PAD Challenge Day 6: Blossom of Change

 Today's prompts from Robert Lee Brewer's "Write Better Poetry" blog and Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog: (1) Write a "change" and/or "don't change" poem, and (2) borrowing an exercise from poet Holly Lyn Walrath: "Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely."

I didn't follow the second prompt exactly, because I actually lifted my line from the incredibly moving ending of James Wright's wonderful poem, "A Blessing," about meeting two horses in a field. I wrote a response poem to that one, using the last line as my tentative title, and I did change it afterward, but I just couldn't discard what is one of my favorite closing lines of a poem ever, so it became my epigraph. I was thinking about riddling the more knowledgable poetry readers as to which poem inspired mine, but I don't know if it's well-known enough, and besides, I just felt like putting everything "out there." So here it is, a sort of very loose unrhymed sonnet:

Bursting

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
- James Wright, "A Blessing"
 
I can't imagine what would change my life
that I would feel so extraordinary
to travel out of body from the husk
of my skin long enough to realize
that very moment could cause me to bloom
like a morning glory, unfolding in real time,
predawn blue, with a sun in the middle.
Bonding with a fellow creature of the world,
lying in afterglow with my first love,
hearing my first Beethoven symphony?
Maybe I can visualize it after all,
not as a zinnia or peony,
but as a milkweed pod bursting open,
launching its downy seeds into the wind.
 
 

PAD Challenge Day 5: The Shapes a Bright Container Can Contain

 Today's prompts from Robert Lee Brewer of Writers Digest is to write a poem with the title "The First _______." Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt is more involved, so I'll quote her:

"I call this one 'The Shapes a Bright Container Can Contain,' after this poem by Theodore Roethke, which I adored in high school – and can still recite!

"This prompt challenges you to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem. If I used Roethke’s poem as my model, for example, the first line would start with 'I,' the second line with 'W,' and the third line with 'A.' And I would try to make all my lines neither super-short nor overlong, but have about ten syllables. I would also have my poem take the form of four, seven-line stanzas. I have found this prompt particularly inspiring when I use a base poem that mixes long and short lines, or stanzas of different lengths."

A challenging one, but an exercise I ended up enjoying very much. I chose a poem by Jane Hirshfield as my source, "Today, When I Could Do Nothing."  It was written in March of last year just as her home area of San Francisco went on lockdown, and first published in the San Francisco Chronicle, but too new to be included in her most recent poetry collection, Ledger. It was immediately popular, because although it focused ostenibly on her rescue of an intruder ant in her home, it spoke universally to all of us feeling those first pangs of pandemic isolation. Anyway, here is my poem.

The First Year 

This has been a brutal time.
I am still here.
 
I've been lucky enough to dodge disaster,
sanity still intact
through this morning, at least.
 
Are we now seeing the tunnel's bright end?
 
It depends on all of us.
 
I hold out hope
today
and pray
sensible people will prevail.
 
I watched a Cooper's hawk
take down a robin yesterday morning
then feast in my backyard.
 
That robin may have thought it was safe
till talons hooked into it.
 
Scales try to balance
commerce with the risk -
many want to eat out, exercise, drink.
 
Science says, not just yet;
immunity's the key, shots in arms essential.
Watch the numbers and graphs.
 
I see a red fox lope across my lawn.
Eventually, nature balances itself.
Where do we fit in, and how much longer?
 
Are we even deserving?
Will this be our extinction event?
Hubris can be a fatal flaw.
 
I mask, I wash, I distance.
 
This spring when everything strives to open,
connect, expand
beyond the confines of homes and bubbles,
I tread lightly.

 

And here is my friend Jane's, against which I can only aspire to compare:

Today, When I Could Do Nothing

by Jane Hirshfield

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —
then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom —
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

[Reprinted with permission of the author.]

