabourne: I have to admit I haven’t written but a few stories for it. I really should work more on it. I will let you know if it ever gets published.

Soft Words:Any suggestions you might have for Rg to improve on your Splashing experience?
Seabourne: I would love to see an index by poet, so I can read my favorites (can I get a favorites index too?)

Soft Words:Anything special you'd like to say to everyone here?
Seabourne: Yes there is. You have been such an encouragement to me and that is just how you are! What wonderful qualities ( Witt, Arti, Sunshine, Lucy, Sampo, Cookie, Nixon, Dublin Steve, and Mojave).hugs to ya all

Angel In The Halls - SplashScribe Interviews Gabriella Michelle a.k.a. Angel of Death

Dear Splashers, meet Gabriella Michelle a.k.a. Angel of Death. One of our youngest Splashers, she is so enthusiastic about her poetry, it’s infectious. She dabbles in paints and words while also balancing academics and school. Say hello!

SW: How did your wings bear you to SplashHall?
AD: I was just looking for a good site to post poems and it was one of the first ones I found where people actually helped you and commented on your work

SW: What keeps you flying in here?
AD: SplashHall is an amazing place. The people here are not only wonderful poets and artists but seem to honestly care about helping and encouraging creative writing

SW: Your favorite forum(s)… any special reasons?
AD: dark gothic and mystery poetry. Well I’ve just always loved the mysterious and dark poetry is what I mostly write.

SW: Your favorite Splashers so far…
AD: I love witt- she helped me out a lot when I first became a splasher and lady sunshine can brighten up my darkest poems. voodoo child has also helped me and encouraged me and I think one of my favorite poets in SplashHall is Sartor. He's an amazing writer. I absolutely love his work!

SW: When did you start writing?
AD: Well I’m still pretty young... I think the first poem i ever wrote was in the 2nd grade.

SW: Favorite authors/poets outside Splash?
AD: W.B. Yeats, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Shaw, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, the great Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, George Gordon, Lord Byron and many more... I think I'll stop there.

SW: What are the strongest influences on your writing?
AD: My friends and family, sometimes things I see happen either on TV or just in the world, but mostly its how I happen to be feeling or thinking of when I write

SW: What are your other interests, hobbies and passions?
AD: I love art. My room is covered in drawings and paintings I do. I love reading of course, going to movies ,and spending time with friends, and music is one of my greatest passions. My father's a musician. I can’t really play anything...lol But I love to listen, I love classic rock, and a lot of new bands. My favorite band is The Used.

SW: If I were a genie in a bottle, and offered you three wishes, what would you choose?
AD: hhmmm.... First I’d wish for money… lol Second good health for everyone I know, and last and most important I’d wish to just be happy for the rest of my life(to laugh every day)

SW: How much do your studies affect your writing and other art?
AD: Its hard sometimes to get homework done. Honestly I usually choose other things over doing my homework... lol

SW: What are your poetic ambitions like?
AD: Well of course I want to get better and I hope to study it in college. I don’t plan on making it a career but its something I love and plan on doing for a long time to come

SW: What prompted your choice of username?
AD: Well there’s this show called one tree hill maybe you've seen it? anyway the creator of the show Mark Shwann is an amazing writer and the show has something in it for teens and adults alike. The characters he creats are amazing one of them in particular is my favorite – Peyton – she loves music, she draws anyway... That whole angel of death thing sort of revolves around her and is used often in the show plus I find that it's very mysterious

SW: Any suggestions you might have for Rg to improve on your Splashing experience?
AD: hhmmm... I can’t really think of anything…

SW: Anything special you'd like to say to everyone here?
AD: For those of you that have helped me and complimented me THANK YOU! =)

Come on by SplashHall Poetry and visit SplashHall Poetess Angel of Dark.

Meet Bernard Henrie AKA Mojave - SplashScribe Soft Words Interviews The Poet

Splashers, here is your super-special New Year treat - An interview with the reclusive Bernard Henrie a.k.a. Mojave, our Splash Poet par excellence. A tiny peek into the person behind the poet reveals that the poet is the person. Mo has a sense of humor and poetry that is a pretty rare combination, something that runs through this interview and holds it together more than my questions do. Alright, I wont hold you back anymore...

SW: What brought you to SplashHall?
Mo: I came to Splash while floating on a mill stream; that is, relaxing. reading the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, a favorite of Heaney:

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so Stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July.

It must have been a sign.


SW. What keeps you here, besides being Ax-happy?
Mo: We are all restless, irritable and filled with commitment phobia; those are our good points, of course; but I stay because of my bad characteristics: the desire for family.

