Poetry Challenge #207-Who Gives a Cluck?
Back when Buz and Tod were getting their kicks cruising Route 66, if their tummies growled all they had to do was look up in the sky, not at a bird or a plane, but west to the 22-foot-high Chicken Boy!
For more than 20 years, 1960-1984, Chicken Boy, a huge fiberglass statue a burly mannish “boy” with a chicken head clutching a bucket of fried chicken, “affectionately known as ‘the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles’”, perched atop LA’s Chicken Boy restaurant. The restaurant closed after the owner died but Chicken Boy lived on—although buried deep in storage until 2007 when thanks to fundraising effort he was resurrected and re-erected in front of owner Amy Inouye’s design firm in Highland Park, CA.
Wondering if cruising to LA to see the Chicken Boy is still a thing? Bet your tail feathers it is! In 2010, then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger awarded it the Governor's Historic Preservation Award.
And today, September 1st, National Chicken Boy Day, commemorates that day. Who gives a cluck? We do!
Poetry Challenge #207
What the Cluck!?
Write a Chicken Boy poem. Whether it features that 22-foot-high statue, or a boy and a chicken, or the Chicken Boys band (out of Austin, of course.)
Bwalk-blwak-blawk, just as chickens don’t all look the same—
There are hundreds of different breeds of chicken distinguished by: size, plumage color, comb type, skin color, number of toes, amount of feathering, egg color, and place of origin.[1]. . . also roughly divided by primary use, whether for eggs, meat, or ornamental purposes, and with some considered to be dual-purpose.[1]
—Chickens don’t all talk the same talk. But, no matter how its written: bwalk, cluck, peekok-peekok or some other spelling from far far away, when it comes to chicken verbalization the one universal is that hard K sound at the end.
Sooooooooo…(or should I say “sawk”). . . Think “Hard K” as you craft your poem.
And then, after you have a draft, go back over through your poem and change words, change sounds, invent words with the sole purpose of making your Chicken Boy poem sound as clucky as possible.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
And for inspiration a Chicken Boy Playlist:
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1900 days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #111-One Dark and Stormy Night…Yikes!
Back in my sleep-over camp-out nights, with the campfire crackling and tossing spooky shadows, the wind howling and tree branches scraping on the tent, we used to make scary spookier still with a game called Yikes!
Things that go bump in the night. . . Scary, right? Scary how a simple bump sound—in the right setting at the right time—sends tingles, quivers, hair-raising heebie-jeebies shivers chasing up our spines.
Oooooohhhhh CREAK
SCRATCH EEK
EEK YOWL
HOWL
Mwahaha
SCREECH SCRITCH
WHAT’S THAT NOISE . . .
Thump THWACK
thwaaaaaaaaaa
It is said that everyone fears the same thing—the Unknown. Thus, the secret to writing scary is not what you write—but what you leave out. “Readers will imagine the rest, filling in the gaps with whatever scares them most,” noted Nocturium in a recent post**. Which takes me right back to those spine-tingling sounds. Let’s give it a Go—ghost!
Poetry Challenge #111
One Dark and Storm . . . YIKES!
iT’S Hallow’s eve, let’s get our Yikes! on. Whoever creates the spookiest poem, wins! First, write a Scary poem. And then . . . make it even scarier still by replacing specifics with sounds words.
See if you can scare yourself silly!
Set the timer for 7 minutes.
Don’t think about it too much;
Start writing!
*Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 1280++ days ago. We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the 7-Minute Poetry Challenge let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
**How to Write a Scary Story post on the Nocturim