PAD Day 6: A Morning Song

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "things aren't what they seem" poem, and 
(2) Write an aubade.

An "aubade" is traditionally a "morning song", a poem written by someone leaving their lover in the early morning. I wrote a sonnet called "January Aubade" a few years ago that was published in The Lyric, and it would actually fit both prompts pretty well. Today's poem I poked and prodded into a sonnet, too, and I guess it turned out okay.  I'm excited that today's guest judge at Poetic Asides is Molly Peacock - I took a workshop with her a few years ago at the late lamented West Chester Poetry Conference, and she is a lovely person, as well as a fine teacher and poet.  It was a workshop on the villanelle, so I was tempted to write one of them, but I thought an aubade seemed to fit better into the sonnet form than the villanelle.

Robin's Aubade

The sun, that warm alarm, has caught me waking -

I see your sleeping form curled in our bed.

The view from here at daybreak is breathtaking -

the budding trees, the pink clouds overhead.

I hear the neighbors too, their music drifting

in on chilly air. So rise, my lovely mate -
I'll sing a morning song, something uplifting.

I'll take you out for breakfast - don't be late! -

a place whose owner puts out quite a spread.

I've got an early flight, and true to form,

I'm all decked out, as usual, in red,

and you've our unborn children to keep warm.

I will return with worms, and straw and string -

I'll spread my wings, but you're my everything.

PAD Day 5 Part 2: Another Yam Poem?

I really wanted to write something more contest-worthy after that silly Emily Dickinson thing, so here's my second poem of the day. It just uses the "vegetable" prompt from Poetic Asides for today. The whole idea of yams as a topic arose while I was actually peeling them this morning for Easter dinner. My son was reading me one of his favorite poems, Galway Kinnell's "The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak" while I was doing my chore, and I responding half-jokingly that I should write a poem entitled "The Man Peeling Yams on Easter Sunday".  So there you go - sometimes inspiration comes from the oddest places. I took off from Kinnell's title and first line and a half, and went off in my own direction.

PAD Day 5: Emily Dickinson and Yams

So today's two prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo seem a bit irreconcilable, but I gave it my best shot.
(1) Write a "vegetable" poem, and
(2) Write a "reconstructed" Emily Dickinson poem: Take an Emily poem, remove all the punctuation (especially all those dashes), turn it into a block of prose, then restructure it - play with the line breaks and even the language, changing or replacing words wherever you want. So what I did was substitute "yam" or "yams" for a number of the nouns in her poem #355, "It was not Death, for I stood up..." and I made some other appropriate word changes as well. I did keep the basic structure of the poem, but the content came out amusing if a little weird.  It won't make the finalists for today's Poem-a-Day Challenge, I'm sure, but it was kind of fun to write. Maybe later I'll try a more "serious" vegetable poem, if that's possible and time permits.

From the Emily Dickinson Cookbook

It was not Yams, for I stood up,

And all the Yams lie down.  

It was not Night, for all the Cooks

Put out their Yams for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh

I felt Marshmallows crawl,

Nor Fire, for my Potholders

Could keep an Oven cool.

And yet, it tasted, like them all,

The Yams I have seen Set,

so orderly for Casseroles,

Reminded me: Forget,

As if the Skin was shaven

And peeled off from a Yam,

And could not cook sans Cinnamon,

And ’twas like Midnight, ma'am,

When everything that ticked has stopped

And Yams grow all around,

Or Grisly frosts first Autumn morns

the Sweet-potato ground,

But most like Chaos, yamless, cool

Without a Chance to share

Or even a Report of Yams

To justify Despair.

PAD Challenge Day 4: Sonnet from an Airport

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPWriMo:
(1) Write a "departure" poem, and
(2) Write a love poem without the word "love" or any of the other cliched verbiage of love poems, or write an "anti-love" poem. This poem didn't quite come out as I expected - for instance, it wanted to make itself a sonnet - and instead of something heartfelt, I imagined the speaker as someone who has a hard time showing his emotions, maybe at the expense of a relationship.  Enough exposition - here's the poem:

Domestic Departures

I swore I wouldn't yield to waterworks
and it’s my fervent hope you feel the same.
Those goodbyes full of bawling look so lame,
how many of them later feel like jerks?
And if you think the sentimental lurks
inside my chest, that there’s a burning flame
of pathos, think again. This is no game –
you’ll find no soft spot underneath my smirks.
So see ya later – have a lovely flight.
We’ll part as friends – too bad it wasn’t more.
And if you feel the need, write now and then.
But as your plane takes off, I think I might
walk past tonight’s arrivals to be sure
that everyone who leaves comes back again.