 

PAD Challenge Day 4: A Bleak Reality

 Today's Poetic Asides prompt is to write an "active" poem, whatever that may mean to you. NaPoWriMo's prompt is to visit the Twitter site https://twitter.com/SpaceLiminalBot and view the assortment of deserted, "liminal" images for inspiration. I actually found the header image to be one of the most haunting, but it didn't take me in the direction that blog host Maureen Thorson suggested. Instead, it reminded me of what has been going on too much in our country in recent years. It's a rather short, bleak, haiku-like poem:

again
 
back door ajar
near the dumpster
and next to the gym
 
active shooter

Perhaps as a sort of antidote, I'll offer this poem which I wrote a few years ago, actually titled "Liminal", and inspired by an essay by my brilliant mentor and friend Jane Hirshfield.

Liminal
 
For each door you open
there is also a threshold.
 
When you pass through
you lose something of yourself.
 
Old clothes fall away and
you wipe the mud from your shoes.
 
You are on the edge,
netherworld between two rooms
 
and the people in either one
have turned their backs to you.
 
This is where they tell you to go
in an earthquake -
 
the lintel and sill hold you inside
a charmed rectangle.
 
But you are the one
who will do the shaking -
 
and in that lonely doorway
you will understand
 
how isolation opens the heart.
Shunned by the world,
 
you will feel love for it,
as a cloistered nun,
 
an Amish boy returning
after his year of "wild time,"
  
or the old poet Komachi
who lost her beauty and status
 
but who still had more wisdom
that any priest.
 
Confident, with papers in hand,
you will step into the next room,
 
where bright afternoon sun
streams through tall windows.
 
The guests will turn around
and as they listen to you read.
 
They will smile in recognition
because you will remind them
 
that everyone, even the medieval monk,
likes to write in the margins.
 
 

PAD Challenge Day 3: How Fast They Grow

 Today's dual prompts from the Writers Digest blog and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "communication" poem, and (2) write a poem based on a "personal universe deck." Basically, it's a deck of "flash cards" you create from a list of words you select with certain parameters, like the five senses, action words, only one abstraction, etc. It was conceived and presented by poet Michael McClure at a Naropa lecture in 1976. Here is a link with the specifics.

I've done "word bank" exercises like this before, like the weekly word bank posted on the Sunday Whirl blog, which I frequently use. Jane Hirshfield also had a similar exercise in her workshop at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She called it the Poet's Painting Box, I believe - I wrote one of my best sonnets ever, for example, using that resource in her workshop. So I tried this too, selecting 100 words by free association, more or less. I didn't make the cards, but I compiled a grid of words (another option shown on the above link) and randomly picked a dozen of them "blindfold"-style. They may not be the most colorful or inspiring words ever used in a poem, but I'm fairly satisfied with where they took me. (The words I randomly picked were baby, eye, shatter, rustle, laugh, cheddar, shrimp, mint, leather, sandpaper, ice, and coffee.)

Baby
 
At five months,
his eyes follow you everywhere,
dark brown, with a knowing glint.
His coos imitate your speech
with a string of vowels, not having
figured out the consonants yet,
but for the occasional g.
He flashes broad toothless smiles
to everyone he knows,
and with a little luck, a laugh too.
Sounds get his attention -
the rustle of a favorite teddy,
the startling shattered glass.
His fingers explore how things feel -
your leather jacket,
your sandpaper cheek of whiskers,
the icy white of first snow.
Soon the world of tastes will open up,
beyond the bottle and the thumb,
and before you know it, he will
be eating shrimp and cheddar biscuits,
mint ice cream, drinking coffee,
listening to loud discordant music,
and telling you why
you're too old to understand him.
 

