Author Archives: Maggie C

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About Maggie C

Stained glass artist, writer, respecter of life.

Rain

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Day 11 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt:

Take a look at Kyle Dargan’s “Diaspora: A Narcolepsy Hymn.” This poem is a loose villanelle that uses song lyrics as its repeating lines (loose because it doesn’t rhyme).  Your challenge is, like Dargan, to write a poem that incorporates song lyrics – ideally, incorporating them as opposing phrases or refrains. 

I kept with the villanelle form, using the strict rhyming rules to give you:

Rain

Rain, rain, go away.
Your splitter-splatter irks this crone.
Come again another day.

Schemer of blight and decay,
You chill my heart and steep my bones.
Rain, rain, go away.

Keep to your clouds and drift away.
I wish to ruminate alone.
Come again another day.

To your gods I do not pray,
Though many sins I ought atone.
Rain, rain, go away.

Lightning, thunder, those may stay.
Harsh winds attend my rheumy moans.
Come again another day.

If your path I cannot sway
I’ll lift my face, my plight to own. 
Rain, rain, go away.
Come – if you must – another day.

The only other villanelle I’ve written can be found here.

Punt

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Day 10 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt (briefly) is to write a poem using alliteration and punning (“See if you can’t work in references to at least one word you have trouble spelling, and one that you’ve never quite been able to perfectly remember the meaning of”).

I can easily confuse perceptibly and perceptively. And if you ask spellcheck, there are a multitude of words I have trouble spelling. And so:

Punt

Proficiency at punnery
Jeu de mots complicity
Linguistical agility
Vocabulary perfidy

Your punster-dive proclivity
Performed with such alacrity
Perchance some jocularity
Be prized from life's inanity.

A punning pundit, plain to see;
Puns in your blood; puns right past me.
My eyes roll quite perceptively.
Please punderstand and humor me. 

My own jokes flutter languidly
While yours soar with impunity.
A painful incongruity,
A punishing reality.

I’ll end this perfunctorily,
Abrupt and unpunctiliously,
My pungent poem of jealousy.
My punctured ego needs reprieve.

Against the Grain

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Day 9 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt 

Like music, poetry offers us a way to play with and experience sound. This can be through meter, rhyme, varying line lengths, assonance, alliteration, and other techniques that call attention not just to the meaning of words, but the way they echo and resonate against each other. For a look at some of these sound devices in action, read Robert Hillyer’s poem, Fog. It uses both rhyme and uneven line lengths to create a slow, off-kilter rhythm that heightens the poem’s overall ominousness. Today we’d like to challenge you to try writing a poem of your own that uses rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, reference a very specific sound, like the buoy in Hillyer’s poem.

And so,

Against the Grain

In growling complaint, against the grain
my well honed plane 
chatters and shudders in my hands
as if it understands
I am employing it in vain. 

Nonetheless we do our best
and push through the defiant strain.

Working in tandem, my plane and I,
the zippered whir as shavings fly
going with the grain, it will soon rain
fragrant strips and curls of wood.

Once fallen, on the floor they lie
like spent streamers at the curb
after the parade passes by.

Love Song for One Not in Love

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Day 8 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt was rather long, so I added it below the poem. But the short take: Write a love song in the form of a ghazal (defined below).

Love Song for One Not in Love

Write a love song, you tell me. It’s easy.  That true?
When madly in love, it might – just might – be true.

Love is a slippery eel, you can’t pin it down, even with
arrows, dear Cupid, with your aim straight and true.

Love sunshine and bunnies and chocolate and unicorns.
“In love” takes more than rose glasses. Now that’s true! 

A duet, a round, utter cacophony. Oooh, that last one!
That’s what love sounds like, were I ruthlessly true.

Enough, though, Maggie. Sing your shanties or anthems
or hymns or blues. Whatever. Just to your own self be true.