PAD Day 3: "Fourteen Machine"

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "machine" poem, and
(2) Write a "fourteener": a poem of any length composed of 14-syllable lines, preferably in iambic meter, rhymed or unrhymed. Maureen of NaPoWriMo says this form lends itself well to narrative - it was popular with 16th and 17th century poets writing in a ballad style, but some more (relatively) modern examples are "Casey at the Bat" and the "Gilligan's Island" theme song(!)  Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale... of wishful thinking.


Deus Ex Machina

I want the gods descending on a crane to bear me up
like in Greek tragedies, just when it seemed that all was lost
and certain death, or worse, dishonor, reared their ugly masks.

I want majestic eagles to swoop down and lift me up
securely in their talons, just like those in Middle Earth
who rescued Sam and Frodo from the red slopes of Mt. Doom.

I want a billionaire someday to knock upon my door
and say, “My friend, there’s way too much for me to spend myself,
So take this cash to fix your roof and send your kids to school.”

I want to hit the lottery, an unknown aunt to die
and leave me in her will. I want my dream job falling
in my lap, a fast machine to take me out of here

and land me in a tropic paradise, a margarita
in my hand. I want a happy ending to my story
no one would expect, that I didn’t even have to earn.

PAD Challenge Day 2: Secrets and Constellations

From time to time this month I'll give a shout-out to poets I know and admire.  My friend Kelly Ramsdell Fineman has sung my praises several times on her blog, Writing and Ruminating, for which I'm eternally grateful. It's time I returned the favor and plugged her very first poetry chapbook, The Universe Comes Knocking, published by Maverick Duck Press.  It's a really fine collection - check it out.

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) write a "secret" poem, and (2) write a poem about the stars, or more specifically, the constellations. The first prompt reminds me a little of Peter Murphy, the poet and retired teacher who founded the annual Winter Prose and Poetry Getaway held each January in southern NJ.  Peter always offers challenging and often devilish prompts throughout the weekend, and one of his favorite addenda to those prompts is "Tell a secret, tell a lie, but don't tell which is which." You can find some of Peter's fiendishly entertaining prompts and some of the poems inspired by them in the book Challenges for the Delusional from Jane Street Press. This poem was inspired by a recent conversation with a favorite young lady, but most of it is fictionalized.

The Stars Obliterated

She looks up at the night sky, amazed

to see it so clearly. In my city, she says,

the sky is only gray –

all the city light washes out the stars.

She doesn't know the constellations,

so I point out Orion, sighting his belt,

the row of three bright stars, blue giants

from hundreds of light years away.

She doesn't know the mythology either,

so I describe his stature and heroism,

his hunting prowess, and how as Poseidon’s son

he could walk on the ocean floor

with his head above the waves.

But he was a pig to women, I tell her.

He assaulted Merope after too much wine

and he pursued the Pleiades so relentlessly

that Zeus scooped them up for protection

and deposited them in the sky.

That reminds me of something, she says,

but she will not share it,

and she is quiet for the rest of the night.

Happy Poetry Month! Poem-a-Day Challenge Day 1

It's been two and a half months since my last post, and I really haven't been doing a lot with poetry since then.  I wrote four short poems in one day last week and was quite proud of myself, so I haven't been setting the bar very high lately.  But I always look forward to National Poetry Month and the Poem-a-Day Challenge over at Robert Brewer's Poetic Asides blog. As he did last year, Robert recruited an impressive list of poets to guest-judge each day's entries, and each daily winner will be featured in the second annual anthology/writing manual Poem Your Heart Out, published by Words Dance Press. (I was privileged to have a poem featured in last year's edition.) I'm particularly excited about this year's judges, because they include three poets with whom I have worked (Marge Piercy, Molly Peacock, and Dorianne Laux) and another whom I've met (Taylor Mali).  Also, as I've done for the past couple of years, I will try to combine Robert's prompt with the one from Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog.  So to start out, my dual prompts for today are:

(1) write a "resistance" poem, and
(2) write a "negation" poem (i.e. describe something negatively, in terms of what it is not).

The second prompt reminds me a little of Billy Collins' "Litany":

...However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air....

I actually wrote two poems for today, both of which reference the "Borg" from Star Trek ("Resistance is futile"), but I will post this one because it fits both the prompts. 

Pull

You are not what I can resist.
You are not smoked salmon,
Brussels sprouts, fresh mango,
or NHL hockey. You are not
American Idol or Honey Boo Boo,
and you are certainly not hip-hop,
Margaret Thatcher or a thunderstorm.
I am also positive you are not bungee-jumping
or reruns of Three’s Company.
And I am fairly confident you are not
A pit bull, a wasp, or WWF wrestling.
Unlike those other things, you pull me in
with your tractor beam, and I blissfully
comply, your servant, your assimilated one.