PAD Day 30: Made it Again!

I can't believe that April's over already. I'm pretty happy with my production this month - depending on how I count them, I've written at least 41 poems this month (46, if you count all the two-line landays and four-line clerihews separately).  As usual, the results varied - I hope there are at least a few contenders for the daily prize of publication in the next edition of Poem Your Heart Out.  On some days writing was easy, and on others, a struggle, but I did write at least one poem for every day in April, and that feels great, especially after a few months of inactivity and "you-call-yourself-a-poet?" self-doubts.

Today's final prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a poem with the title "Bury ________", and
(2) Write a poem "backwards". By this, Maureen Thorson means to start with the last line of a poem and write it, working your way up to the first line; or you can take a poem you already wrote, reverse the order of the lines, and tweak them to make them more cohesive and coherent. I didn't mash up the prompts today, even though it might have been possible, so here's my "Bury" poem:

And here's my "backwards" poem, a rewrite of my Day 4 poem, "Domestic Departures". I thought it was a good choice because of the speaker's ambivalence in the original poem, and also the last line of the original suggests a certain cyclical nature to this relationship.

Domestic Arrivals

So everyone who leaves comes back again -

I walk through the arrivals to make sure.

And as your plane lands, I think that I might

feel I need you. You wrote now and then,

we parted friends, but I wished it was more.

I see you coming - what a lovely sight.

I have a soft spot underneath my smirks

for you.  I thought again - this is no game

inside my chest - there is a burning flame,

and yes, I think the sentimental lurks.

When you left, I felt like such a jerk,

my dry-eyed goodbye later felt so lame,

and it's my fervent hope you feel the same.

I swore I wouldn't but - look, waterworks.

I hope you all had a swell National Poetry Month!

PAD Day 29 Part 2: Written in the Sky

As promised, here's my more "serious" poem.  When you're really stumped, there's always Google, and when I googled "nobody knows", I got two news stories from the past day or two - one was about the terrible earthquake in Nepal, and this other one, much lighter, out of Australia:

PAD Day 29: Trashing Dr. Bill

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "nobody knows" poem, and
(2) Write a poem in the form of a review.

So here's the deal.  I know I still want to write a "serious" poem today because the judge at Poetic Asides is Marge Piercy, one of my favorite poets, with whom I worked for a week in a workshop a few summers ago, and whom I know best of all this month's judges. (See my prior blog entry here for a chronicle of my experience, one of the best weeks I ever spent with poetry.) But I had so much fun responding to the NaPoWriMo prompt that I had to post it early. I'll post another poem later once it comes to me.  This may not qualify as a "poem", and it's certainly not a serious trashing of one my favorite poets of all time, but like I said, it was fun.

Poetry Review

 

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickensso much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickensso much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickensso much depends

upon  

a red wheel

barrow  

glazed with rain

water  

beside the white

chickens 

William Carlos Williams’  latest poem is a study in obfuscation. 

How can only sixteen words

(or fifteen, if one reconnects the maddeningly dissected “wheelbarrow”)

be so obscure and confusing?   

He begins with a statement that “so much depends”

on this piece of farm equipment. What exactly does depend on it?

Apparently, it’s been left out in the rain –

an object thus abandoned would seem to have outlived

its utility, in this humble writer’s opinion.

Methinks that not much really depends

on a wheeled hopper left to rust in the elements.  

And why state the obvious regarding the hue of this device?  

Everyone knows that wheelbarrows are red.   

Regarding the glazing by rain, of what other substance

would rain be composed other than water? 

This writer has never seen motor oil or orange juice

fall from the sky.  The fact that it sits beside the white chickens

seems trivial and coincidental at best.

Of course there are chickens – this is a farm, for pity’s sake. 

And is it really significant that they are white? 

The unusual line breaks only further confound the issues

in the poem, the aforementioned fracture of  “wheelbarrow”

being one such example.  Conceits such as this only help perpetuate

the distressing trends in today’s poetry, which include

the abandonment of classical themes, rhyme and meter,

and even sensible, syntactical arrangement of the words.

If Dr. Williams were not so busy with his medical practice,

and used paper larger than a prescription pad,

perhaps he would have had time to produce a longer,

more substantial poem. As it stands, it is chopped up

like a salad. It could be simplified just by eliminating

the line breaks and unnecessary words: 

So much depends upon a wheelbarrow glazed with rain beside the chickens. 

Congratulations, Dr. Williams – you have written a sentence.

But then we come back to the enigmatic question:

What depends on that goddamned wheelbarrow? 

This writer has lost sleep the last three nights attempting

to decipher its meaning. I guess we will never know. 

-        Reginald Overcrom, The Fusty Review of Literature, December 1962.

 

PAD Day 28: Why Bridges Matter

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NapoWriMo:
(1) Write a "matter" and/or "antimatter" poem, and
(2) Write a poem about a bridge.

I've already written one to fit the second prompt (Day 23), and I know I've written a poem for a previous year's PAD challenge called "Matter/Antimatter". (Did Robert recycle this prompt?)  Anyhow, I decided to use "matter" in a different definition, and came up with this list poem.


Why Bridges Matter

We cross them when we come to them
and must be careful not to burn them behind us.
They may carry us over troubled waters,
then it's just water under the bridge.

We use them to bridge the gap, whether it's a river,
a crevasse, or bad teeth. They blew up the one
on the River Kwai, hanged a man off the Owl Creek,
took pictures of covered ones in Madison County,
played Pooh-sticks off the one in Hundred Acre Wood.
One led to the fantasy kingdom of Terebithia,
Billy Joe McAllister jumped from the Tallahatchie,
and George Bailey contemplated the same fate,
till Clarence fell in the freezing river and changed his life.

