Forms (#15)

Questions I have no answer to:

Who sees love coming? (Helen Humphreys)

How long can this coffee cup last? (Megan Willome)

Tell me, what is it you plan to do 

with your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver)

Do the shells still hear the sea,

though they are in pieces; (L.L. Barkat)

Can you be sick for a home you’ve never seen? (Jen Rose)

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (William Blake)

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck

if a woodchuck could chuck wood? (C. Huckie)

What’s the point? (Likely everyone at some pointless point in their life)

What is a poem? (Mark Yakich)

Forms (#14)

Inspired by Bridgett's blitz poem. The title didn't come out quite right  but I don't have time to fiddle with things... time to pack. (The form was trickier than it first appeared. And I did think of calling it "Make it long," but knew everyone's minds would take a U-turn and head in the wrong direction if I did.)

Make a long (story short)

On the move

On the make

Make love not war

Make fuck with me*

Me me me

Me too

Too little

Too late

Late nights 

Late again

Again you say

Again you leave

Leave me alone

Leave me be

Be strong

Be silent

Silent night

Silent gold

Gold digger

Gold finger

Finger foods

Finger licking

Licking slurping

Licking lies

Lies all lies

Lies still

Still room

Still remember

Remember when

Remember wrong

Wrong way

Wrong turn

Turn on the charm

Turn cold

Cold winters

Cold as ice

Ice slices

Ice cream

Cream puffs

Cream dreams

Dreams of daylilies

Dreams of darkness

Darkness harkens

Darkness and so

So be it

So long
Long gone 
Long distance

Distance
Gone

*Just watched Shirley ‘Valentine. Again.

Forms (#13)

Post from a previous month that I am repurposing as a monostitch

I don't have a thing to wear.

Poems (#12)

I think it's a pantoum

A friend asked today, “Have you lived well?”

My response slow in coming, for

On what part to dwell?

So much of the past, now ancient lore.

My response slow in coming, for

That strip of dark forest

So much of the past, now ancient lore

But vomit and fear, can I ignore this?

That strip of dark forest

No adults permitted

Vomit and fear, can I ignore this

Let my memories be limited?

No adults permitted

A heaven gone wild

Let my memories be limited:

I was a happy child.

A heaven gone wild

The earth a soft loam

I was a happy child

But too free to roam.

The earth a soft loam

Bluebells galore, no fear to quell

And so free to roam.

A friend asked, “Today, have you lived well?”

Poems (#11)

In desperation, I went to this poem generator and asked for a quickie. I specified a sad tone, that the poem be about a female, and that she owns a chainsaw, which is dainty and fancy. Here's the result: 

Whose chainsaw is that? I think I know.
Its owner is quite sad though.
It really is a tale of woe,
I watch her frown. I cry hello.

She gives her chainsaw a shake,
And sobs until the tears make.
The only other sound's the break,
Of distant waves and birds awake.

The chainsaw is dainty, fancy and deep,
But she has promises to keep,
Until then she shall not sleep.
She lies in bed with ducts that weep.

She rises from her bitter bed,
With thoughts of sadness in her head,
She idolises being dead.
Facing the day with never ending dread.

Non-poetic interruption

If I don’t return from Greece, you’re all welcome to visit me here. Pack a lint brush.

Forms (#10)

Preamble to Limerick for Judy

1. Judy did a consumer DNA test and was really hoping to learn that she has Neanderthal ancestry.
2. Judy wrote a book about body hair.
3. Judy is wild about Louis.
4. Judy and Louis have wild sex. (I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me telling you this. In fact, some of their sexcapades will be included in her next book.)
5. Judy is an anglophone. Louis is a francophone.

There once roamed a Neanderthal named Judy,

Whose occipital bun conferred rank of patootie.

In body hair she revelled

And was often dishevelled 

From rolls in the cave with Cro-Magnon Louis.

Forms (#9)

Below is the section from an article that I mashed up to create my Dadaist poem. (I selected these passages because they include the word chainsaw, which some in the group appear to be inordinately, almost DSM diagnosis-worthily, fond of).

"People here would love to keep them all, but, eventually we're going to get to the point where we're overrun with them," Nichols said. "There are so many chainsaw carvings, one city worker has to spend most of his work day curating and caring for them.”

Nichols said the idea of selling off public art was a contentious one, and many people in the community are quite attached to the sculptures. However, Nichols says the money will be put to good use at next year's carving championships.

This poem resembles me* 

Them use but, would most curating keep love

at championships spend Nichols community where caring people a many all,

contentious eventually said. Sculptures. So worker one, “People

carvings, to money are next we’re here quite 
there was however for work and good them going overrun many his will 
the public says chainsaw with Nichols day to and has the are to

to attached we’re carving one year’s idea point to the Nichols get to the 
be them” selling in city art

of the said to put off of.

* Apparently I am a riddle wrapped up in an enigma so tightly that my brain is being deprived of oxygen. 

