He’s Alive
Twenty-Two
A World Of His Own
It’s A Good Life
Young Man’s Fancy,
Black Leather Jackets
Where Is Everybody?
The Passersby
Little Girl Lost
The Chaser
Shadow Play
Sounds And Silences
Nothing In The Dark
Two
Nervous Man In A Four Dollar Room
Living Doll
Ring-A-Ding Girl
Queen Of The Nile
The Fugitive
To Serve Man
In His Image
The Lateness Of The Hour
Four O’Clock
Nick of Time
The Graves

While making this, I had a bit of a story playing in my head. I wanted to paint the picture of a man that seems normal and innocent on the surface, but in reality he is demented and kidnaps young women, forces them into things, then kills them and buries them all in the same place. To openly clarify, I OF COURSE DO NOT advocate for this kind of behavior, I just noticed that the titles of the episodes leaned into a creepy, unsettling, suspenseful vibe. In this poem, you’re introduced to Mr. Garrity, who seems to be a young, clean and happy gentleman. Quickly you find that he’s looking for victims and can’t find one until a lost little girl passes by. The following lines portray him doing the kidnapping her in the dark. After that, a list of different ways of viewing this girl in different tones and perspectives are listed, hoping to portray the idea that the man is genuinely deranged and doesn’t even know how he sees his own targets anymore. It wraps up with the man noticing the time and realizing it’s getting late and just in time he’s able to kill the girl and bury her.

So this (two star, writing) assignment said to make a poem out of the titles of episodes of the twilight zone! My main goal was to make something cutesy and sweet, because that is the opposite of what the Twilight Zone is about, and I think I succeeded!

The process? Look over the master list of Twilight Zone titles and look for inspiration! Then, start writing them down to draft a cutesy poem! I was originally going for the a theme similar to “The Ones” Ellen Doré Watson (I also wrote about one of my favorite quotes from her here!); which is a nice, we’re all just humans trying to exist and be happy, let’s be kind to one another. Peep my planning!

Oof you might not be able to read my handwriting, oops! But yeah, the first 8 or so lines was my stab at that sort of theme. However, I didn’t really like how I was just listing things, and I didn’t see anywhere to really go and tie it all together from there, so I decided to switch to a more, the world is nice and I’m glad to be here vibe, which I think I accomplished better. The only modifications I made were all punctuation, and anything in parenthesis was added. The parenthesis are not meant to be anything poetic, they just serve to differentiate.

After I hammered down what I wanted the poem to mean, the rest was just searching for the titles that could convey that. I really used the “its a good life” title to hammer that point in, but I think the repetition sounds nice. I wish there was less punctuation, because i prefer my poetry to be kind of grammarless, but I feel like it was necessary to convey the pacing and pausing that I wanted. The grammar on the second to last line (“we’s alive”) is for sure funky, but I wanted to stay as true to the original title as possible. Thus, we’s alive. And as silly as it is, I actually do really like how it sounds after the “he’s alive / she’s alive” bit. So there you have it! Poetry by liz! (even though the Twilight Zone writers were really the ones doing most of the writing).

its a good life. -liz

There’s a writing assignment to do a Poem Made With Twilight Zone Episode Titles which comes from the ds106zone days. Since we’re doing Noir106 these days, I decided to give it a different twist and use episode titles from The Shadow. That’s a thing about these assignments: They’re more about being creative than following the rules. You can alter them, or you can make up your own assignment and add it to the bank. If I had thought of it earlier, I might have added a Shadow Poetry assignment, but at this point I don’t know if it matters.

I went looking for titles. First I tried searching the Internet Archive, but that didn’t work out so well. I did find an extensive list on Wikipedia however. It seems like every other episode title ends with “death” though, which wouldn’t make for proper poetry, but there were ones I could work with. I scrolled through the list and pulled out titles that rhymed and built a list. I grabbed couplets that felt like they fit together, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of narrative sense:

The Shadow by Francesco Francavilla

Happy Doomsday
Death Shows the Way
Death Rides the Skyway
Death Rides the Subway

Cave Of the Zombies
The Gibbering Things
The Curse of the Gypsies
Death Pulls the Strings

Death Stalks The Shadow
Death Draws the Bow
Death in a Minor Key
Murder By Proxy

Rendezvous With Doom
The Man Who Could Not Die
Death and The Viking Groom
The Absolute Alibi

It doesn’t really tell a story, but it does paint some kind of work picture, so I’ll call it poetry. It has a rhythmic feel to it as well.

At first I asked my wife for help with it. She likes things to make sense (but she married me anyway), so she started to make it a narrative poem, tweaking the verbiage to make it flow and give it meaning. But if we were going to go that route, it would have to come to some conclusion, and I didn’t see that in the lines I had. So I took a step back and decided just to use the raw titles in a sort of found object poem. So there you go. Who knows what rhymes lurk in the titles of episodes?

This is a poem comprised of The Twilight Zone episode titles.

One for the Angels

Long live Walter Jameson!

The hitch-hiker, the obsolete man, the Rip Van Wrinkle caper:

he’s alive. Execution, in his image-

static, dust, steel.

Ninety years without slumbering. It’s a good life.

On Thursday we leave for home, Jess-Belle.

You drive.

Come Wander With Me

I Am the Color of Night

Color Me Black

Queen of the Nile

The Old Man in the Cave

 Ring-a-Ding Girl

The Living Improvement of Salvadore Ross

I Sing the Body Electric

A Quality of Mercy

The Arrival

The Silence

The Mind and The Matter

The Whole Truth

Static

Come Wander With Me

Where Is Everybody?

