Day 15 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo)
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a six-line poem that has these qualities: informed by repetition, simple language, and expressing enthusiasm. And so…
Special Delivery
It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming! I heard it in my sleep! Two streets down. Do you hear it now? Come outside! I can’t see it, but I’ll bark my head off anyway, and jump and paw at the fence, because it's coming: the day I finally break outta here and catch that mail truck!
try writing a poem that describes a place, particularly in terms of the animals, plants or other natural phenomena there. Sink into the sound of your location, and use a conversational tone. Incorporate slant rhymes (near or off-rhymes, like “angle” and “flamenco”) into your poem. And for an extra challenge – don’t reference birds or birdsong!
Here we go:
Pilgrim Ridge
Atop Pilgrim Ridge, miles from nowhere – no, that’s not an apt description; Nowhere is quite near, in fact it’s right here – crisp, pure silence defies definition until one acclimates to the endless sky, the light savory air, the rocky ground stubbled in dry remains of early summer wildflowers.
Leaning into the silence, one begins to hear the percussive opening of a breeze-soft symphony; gentle crackling of seed pods, split as the sun bears down, the shaker of seed shot falling to ground, a brush-on-cymbal swish of grasses swaying together, the guiro scrabble of chipmunks skittering up skinny pines to hide in long-needled shelter. And then the music ratchets up.
The chipmunks begin their cuíca scoldings. Wind chimes low tones in the clustered trees, now weaving. Grasses are folding in the hot air. A steady push now; no longer a breeze. Clouds scuttle in and the thunder drum shakes, first slow and lumbering, then brash, a crescendoing rumble that ends with a lightning-bright quake, and the diminuendo of tambourine rain.
Donald Justice’s poem, “There is a gold light in certain old paintings,” plays with both art and music, and uses an interesting and (as far as I know) self-invented form. His six-line stanzas use lines of twelve syllables, and while they don’t use rhyme, they repeat end words. Specifically, the second and fourth line of each stanza repeat an end-word or syllable; the fifth and sixth lines also repeat their end-word or syllable. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that uses Justice’s invented form.
And so:
Pink Moon
April’s full moon – the Pink Moon – lights the sky tonight. Its name evokes spring flowers: creeping phlox, moss pink. Where I live the red flowering currant blooms now. Amongst shrubs with still bare branches, a pop of pink. I stepped outside to view the moon. It wasn’t there. I’ll check later. Perhaps it’s neither here nor there.
Flowering currants are first to bloom in my yard of native species. Osoberry comes on next. Its small pale blossoms don’t make nearly the same splash. Oregon grape blooms next, and then the next, and next. The Pink Moon is not pink; the red currant blooms are. I’d check again, but cat-in-lap says no, so here we are.
Devil’s fingers (Clathrusarcheri ), also known as octopus stinkhorn, is a fungus which has a global distribution. In maturity it smells like putrid flesh.
“Dawn’s rosy fingers” is a recurring metaphor in Homer’s works, like The Odyssey, where it signifies the beginning of a new day and the start of events.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
What Rhymes with Stanza? 