{"id":4155,"date":"2011-07-22T17:00:39","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T21:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=4155"},"modified":"2011-07-17T00:45:47","modified_gmt":"2011-07-17T04:45:47","slug":"weekly-prompt-borrowed-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/22\/weekly-prompt-borrowed-signs\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Prompt: Borrowed Signs"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_4157\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4157\" style=\"width: 500px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/TechMuseumSigns.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4157\" title=\"TechMuseumSigns\" src=\"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/TechMuseumSigns.jpg\" alt=\"Drinking the Sky, Liquid Vision, and See - bits of signs from the Tech Museum\" width=\"500\" height=\"232\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/TechMuseumSigns.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/TechMuseumSigns-300x139.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4157\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bits of signs from the Tech Museum in San Jose<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a found poem exercise that&#8217;s inspired by a trip that my boyfriend and I took to the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA while on vacation a couple of weeks ago.\u00a0 As we made our way through the joyously kinetic (and occasionally frenetic) space of the museum&#8217;s galleries, I found myself intrigued by the surprisingly figurative language used on the signs in one of the exhibits: by the way in which it resisted the impulse to inform on a strictly literal level and instead chose to render the vision behind the very practical inventions that were being described in expansive and imagistically evocative ways.\u00a0 &#8220;Drinking the Sky,&#8221; for example, was the title of a station about fog nets\u2014fine mesh screens which trap moisture from morning fog to make clean drinking water.\u00a0 <em>What a lovely idea,<\/em> I mused, thinking not just of the fog nets themselves (which are indeed a marvelously ingenious invention), but also of the image of harvesting the sky, of gathering its fabric to one&#8217;s mouth to drink.\u00a0 Then there was &#8220;Liquid Vision,&#8221; which was the title of a display about soft, water-filled glasses lenses whose strength could be adjusted by reducing or increasing the amount of liquid inside.\u00a0 I admired the invention itself, but enjoyed the synaesthetic nature of the title even more: I imagined vision that was truly liquid\u2014as light so often seems to be\u2014revealing the world to us fluidly, wetly, clearly, in currents and waves.\u00a0 If such a thing were our everyday experience, we&#8217;d be literally washed in sight; one might come away to sleep dripping with colors and shadows and shapes.\u00a0 Or indeed, perhaps that vision that could be liquidized or distilled&#8211;bottled, sold, distributed from place to place in a canister . . . like a film, but for oral consumption.\u00a0 Potion-like.\u00a0 Shimmery. Strange. At any rate, something that one could wrap a poem around.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Prompt: Write a poem whose central image is inspired by language &#8220;borrowed&#8221; from a sign, billboard, or poster.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a found poem exercise that&#8217;s inspired by a trip that my boyfriend and I took to the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA while on vacation a couple of weeks ago.\u00a0 As we made our way through the joyously kinetic (and occasionally frenetic) space of the museum&#8217;s galleries, I found myself intrigued by the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[674,72,71],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4155"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4160,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4155\/revisions\/4160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}