I Shot An Arrow Into The Air,
A Quality Of Mercy.

The Four Of Us Are Dying.

Of Late I Think Of Cliffordville,
The Parallel,
The Incredible World Of Horace Ford.

On Thursday We Leave For Home -
The Hunt,
Ninety Years Without Slumbering.

And When The Sky Was Opened
I Sing The Body Electric.

I, again, was intrigued by this poetry writing assignment. Like the Twitter poetry writing assignment, I really enjoyed combining things in a way to make meaning. I found this one to be a little more difficult, though, because I challenged myself not to add any new words. Since the episode titles have more to them than Twitter, I wanted to make my poem solely out of the words given. Therefore, I decided to only add punctuation rather than new words.

As a result, I think my poem was a little more stretched as far as an actual meaning is concerned. It was difficult to find titles that would actually flow together. I decided to focus on the idea of noir in order to fix that problem. In noir, plots are often discordant and timelines are jumbled. Plus, the language and tone of The Twilight Zone reflects aspects of noir, such as mystery and terror. Therefore, I used the theme of noir to tie this poem together, with two or three lines combined that actually worked together as a brief story.

I’ve always enjoyed the The Twilight Zone and was excited to see it incorporated into an assignment. As I said before, I think The Twilight Zone is a great example of noir, which makes it even more applicable for this class. I liked being able to draw on the aspects of noir we’ve studied in the past two weeks and incorporate that into an assignment.

For my first assignment I have chosen to make a poem out of Twilight Zone Titles. Here it is!

Night Call,

Little Girl Lost,

Come Wander With Me,

What You Need,

is The Hunt,

for The Midnight Sun,

Sounds And Silences,

You Drive,

Nothing In The Dark,

The Encounter:

The Hitch-Hiker in,

Black Leather Jackets and,

Dead Man’s Shoes,

The Fear,

In His Image,

He’s Alive

Cavender Is Coming.

The assignment can be found here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/poem-made-with-twilight-zone-episode-titles/

For my second writing assignment I have chosen to make a short monologue of a household tool. Can you guess what it is?

Mystery Tool:

Did he HAVE to handle me so aggressively?  I’m practically an antique. There’s no respect anymore, I tell you. Day by day they fondle me with their cold, clammy, sweaty, greasy hands like it’s just no big deal. “I don’t have feelings,” they say, “I’m an ‘inanimate object’,” they say. Well, they have another thing coming. Without me there would be no daily activity, the humans would be confined to the inside like the rest of us tools. Never once have they stopped to admire my shiny, brassy quality or my ornately carved floral details that are slowly being covered in their hand grime.

I’m so unappreciated and abused. Ever day I am exposed not only to the elements but to the filthy humans, and the little humans, who are the worst just by the way, and the furry humans too. I’d leave if I could, don’t think for a second I wouldn’t do it. I often fantasize about packing up all my screws and heading off to bigger and better places. Like the pictures in those thin, shiny books the one human is always looking at. I can just picture myself there, no humans, no dirty, no under appreciated abuse. But I couldn’t just go on my own. I can’t even stand on my own! And that moving rectangle I’m forcibly attached to is the biggest push-over you’ll ever meet. He doesn’t even see anything wrong with being used so violently each day! I think he’s missing a few screws, if you know what I mean. He has to be after being slammed into the stationary rectangles multiple times a day!

I’m telling you if I could just…Oh! They’re coming! And they’re covered in filth…here we go again…

Did you guess what the mystery tool is? Here is a link to the original assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/monologue-of-a-household-tool/

For my last writing assignment of the week I am creating an alternate ending to one of this week’s readings. The reading I have chosen is “A Matter of Procedure”. A link to this story can be found below.

http://shenandoahliterary.org/641/2014/08/15/a-matter-of-procedure/

It sickened me how beautiful she was. It especially sickened me when I compared her to my own plainness. There was nothing special about me. I found myself consumed with the thought of her. Her perfect blond, silk hair, her little tennis skirts, the way her laughed sounded like a melody, it consumed me.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I laid awake for most of the night, haunted by the sound of her voice, her laugh, her sent, her blood curdling screams. And then…silence. I slept, but not well. When I woke the next morning the sheets were in knots on the floor. I’d slept horribly. I stumbled into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I went back to the bedroom while the kettle boiled to clean up a little. As I knelt down to pick the sheets off of the floor, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror by my easel. I didn’t look like me, something has changed. I shook of the usual feelings of self-doubt and continued on my way down to pick up the covers. As I did so, I noticed a bag under the bed that I didn’t recognize. Before I had time to think about it, the kettle started screaming. I rushed to the kitchen to silence the offensive sound. There it was again: the screaming.

There was a loud banging on the front door. It silenced the screams. I got my tea together and walked to the door. It was the chief and a couple of county sheriffs. The chief was just standing there, like a stone statue, cold and unwavering. He was holding a long piece of paper and the sheriffs had their handcuffs out. “What’s happening?” Nobody responded. “You’re under arrest…”

The rest was a blur. I am writing you this from my prison cell in the women’s correctional facility. Annabel was always mocking me with her perfect hair, her perfect body, her perfect life. Everything I knew I would never have. I just wanted to be her. I still hear the blood-curdling screams at night but the silence comes eventually. Just as it did that night. In the silence always comes.

Here is a link to the original assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/write-an-alternative-ending/