The prompt:

The ghazal (pronounced kind of like “huzzle,” with a particularly husky “h” at the beginning) is a form that originates in Arabic poetry, and is often used for love poems. Ghazals commonly consist of five to fifteen couplets that are independent from each other but are nonetheless linked abstractly in their theme; and more concretely by their form. And what is that form? In English ghazals, the usual constraints are that:

  • the lines all have to be of around the same length (though formal meter/syllable-counts are not employed); and
  • both lines of the first couplet end on the same word or words, which then form a refrain that is echoed at the end of each succeeding couplet.

Another aspect of the traditional ghazal form that has become popular in English is having the poet’s own name (or a reference to the poet – like a nickname) appear in the final couplet.

Want an example? Try Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal.”

Now try writing your own ghazal that takes the form of a love song – however you want to define that. Observe the conventions of the repeated word, including your own name (or a reference to yourself) and having the stanzas present independent thoughts along a single theme – a meditation, not a story.

Why I Am Not a Soup Can

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Andy Warhol, Green Pea

Day 7 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt 

A few days ago, we looked at Frank O’Hara’s poem in which he explained why he was not a painter. Jane Yeh’s “Why I Am Not a Sculpture” has a similar sense of playfulness, as she both compares herself to a sculpture and uses a series of rather silly and elaborate similes, along with references to dubious historical “facts.” Today, we challenge you to write a similar kind of self-portrait poem, in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet), use at least one outlandish comparison, and a strange (and maybe not actually real) fact.

Nothing too outlandish, really, but here’s my attempt:

Why I’m Not a Soup Can

Not far down the branches of my family bramble
there are Campbells. 
They came from Scotland, where the
pea soup is thicker than an Aberdeen haar.
But soupy family fog does not a soup can make.

Warhol painted soup cans. Thirty two of them.
I have lived 32 years. Twice over. 

His style, Pop Art. Mine, pointillism. 
A bazillion little adams held together
by a strong force, eve. Quite quarky. 

Both soup cans and I hold a mash-up of ingredients.
Peas, corn, mushrooms.
Anxiety, hope, high fructose corn syrup…

For soup, add water. For me, add compassion.

Time for Tea

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Day 6 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt utilizes columns again. We are asked to pick a number 1-10, then scroll to a chart of four columns and 10 rows. From there,

“Find the row with your number. Then, write a poem describing the taste of the item in Column A, using the words that appear in that row in Column B and C. For bonus points, give your poem the title of the word that appears in Column A for your row, but don’t use that word in the poem itself.”

I chose the number 4 and the corresponding row provided the title “Tea” and the words “cuckoo” and “unfit.” And so, may I offer you some…

Tea

Who put the cuckoo in the clock,
it’s two beat song so bland and fleet?
So many notes from which to choose
why opt for bitter over sweet?

Weak or strong, the cuckoo’s song,
a lullaby to help you sleep, or 
prone to set one’s teeth on edge
when each hour bids one more repeat.

A song unfit to stand alone,
too sharp, too dull, too flat, too steeped.
With cream and sugar coat the gears,
so cuckoo’s clock its rounds may keep.

Improv Screams

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Day 5 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is a bit complicated to explain.

… inspired by musical notation, and particularly those little italicized –and often Italian – instructions you’ll find over the staves in sheet music, like con allegro or andante.

We are presented with three columns of words, and instructed to

First, pick a notation from the first column below. Then, pick a musical genre from the second column. Finally, pick at least one word from the third column. Now write a poem that takes inspiration from your musical genre and notation, and uses the word or words you picked from the third column.

I won’t reproduce the full columns, but the notations include gems like, “play like you are about to start crying,” “tempo di murder” and “with a hint of frenzy.” Musical genres include, “yacht rock,” “jazz fantasia” and “breakup anthem,” among others.

My selections were: genre “power ballad;” notation “improvisatory screaming;” and the word vampire.

Thus, my poem:

Screaming Meemies

A ballad not for faint of heart
this story I’m about to [scream]
a tale so foul [a shuddered moan]
derived from Satan’s basest dreams.

