PAD Day 5: The Golden Shovel

Today’s dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "discovery" poem, and (2) write a “golden shovel” poem. This form was created by Terrance Hayes in his poem "The Golden Shovel": he took Gwendolyn Brooks’ famous short poem “We Real Cool” and made each word of that poem the last word in each consecutive line of his poem. (The title of his poem, and the name of the form, is taken from the subtitle of Brooks' poem - the "Golden Shovel" is the name of the pool hall.) The poem I used here is Margaret Atwood’s “You Fit into Me”:

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

So here’s a poem from the POV of a woman who discovers that her relationship is over. Like with Hayes' poem, I tried to keep some of the spirit of the original in my reworking:

The Hook and Eye Disconnect
(after Margaret Atwood)

Baby, I just discovered that you
and I don’t work anymore. You’re not fit
to hold this heart, to slip it into
your pocket like spare change. Tell me
you care, that you really like
my company, but that’s just a
convenient lie. Don’t think you can hook
me with threats or pleas. I’ve seen into
the future, and it’s filled with an
empty house. We don’t see eye-to-eye,
and I can’t abide your swagger, a
selfish air, a lingering lust for all those “fish
in the sea”. So baby, you’re off the hook –
I release you; I throw you back. Have an
incredible life. The door is open,
the world ready for your unfaithful eye.

Log in to Reply

PAD Day 4: Lune-y for Spring

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a poem whose title starts with the word "Since", and (2) write a "lune". A lune is a haiku-like form of three short lines - there are varying versions of the form, but today I am using the one created by poet Jack Collum. It's very simple: line 1 = 3 words, line 2 = 5 words, and line 3 = 3 words. So here's my "lune string", as it were:

Since the Last Snow

we’ve put away
the shovels, the rock salt
for another year

we’ve unbundled ourselves,
opened doors, pulled up shades
looking for green

we’ve watched robins
wander in our thawing yard
hunting for breakfast

we’ve driven everywhere
playing our favorite music loud
windows rolled down

we’ve started digging
in the cool loam, planting
for the future

PAD Day 3: Charmed, I'm Sure

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "message" poem, and (2) write a "charm" poem (a short rhyming verse that is a "recipe" for a magic spell.

Charm Against Texting

the nectar of three plums
to stop their nervous thumbs

a pulp of collard greens
to fog up busy screens

a beetle’s carapace
to get them face-to-face

a leaf of celery stalk
to get them all to talk

an abalone pearled
so they can see the world

PAD Day 2: A Japanese Demon

Starting today, I will attempt what I did the last two years of NaPoWriMo and combine the prompts from Poetic Asides and the NaPoWriMo blog, hosted by Maureen Thorson. (Note to Maureen: Sorry if I appeared to "steal" the title of yesterday's blog from yours - I really did come up with it independently before visiting your blog.) Today's dual prompts: (1) Write a "voyage" poem, and (2) write a poem based on non-Greco/Roman mythology, such as the Norse or Japanese. I took Maureen's suggestion and clicked a link to a list of Japanese spirits and demons, and the subject of this poem is the first one that jumped out at me. (Yes, it's rather unsettling when a Japanese demon jumps out at you.) "Akaname" is a spirit who comes and licks your bathroom at night. I understand Japanese children were told about him to scare them into keeping their bathrooms clean.

Akaname

I slide up through your gummy drain,
and my poison spit dissolves the scum
the soap left on your tiles. Then
I creep to the toilet, my red tongue
flicking in the bowl, scouring anything
you’ve left behind. Even the sink
won’t escape my hunger for grime.
I slither through your towns after midnight,
making my way from bathroom to bathroom,
invading the ones that aren’t spotless.
This is my mission, my nocturnal voyage.
So forget your Comet, your Scrubbing Bubbles -
leave the job to me. Just don’t get up
in the middle of the night,
because you might not like what you see
when you turn on the bathroom light.

NaPoWriMo: Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Poetic Engines!

Okay, here we go again- Happy National Poetry Month! I'll be participating once again in the Poem-a-Day Challenge on Robert Brewer's Poetic Asides blog. There are actually a lot of good NaPoWriMo challenges out there this month, but I've been faithful to this one for the last few years, and this year is particularly interesting because Robert has enlisted 30 poets, some quite well-known, to judge each day's prompted poems to pick the best of the day.  Among those names are Thomas Lux, Bob Hicok, Andrew Hudgins and Daniel Nester. After the month is over, the 30 selected best poems will be published in an anthology. Needless to say, the blog is buzzing with activity - close to 700 entries just on the first day. Historically, that much participation slacks off a bit as the month wears on, but it looks like there will be some stiff competition to be selected.

Today's prompt for Day 1: Write a poem about beginning and/or ending.  Here's mine:

Red Shoes

They peeked out from the white hem
of your wedding gown as you strode
up the aisle. Vivid as your lipstick,
they flashed as you sat playfully
on your groom’s lap for the wedding album.
At your reception, they kicked and stomped
all evening on the dance floor.
You looked like a Vogue model, someone said,
or a movie star. One guest compared you
to Audrey Hepburn, slim and classy.
But everyone remembers those red pumps
with the ankle straps you wore that day,
the ones in which you walked into your new life,
shoes as bold and unique as you .
Now you’re a new mom, and your baby daughter
gets bigger and brighter every day.
When she takes her first steps,
what color will her shoes be?