Forms (#8)

Following is an excerpt from this site: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/chance-operations-poetic-term . Tonight's project is to compose a Dadaist poem. Tomorrow, I will post the results for the "vulgar herd" to critique.

Chance Operations 

In one section of Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love," he offers the following instructions to make a Dadaist poem, here translated from the original French by Barbara Wright:

     Take a newspaper.
     Take some scissors.
     Choose from this paper an article the length you want to
        make your poem.
     Cut out the article.
     Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up
        this article and put them all in a bag.
     Shake gently.
     Next take out each cutting one after the other.
     Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

     

     The poem will resemble you.
     

     And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Forms (#7)

Below is one of the reformatted versions of the poem I mentioned in my previous post. I couldn’t find the one I originally wrote—which had much shorter lines—or any of the otherly lineated versions. I’ve left this as is, even though I'm not happy with it and have no idea why I used the line breaks and spacing that I did. (Why, for example, did I choose to emphasize “then sets off to perch on a neighbouring roof”? Is this just pretentious claptrap?) 

Unlike Bridgett, I wish there were a mathematical formula for creating the perfect poetic line, rather than the more-slippery-than-the-slipperiest-eel/slope art that it is.

Babi Yar*

We need to leave early if we want a seat she tells her daughter Malka, a Russian nesting doll deep within her clothes who waddles and complains. Picking up a suitcase crammed with photographs jewelry lace she tucks some bread inside her coat and asks Malka to wait outside. Opening a window she unlatches the door of Anton’s cage, watches as he flutters between everyday life and the unknown

then sets off to perch on a neighbouring roof. 

She has told Malka that someone will feed Anton but there will be no one, they have all been ordered to leave. Anton will not survive the winter’s cold but she does not want him singing his swan song to an empty room.

Outside families move in one direction, migrating birds that call to one another yet stay in formation, knowing they must leave before it is too late. Funnelled through gates they are caught in a corridor filled with laughter kicks punches. Malka grows smaller and smaller as each layer is removed until she is naked, crying. Malka quiet please be quiet please. They pick her daughter up and like children playing swing her to and fro

then heave her through the air.  

She soars briefly, thin arms and legs flailing – a young bird trying its best to stay aloft – then drops from view.

At the edge of the ravine now she looks into the black holes of machine gun barrels, eyes of her executioners. It is time to let go of thoughts of trains, of your child’s cries

and fly.

* Babi Yar was the site of multiple massacres during World War II. People were lined up at the edge of the ravine and shot, while some (including children) were simply tossed into it and left to die.

Forms (#6)

The only other poem I’ve written—aside from the odd (likely very odd) long-forgotten haiku or limerick—is free verse. I fiddled a lot with the lineation, a term I just learned today, after looking at this site. If you don’t want to read it (the essay on that site) in its entirety, the examples below are meant to show how “lineation shapes readers’ involvement in and understanding of a poem.” 

The four AM cries

of my son worm

through the double

foam of earplugs

and diazepam.

(Cries at four a.m., or is four a.m. itself crying?

(Ah, a baby or kid. Weird to end on worm. Is the son wormlike?)

(Double what?)

(Ah, earplugs! There must be two of them. OK, I’m feeling good here—wait, there’s a big break.)

(Oh. Huh. This is an anti-anxiety drug. That raises the stakes a bit. And the diazepam is part of the double foam, isn't it? One more barrier the cries have to break through. The speaker is both physically and mentally guarded.)

Brock’s use of enjambment allows him to dole out information bit by bit, heightening readers’ curiosity and the drama hidden inside an otherwise common domestic scene. 

The four AM cries of my son

worm through the double foam

of earplugs and diazepam.

Far fewer questions propel me through the poem. The brief mysteries are clarified, and gone are some of the odder valences the enjambment produced, such as the interesting association between worm and son, which lumps the child in with other things to guard against, such as poisonous spiders. 

The four AM cries of my son worm through the double foam of earplugs and diazepam.

Well, now I’m just uninterested. Without the odd tones and questions the original enjambed lines produced, this scene seems ordinary and dull.

This is a long-winded (likely very long-winded) build-up to what I really wanted to say: in that one free verse poem I wrote, the perfect lineation eluded me. Or make that,

the perfect

lineation eluded

me.

Poems (#5)

Found villanelle—thanks to Mali, who suggested where I might find it*—written for my younger nephew on his 16th birthday (he’s now 24, and still has a full head of hair)

Oh, you'll go far with that glorious hair

And those pearly whites, the world's your oyster!

But beware: androgenic alopecia** isn't that rare.

Words you'll deliver with sublime dare

Whispering sweet nothings like mize and goister

Oh, you'll go far with that glorious hair.

There'll be parties and offers and loads of fanfare

Let down your hair, prepare to roister!

But beware: androgenic alopecia isn't that rare.

You'll whirl and swirl, a passionate pair

Yet on the lonely hearts club you'll eventually foist her

Oh, you'll go far with that glorious hair.

Your pad will be a groovy lair

For you no retreat into a cloister!

But beware: androgenic alopecia isn't that rare.