SW. Your favorite Splashers?
Mo: I play no favorites --- learned that by having three god children in my life for 20 years now; no favorites, treat everybody the same, as Joseph Wambaugh says in one of his police novels. I favor the variety, the mix of different points of view; some of us like brevity, others never met a modifier we didn’t like. I like that some of my fellow writing students are from countries other than my own, younger, older; varied cultural backgrounds, urban and more rural. several people are quite short --- others quite tall --- just teasing.

SW. When did you start writing?
Mo: I started as a journalist in high school, never creative writing as we called it at that time; I was a copy boy on my local daily and worked up to reporter status --- I wanted to be a political reporter.

I edited my college paper. what I found was that I loved asking the “why” questions more than the how, where, when and who. I met a pulitzer winner who wrote feature stories, his work read like a novel; I realized how powerful that format could be, how revealing of human drama.

Journalism probably gave me my passion for the more factual, the metaphor, the poem that makes sense; literal sense, figurative sense, narrative sense; though I am not blaming my narrowness on an otherwise noble profession…

SW. I know you are absorbed in free verse poetry… have you ever experimented with other styles of poetry? Any special reasons?
Mo: not too much, but i think within "free verse" there is great variety -- Bukowski to Eliot, Berryman to an Irish writer like Patrick Kavanagh. Dylan Thomas to Sharon Olds. these writers have been able to stockpile such a treasure trove of images, metaphors that code my life:

like a patient etherized upon a table....fog on cat feet. the night coming in like little boats.

SW. Have your Ax-periences changed your way of writing?
Mo: sure. what doesn’t change us? provided we are conscious, listening, looking with our eyes and our heart, our experiences make us a new person every few months; someone in a new age workshop said, “insight comes in a flash, it’s the working out of implications that takes all the time;” I think we examine the implications here at Splash; love, marriage, divorce, isolation, struggle, the day job, identity. the implications; travel outside my country, taking financial responsibility for a child not your biological own, supporting the politician of your choice, and if you are lucky, work that you enjoy; spiritual development, but that for me means the arts – music, all that stuff.

SW. Favorite authors/poets (outside Splash)?
Mo: plenty, but I think of particular poems rather than the body of a poet’s work; early Wallace stevens, so much better than what came later; James Wright here:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.


All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

--- James Wright

most of Eliot:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps 5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;

--- excerpt from Preludes

lots of Philip Larkin:

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

--- Philip Larkin - Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

Pound, when he writes like this:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

--- In a Station of the Metro

a lot of Sharon Olds, and Elizabeth Bishop, some Adrienne Rich

Randall Jarrel’s poems, his essays also.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

--- Randall Jarrel - The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

most of Eric Pankey:

There must be a word that means
To knock repeatedly
On a door to gain entrance
And yet not gain entrance.

Neruda, Heaney and all… all of Dylan Thomas.

SW. What do you think are the strongest influences on your writing (besides the Ax)?
Mo: my father, who never finished high school --- he could see stories, his loving acceptance of the weaknesses and eccentricities of others; Saul Pett, a feature writer with the Associated Press who won a Pulitzer; “Tell readers not only what happened," he would say, "but what it was like to have been there." ... my mom, who loved movies and took me each week – her image riding horses full gallop across the unfenced Kansas prairie, unafraid her pony would step in a gopher hole and break her neck with a terrible fall. she was a poem when she rode, free and anonymous. all the great film makers from france and italy, England and India in the 60’s and later.

SW: What are your other interests, hobbies and passions?
Mo: I’m a history buff and I like airplanes; sports, though I am now mostly a watcher --- only wish I could still play without embarrassing myself.

SW: I’ve never seen you on the forums besides the Ax… why not?
Mo: well, maybe another name? I moderated on one Forum, won an IBPC on a second, and posted on a third for more than a year.

SW: Tell me about your muse…
Mo: my daughter; and Kathleen; music and movies; art for the last few years – Vermeer to Rothko.

SW: Any suggestions you might have for Rg to improve on your Splash-ing experience?
Mo: Rg has created a wonderful world, he needs no advice from an amateur.

SW: Any words of wisdom for us?
Mo: write it down, write it down everyday and never stop writing and listening to others; if people see that you care and that you are trying to understand, they will tell you more than you ever dreamed; love your characters more than yourself; check ego at the door, finish your vegetables.

SW: Thank you for that insight, Mo. I'm sure all you Splashers enjoyed it too.