Cartoon Captions, St. Paddy's, and So Forth

Poor old blog – nobody loves you, apparently not even me. Having totally missed February, I guess I need to update things a little. There’s not a whole lot going on poetry-wise, although it looks like we’ve resurrected our old group, the Quick and Dirty Poets. Though we’re a small group of four at this point, it will be great to have a peer group again to share poems and critique. We are talking about resurrecting our reading series this year, too. I hope it will inspire me to write more and better poetry. I need to get cracking on submitting more, too. I have a bunch of baseball poems from November that I could submit to Spitball, for instance. One thing I have done recently was to apply to a juried workshop with Billy Collins at the Key West Literary Seminar next January. I won’t hear till late spring if I got in – fingers crossed!

 Last week was interesting:. I found out on Monday that my caption won second place in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (which can be found here) and then a few days later I learned that I won second place in another cartoon caption contest, this one for the weekly Style Invitational contest from the Washington Post, which can be found here) Then that same day I found out I won third place in the Poetic Asides sijo contest. (The “sijo” is a Korean poetic form.) So although I felt a little like a “bridesmaid”, coming so close to the top prize three times, it’s still a cool feeling to pull a “hat trick” like that.

St. Patrick’s Day was fun at our house this week. Of course I trucked out all my Irish and Celtic music to play through the weekend and into Monday. My wife dressed our little granddaughter up like a “St. Patrick’s Day fairy” in a green tutu and fairy wings. (She already loves “dress-up”.) And it was fun, too, sharing Irish-style food like corned beef and shepherd’s pie with the two Korean students who are staying with us.

Music: Still not much new stuff that has tickled my ears. So far I've heard the new Drive-by Truckers album and the new Real Estate album (both pretty good). My favorite so far, though, is Elbow's new album, The Take Off and Landing of Everything. Elbow creates some gorgeous, moving, anthemic songs that Coldplay only wish they could do as well. "My Sad Captains" may be the best song on the album - it just blows me away every time I listen to it.

Poem: In honor of St. Patrick's Day, here's a poem I wrote about a site we visited on our trip to Killarney a few years ago. This won a prize and publication in a journal called Shakespeare's Monkeys.

Ladies’ View

When Queen Victoria came to Killarney
and stayed at Muckross House, she sent us ladies
up the hill to find a picnic spot. Dutifully
we bounced along the road in one-horse carts,
carrying wicker baskets of paté, aspic, and sandwiches.
But when Her Majesty mounted the hill herself,
we were unprepared, so she rebuked
us in front of everyone assembled.

How could we tell her we were delayed
by seductive nature? A glacier-carved valley
lay before us, spread between the thighs
and shoulders of the mountains, with the jewels
of Killarney Town in the distance, in the nape
of the neck of this land, the river and lakes
like fingers caressing it all. And as we stood
on the overlook, the wind lifted our petticoats
and loosened the bonnets from our hair.

Haiku, Somonka, Box Sets, and So Forth

Hey, I just remembered - I have a blog!  I guess my life just isn't fascinating enough to warrant daily, or even weekly (sometimes monthly) posts. Anyway, it's best to keep my legions of fan up to date once in awhile.

I'm still grappling with relative poetic inactivity since cranking out 30-plus baseball poems for that chapbook contest in November.  I hope to hear the results of that effort by Groundhog Day.  Meanwhile, I have a rather minimalist haiku that appears on today's (Jan. 23) edition of the e-journal tinywords, which you can find here. Also, I placed second in the Poetic Asides Somonka contest, for a collaboration with fellow blog regular Rosemary Nissen-Wade.  A "somonka" is a form of tanka usually with two verses, often written in collaboration, and often with a love theme.  Here's our poem (Rosemary wrote the first verse and I wrote the second):

Listen!
A magpie warbles
at my gate.
I send you the song
across distance.

When I hear it
I will fashion clouds
to its music.
When the weather turns
they will sail to you.

The first-place winner's prize is publication in Robert Brewer's poetry column in a future issue of Writer's Digest, but he says ours will also appear if he can swing it. If so, it will be my fourth appearance in his column.  Thanks, Robert, for selecting it, and thanks, Rosemary, for a great collaboration.

I did write another poem recently, prompted by my poet friend Lorraine Stanchich Brown, who is working this week at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Florida as an intern to Carolyn Forché. Lorraine and I met at a writer's retreat in Maine years ago, and have remained long-distance friends ever since. We reconnected when I attended the Palm Beach festival in January 2011.  She has been involved with them for several years, and that year she got to be Robert Pinsky's personal assistant, while I took the wonderful Jane Hirshfield's workshop.  Lorraine sent me one of her workshop prompts, and we're trying to rekindle the one-on-one critique exchange that we've had on and off over the years.  The other good news is that my local critique group, The Quick and Dirty Poets, may be in the process of resurrecting itself.  So maybe I'll have more incentive to write in the near future.

Music:  This time I'm recommending two box set series that I discovered while browsing Amazon.com.  They are the "Original Album Classics" from Sony Records, and "Original Album Series" from Rhino records (featuring a lot of Warner Brothers artists).  Both series are very similar in that they are box sets of up to five classic albums by the same artist, in a no-frills package that includes the CD of the original album releases (some with bonus tracks) and replications of the original cover art on the cardboard sleeves. And the best part is that these sets average about $20 each, so they're perfect if you want to round out your CD collection with an artist you may have neglected to acquire over the years on CD.  My first purchase, a while ago, was a Dave Brubeck set that included his classic Time Out and four subsequent studio albums. More recently, I purchased sets by two 1960's groups who couldn't be more dissimilar, artistically or commercially: The Monkees and The Incredible String Band.  Also, I found a five-disc set of Santana albums from the early- to mid- 1970's for just over $10 - practically a steal.  Check these sets out on Amazon if you are so inclined - chances are you'll find at least one you'll like.