Your clothes, mon cher, sont très debonair

Your skin, your lips, could not be moister

Oh, you'll go far with that glorious hair

But beware: androgenic alopecia isn't that rare.

* I can't even think inside the box

** Male pattern baldness

Forms (#4)

A villanelle containing my second favourite word (flummery)

The new world order, a triumph of thuggery

Demented dickheads belching lies

Oh get me, get me to a nunnery.

Masses of minions engage in flummery

Striving to quell temper’s hair-trigger rise

The new world order, a triumph of thuggery.

Rumours of strippers and patent adultery

Outrageous claims of penile grandize

Oh get me, get me to a nunnery.

Hungry man monsters, fat and blubbery

Consuming control, the ultimate prize

The new world order, a triumph of thuggery.

Where once prevailed an outlook summery

Clouds of dismay beyond outsize

Oh get me, get me to a nunnery.

There is no more a viable snuggery

Or words of comfort for those few wise

The new world order, a triumph of thuggery

Oh get me, get me to a nunnery.

Forms (#3)

I wrote a villanelle* for my youngest nephew on the occasion of his 16th birthday. I searched and searched for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I do remember, because of the first few lines I wrote and the villainous rhyme scheme of villanelles, that I was challenged to find words that rhyme with “oyster.” Three I remember using were “cloister,” “moister" and "roister."

Although I was unsuccessful in finding that villanelle, my search did turn up a list of things I wanted to incorporate or turn into short stories. One was an anecdote recounted to me by a former coworker: “Grandmother going through menopause during Lord’s Prayer in church one Sunday. Could precisely time the event because she had one hot flash and that was it.”

*Some notes on villanelles (directly lifted from Wikipedia):

With reference to the form's repetition of lines, Philip K. Jason suggests that the "villanelle is often used, and properly used, to deal with one or another degree of obsession"^[24] citing Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" amongst other examples. He notes the possibility for the form to evoke, through the relationship between the repeated lines, a feeling of dislocation and a "paradigm for schizophrenia".^[24] This repetition of lines has been considered to prevent villanelles from possessing a "conventional tone"^[25] and that instead they are closer in form to a song or lyric poetry.^[25] Stephen Fry opines that the villanelle "is a form that seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves as such", having a "playful artifice" which suits "rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or fatalism".^[26] (In spite of this, the villanelle has also often been used for light verse, as for instance Louis Untermeyer's "Lugubrious Villanelle of Platitudes".^[27][28])

On the relationship between form and content, Anne Ridler notes in an introduction to her own poem "Villanelle for the Middle of the Way" a point made by T. S. Eliot, that "to use very strict form is a help, because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form, and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release".^[29] In an introduction to his own take on the form, entitled "Missing Dates", William Empson suggests that while the villanelle is a "very rigid form", nonetheless W. H. Auden—in his long poem The Sea and the Mirror—had "made it sound absolutely natural like the innocent girl talking".^[30] 

Forms (#2)

Mademoiselle Mimsie caused quite the kerfuffle 

crazily cavorting in pink pantoufles  

down the Champs-Élysées. 

Forms (#1)

To whoever plans to write a eulogy for me: please work in kerfuffle somehow*. 

* I'm hoping that random thought snippets constitute a literary form. 

Books (#14)

A female orca in Puget Sound won’t let go of her dead calf. 

Hearing this reminded me of a strange movie I saw with a friend a few years ago, Under the Skin. Neither of us had a clue what it was about at the time. The character played by Scarlett Johansson, who seemed to be an alien but we weren’t sure, seduced multiple men* and then may have killed them, but we weren’t sure. The entire film was disturbing in its strangeness, but one scene involving a crying baby stood out. Mom and Dad had, if I’m remembering correctly, been killed and thrown in the water by two of the aliens (or whatever they were). The camera lingered on the baby, a tiny wailing thing sitting on a desolate stretch of rocky beach in Scotland, the sea roiling in the background. They (the presumed aliens) were  discussing something trivial—apparently aliens also have to deal with things like laundry and shopping lists—seemingly oblivious to the baby’s distress.

When the movie ended most of the audience was silent. I suspect we were all thinking, “What the hell was that about?” When Heather and I exited the theatre, we put this question to the person at the popcorn stand. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I haven’t actually seen it, but it’s based on a novel.”

I borrowed the book (also titled Under the Skin) from the library. I remember few details, except that it bore little resemblance to the movie, and the “aliens” were furry, four-legged beings who raised two-legged, furless creatures for food… and I finally understood the meaning of that scene in the movie with the baby on the beach.

* Fun fact: While making the movie, Scarlett Johansson would drive a van around Edinburgh. If she spotted the type of man her character in the movie would want to have sex with—and apparently the aliens (or whatever they were) have the same taste in men as I do—she would stop and ask for directions, and then start flirting with him. A film crew was hidden in the back of the van, filming these encounters. Some of that footage made it into the movie (and I’m sure a bunch of men contemplated throwing themselves into the Firth of Forth after having been, unbeknownst to them at the time, propositioned by Johansson, and turning her down).