We can drive across the Golden Gate, jog across
the Brooklyn, kiss under the Bridge of Sighs,
move the London to Arizona. But the Tacoma Narrows,
that object lesson in engineering,
snapped like a rubber band in the wind,
and Antietam's was soaked with Union blood.

All of them mean something to us, either a path
over adversity, a way somehow impeded,
or simply how to get from here to there.

PAD Day 27: Powers of Two

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:

(1) Write a "looking back" poem, and

(2) Write a "hay(na)ku" (more on that below).

Since it's my birthday today :) , it's easy to "look back". In keeping with my tradition from most recent years, I wrote a birthday poem:

2⁶ 

I don’t remember much about 2¹ or 2²,

but by 2³ I was a precocious second-grader

with three little sisters.  At 2⁴,

I was a geeky sophomore in high school

who was into Dylan Thomas

and thought Jefferson Airplane was groovy.

By 2⁵ I was married, well into my career,

and already raising 2¹ boys.

Now I’m 2⁶, the last time I will be

a power-of-two years old.

Unlike the Beatles’ prediction,

I don’t rent a summer cottage

in the Isle of Wight. I have 2⁰ grandchild,
but her name isn’t Vera, Chuck or Dave.

I’m proud of my 2² grown-up sons,

and I still have all 2⁵ of my teeth.

I could make it to 3⁴, but for now,

I’m just counting on the power of two,

and you’re the best part of that power.

Now for poem #2. The "hay(na)ku" was a form invented by poet Eileen Tabios, and named and popularized by my poet buddy Vince Gotera.  The form is simple: one word in the first line, two in the second, three in the third. You can string them together in inventive ways too. This one is in a form that Vince calls the "hay(na)ku sonnet". Pardon the reference to the same Beatles song:

What to Do on This Birthday 

work

like it’s

any other day 

but

take it

a little easier 

accept

good wishes

gracefully, and smile 

have

a small

celebration at home 

listen to Beatles’

“When I’m Sixty-four”

PAD Day 26: A Shakespearean Climber

Today's guest judge at Poetic Asides is Hélène Cardona, a French poet, actress, and Facebook friend, who also acted in one of my favorite movies, Chocolat. She is, I daresay, perhaps the prettiest judge of the month. 

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:

(1) Make a title out of one or more words from a list of Shakespeare "coinages", and

(2) Write a "persona"poem.

William Shakespeare is credited with inventing more than 1700 words and phrases in English, but that number is probably inflated. While a man of his creative genius probably did coin many words and phrases, it's also likely that he may have been just the first to publish some of them in English. He may not have even the first to commit some of them to print, as there were many publications by other authors of the time that were not preserved over the years.  In any event, we have him to thank for at least introducing them to us.  The list that Robert Brewer provided as a link, which is just a partial list of Shakespearean "inventions", can be found here.  I challenged myself to include as many of these words in a poem as I could, so it was my "word bank" for the day. I got 17 of them into my poem.

As to the "persona" poem, it's a favorite device of mine, and I've written a number of them over the years, some from unusual points of view, like a conjoined twin, the planet Mars, and a middle-aged female crossing guard. But when someone tells me "write a persona poem", I get somewhat stumped, like today.  It took a while to come up with this, which really feels more like an exercise to me than a good poem.  Here it is, for what it's worth. (I underlined the "Shakespearean" words.)

Mountaineer

You may watch in amazement

as I free-climb the sheer face

of this wall, feeling invulnerable.

Nothing will impede my progress

to the summit. I am dauntless -

nothing will dishearten me

from achieving this monumental feat.

I will be the unequivocal champion

when I reach the top and peer out

on a majestic Olympian view.

I know what seems like a mountain

to me is just a bump to you,

and as I am vaulting to my goal,

your single finger flick

dashes my aspirations.

As I fall to the lower depths,

all my efforts seem worthless,

and the savagery of your foot

crushes my hopes into the floor.

PAD Day 25: Over the Ocean, Then and Now

Busy day today, but I still managed to crank out three short poems and a "regular-sized" one, that last one just under the wire. Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write an "across the sea" poem, and
(2) Write a "clerihew".

A "clerihew" is a light verse of four lines with an AABB rhyme scheme. The first line is the name of a famous person, and the other lines describe something about him/her. Meter and syllable count are not important; some clerihews even have run-on lines for comic effect.  So I wrote some "across the sea" clerihews:


Thor Heyerdahl
had us all in thrall
with his journey in a leaky
boat called the Kon-Tiki.



Captain John Smith
made landfall with
some doubts: "This will daunt us..."
till he met Pocahontas.



Mr. Charles Lindbergh
was no August Strindberg -
wrote no plays, but flew solo,
so low he could play water polo.


And here's a more serious one, based just on the Poetic Asides prompt:

Transatlantic Crossings

Many of us have ancestors

who came across the ocean

in a rickety wood boat

or a rusty steamer,

some of us of our own volition,

some in chains against their will.

It was risky, downright deadly

at times, with all the storms

and disease. So I shouldn't complain

that I will be over water

for the next six or seven hours.

I know about odds and statistics -

"You're safer than you are in a car."

But I also know if we fell in

from forty thousand feet,

it would make no difference

if it was water or concrete,

and even if we did survive

there would be no one around

for many miles to pluck us out.

So I pull down the window shade,

stick in my ear buds and watch

some movie I wanted to see

three months ago, maybe doze

for a little while, but not before

thinking of those immigrants

putting their lives on the line

to get to the promised land,

or the others who had no idea

what they would be subjected to

once the manacles came off,

while all I will probably encounter

tonight is a little turbulence.