PAD Challenge Day 2: The Branch Not Taken

 Today's prompts from Robert Lee Brewer and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "what will the future bring" poem (think about a possible future outcome, either general or personal, and make that the title of the poem, and (2) read Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and reflect on choices you made or might have made and how they changed, or might have changed, your life. So here are two apparently conflicting prompts that actually can work pretty well together, and seem to lead one to contemplate both past and future. For example:

Up to Fifty
 
Unlike Frost, I see divergent paths
as branches, not as roads. Sometimes I think
of how this life would be if I had climbed
a different limb, perhaps the one that took
me to another school, a college in
the South, where I would never meet the girl
who's now my wife. So many choices followed,
as I clambered up and up, and yet she
stayed beside, as we helped each other reach
these heights. Looking down, I realize there's
more past below than future left to climb.
Eventually, I'll lose my grip and fall
to earth, a castoff autumn leaf, or reach
a branch that's just not strong enough. But I've
still got work to do, to shimmy up
this seven-decade oak, and she with me,
up toward that golden anniversary,
and then we'll sit and marvel at the view.
 

PAD Challenge: Say Hello to April and Jazz II

 Here's a bonus poem,written just for Robert Lee Brewer's prompt to write an "introduction" poem.

It's Me, April
 
Knock, knock.
It's April.
Will you let me in?
I know that you've heard
that I'm the cruelest month,
and that I bring showers,
so today you may feel like a fool
letting me in, but give me time.
By the middle of the month,
I may be taxing,
but after that you'll warm to me
and I'll warm for you.
We'll celebrate the Earth
and what we can do to save it,
then I'll put on my best floral dress
and dazzle you.
And don't forget, dear poet,
I'm bringing baseball
and your birthday with me!

PAD Challenge Day 1: Say Hello to April and Jazz

 Okay, here we go! It actually feels good to have ten poems written already coming into National Poetry Month. So I guess my new goal this year is 40 poems in 40 days. 

Today's prompts from Robert Lee Brewer's blog (now with the rather dull title "Write Better Poetry") and NaPoWriMo: (1) write an "introduction" poem, and (2) write a poem inspired in some way by an animated video of Sun Ra and His Arkestra's "Seductive Fantasy." It's a pretty wild and psychedelic video, and you can find it on Youtube. It didn't inspire me to write a "deranged" poem as blog host Maureen Thorson suggested, but I did come up with this:

Introduction to Jazz
 
Pleased to meet you, I'm Jazz.
I was born plump and fat from Louis' horn
on a sweaty Nola night.
 
Ella taught me how to speak, words
and syllables I never heard before
as she scatted, the band played
and jitterbuggers whirled on the floor.
 
Dizzy and Miles were my godfathers,
Diz with his puffed-out cheeks and tilted horn,
Miles with his shades, oozing cool,
be-bopping me through childhood.
 
Trane brought me into adolescence,
his sax on the straightaway of melody
then winding up the mountain road
into the rare air of unleashed harmonics
where rules no longer applied.
 
A side trip into bossa nova,
an island where crystal-blue water
lapped at my toes, and Getz and Gilberto
wafted like a trade wind in the palms.
 
Then I ricocheted back to rock and funk,
Chick and Herbie and Weather Report,
infusing me with new blood,
and Sun Ra, building worlds, launching
my brain into orbits around them.
 
That's not the whole story.
I'd like to tell you more.
What would you like me to play?

Also, here is the last of the "warmup" poems I wrote in March, a response to Robert's "T-minus 6" day prompt to write an "invention" poem. It's about a centenarian who got a lot of attention on his birthday last week.

MAD Genius at Work
 
Al Jaffee's the old man of MAD -
eighty years on the job? Not too bad!
A gifted cartoonist,
and clever lampoonist,
he's one of the best that they had.
 
In one feature he, I should mention,
penned many a wacky invention.
But some things that he drew
eventually came true,
which may not have been his intention.
 
From his genius brain, ideas poured -
computer spell-checker, snowboard,
the multi-blade razor,
but not the space laser -
a patent should be his reward.
 
You're 100, Al - you've got class!
Your prescience is hard to surpass,
and you've lived long enough
('cos you've got the right stuff)
to see your ideas come to pass!