The clock tolled noon one fateful day.
A lightning strike; earth split a seam
and from the depths of hell arose 
a fiend astride a golden gleam.

This incubus [a prolonged shriek]
this vampire spewing blood and greed
loosed upon our hallowed grounds
to feast upon our direst needs.

A knight in armor tarnished gray,
and yet a hundred score and five,
fell at his feet [cue gnashing teeth]
to save careers (and ruin lives).

Such devastation [Banshee’s screech],
depriving souls their tended dreams,
all done to fatten Satan’s purse
and trample those of lesser means.

This [haunting howl] yet to resolve,
to hell consigned or fait accompli?
No hero comes to save the day.
It rests on you, it rests on me.

Conjoined

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Day 4 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt:

In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. … Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.

Thus:

Conjoined 

Every time I touch you, 
I track a different story.

Of Nature's wisdom and resilience;
how two branches melded into one,
fibers joining to heal a friction wound.

Of what happenstance compelled such intimacy;
sheer gravity, crowding overgrowth, maybe
competition for life-giving light. 

Of the artistic bent of chaos,
that rendered a random bonding into
perfectly balanced asymmetry.

A masterpiece of your own right;
vying with any art created by humankind.
I am humbled to have found you 
discarded in a brush pile.

They wonder why I keep tree branches
about the house. 
I wonder why they don’t see the art.

Why I’m Not a Poet

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Day 3 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt:

… American poet Frank O’Hara [s]… poems feature a breezy, funny, conversational style. His poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” is pretty characteristic, with actual dialogue and a playfully offhand tone. Following O’Hara, … write a poem that obliquely explains why you are a poet and not some other kind of artist – or, if you think of yourself as more of a musician or painter (or school bus driver or scuba diver or expert on medieval Maltese banking) – explain why you are that and not something else!

Hence:

Why I’m Not a Poet

Well, dang, this is embarrassing. 
Here I am, caught in the act;
attempting to commit poesy,
and I’m not even a poet.

I think too concretely to be a poet. 
Poets use stepping stones as metaphor.
I use concrete as stepping stones. 

Poet Frost says “good fences make good neighbors.”
I say good fences guard my veggies from hungry rabbits.

Gertrude Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose.”
Me: That damned rose I’ve dug up three times now
is growing back yet again! Where’s the shovel? 

You wax poetic,
I wax the teeth on my dovetail saw. 

Alas, if not a poet, then what am I? 
A mason, a gardener, a landscaper, a woodworker?
A stepper of stones, a guardian of gardens,
a shaper of shrubbery, a worker of wood?

I dunno. How’s that for a poetic closing line?

The Protestant

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Day 2 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt:

we challenge you to write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word, an odd/unusual simile, a statement of “fact,” and something that seems out of place in time…

Herewith:

The Protestant

Are you going to the protest? I am.
Heard that before? That’s because I’ve said it before.
I mean it this time.
I’ll be the queen of protestation!
Thou thinkest I protesteth too mucheth?  Ha! 
And, no, when I said protestation I didn’t
mean prostration. 

But really. I’ve got it all figured out.
I’m making a sign, at my kitchen table
with the curtains drawn so the neighbors won’t see.
I’m sharing my opinions in big block letters,
though I’d rather just print them on an index card.
Maybe file them away in my mother’s old recipe box.
In the back with the newspaper clippings of obituaries
and the torn off corners of Christmas card envelopes
bearing old friends’ new addresses. 

I figure I’ll take the sign out to my car 
disguised in a trench coat like
an under cover bedbug.
Signs don’t wear trench coats? 
A dead giveaway, then.
Okay, I’ll just spirit it out of the house
under the cover of darkness,
like an insomniacal bedbug.

Of course I worry.
What if I get there and I don’t see anyone I know? 
What if I get there and someone I know sees me? 
You say my excuses are infinityesimal?
Tiny and of little consequence, but
they can go on forever.
[eye roll] Very funny.

I mean it this time.
I’m going to the protest.
Are you?