A Frost

All right, all right, I did an erasure poem. I’m normally not fond of these, but I figured I should be a good sport with the spirit of the NaPoWriMo prompt and do one. I’ve marked the erased text in cream, so you can probably still make out the original, but try to only read the black text, I guess. These always make me feel distinctly un-creative: I feel like taking someone else’s work and chopping away pieces with a machete leaves behind something that is either too similar, or makes so little sense (and the sense it does make is only because of what was there originally). But then, maybe I’m picking the wrong poems, or maybe I’m just trying too hard. I don’t know, this and transliteration are just the bugbears of my text-mucking life.

A Visit from St. Nicholas
(with apologies to Clement Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

Recursion Twenty-Six: city by the sea

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”
~ Norman Maclean, American short story author

Scribbling out a quick prompt while I have the chance…!

Because I assume you want to know more about my sorry little life, after a crisis of confidence in writing last night, I realized that I’d pretty much hit The Wall of NaPoWriMo. You know how runners talk about the wall, that point where your body just refuses to function any further, and even the physics of momentum/inertia seems like it can’t keep you going forward? Muscles and nerves refusing to fire, etc.? I think that about sums up how it was. (I ended up surfing the Net for 2 hours.) But I jotted off a quick rhymey ditty, went to bed, and woke up early enough this morning to treat myself to another pancake breakfast with my notebook in hand. I have to stop making a habit out of this, but at least  it got me feeling like there were things worth saying that I could say, and setting things in motion again. If you’re at that point with the month, never fear: we’re in the final stretch now.

Our river has begun its final descent to the sea. I’m a big fan of cities at river mouths, for some reason: New York, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam. And even seaside places that don’t have a major river by them: Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco. Paris and London and Montreal are all lovely, but there’s too much land around; I love a good marine vista. There’s something about allowing the water to parcel us up that has an implicit (and sometimes misplaced) trust in nature, but also an assertiveness in catching ourselves between land and sea, in the hopes of taming both. We rely on both for survival, and have managed to turn both into mechanisms of trade and development. Or maybe it’s just that now and then we need something to gaze at which is impossible to turn busy: you need a lot of ships and swimmers to make the ocean as distracting as developed earth. People can approach such a city from all directions, and so many factors come together to make them grow, sometimes more than they should, but always in a way that seems relatively effortless.

Such a metropolis is ripe with things to appropriate for poems. If you don’t live in such a place, don’t worry: our exercise today does not rely on firsthand/current experience with it. Think back to those prompts when I asked you to grow things along the edges of a river, using its water. Rather than growing, this time we are going to allow things to come to the river; and remember, the nature of the current has changed, twisted, amplified. Go out and do some gathering in your everyday: try to find twenty items for a list, be they concrete items, abstract ideas, everyday moments, unique experiences, bodily feelings, momentary emotions, or random musings. I recommend standing up and walking around (as Miz Quickly also has you doing today), through a park, a garden, or some other liminal space between the natural and the urban. See how the built collides with the unbuilt, and make note of the interactions that take place.

With that spirit held close, begin to go through your poems this week and see how they reflect the river itself, that line of theme and image that’s been increasing its velocity. Which of the items in your list will be nourished by that stream‘s water? If you noticed a man polishing hubcaps this morning, it may not fit with iconoclastic grief, but if you saw warblers tearing yesterday’s paper to shreds, that could be perfect. Let’s say that for my biological process in the world theme, I came across bees swarming around a dead pigeon, taxicabs nearly colliding, and a woman, topless, smoking on her fire escape. The middle one probably wouldn’t work very well, but the other two have potential. Explore the interaction between these found moments and the theme in question; I know we’ve been doing a lot of resonating of this kind, but my goal is that it puts you in a state of mind to perceive and be ready to investigate such correspondences. Part of the charm of poetry is its ability to pick out the unexpected meanings; part of the charm of the river-as-city-aorta is that sooner or later, everyone wanders down to see it.

And for added masochistic shiggles, if you need a particular form challenge today, it is Day 26, so… maybe try an abecedarian, where each line of the poem starts with the next letter of the alphabet. (Start with whichever letter you want, and maybe circle back to the beginning in a final, 27th line.) Then show us what you’ve got!

Tramp Song

I went to the Publishing Triangle Awards earlier this evening, to hope for the wins of three excellent authors (a memoirist, novelist, and poet, respectively) I admire; two made it, and I am dismayed about the third, but it was still nice to go and check it out. (And it was free/open to the public. Also nice.) I’ve just been in kind of a malaise all day, and wish that had snapped me out of it, but instead I just came home, made dinner, and did absolutely nothing for a while. I don’t know why. I’ve been thinking too much about the future and how much different things I love are worth it.

But Miz Quickly had a prompt that I kind of followed, to write a poem after another poet’s line. This one is from a line by Mark Doty, which is the first line of my poem, from his “At the Gym”. I walked by a bench under flowering trees earlier this evening, and thought it looked like a nice place to nap. That’s about as deep as the story goes.

Tramp Song

Here is some halo
for a carpetbag saint:
the cherry-web blown
and the magnolia browned,
this bench with chipped paint
for a carpetbag throne.
Here is a motive
to be sleeping outside:
the banish of grey
from republican sky,
nobody’s denied
to be sleeping all day.
Here is a coda
on the night-weather’s chords:
by night, blessed to find
a chapel out of wind,
some bench with its boards
on the night-weather’s mind.

Noises

I think – think — this is my fiftieth draft this month (not all of them have been posted), not counting a few revisions of old work along the way. Which means I might achieve my goal of doing two poems + one prompt each day in April after all, which would be a huge relief. (I could sleep happy into May 1.) Maybe I will try to get a little bit ahead of myself this weekend to ease up on Monday and Tuesday next week. But a lot of these also have been remixes, found poems, re-worked texts, and a translation; not sure if I should count those. I suppose the point is to mess with language a little bit and see what happens, yeah? In any case, I think this year’s NaPo has exhausted me than any other I’ve done so far, and I need some serious regroup after it. For now, this is for Poets + Writers‘ challenge to open a book you’re reading (mine: Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates) to a random page (75) and use only the words on that page to make a “literary object”. The title is a throwaway, and I don’t actually feel the way I describe here, but I suppose it works, kind of. Meh. I think I’m usually better off when I just write my own thing… damn this prompt-addiction!

Noises

When I learned longing,
it was too abstract, too dark
with the American night.
My dream-shell might be
casual ink; my fierce choices
free of translation.
An emotional phrase grows
husked and rare in my ears,
later to turn black
with functions. The moon always
explaining; the custom of love
a world-weight, appearing.
Why, I also learned opening,
original and imagistic,
but inside the usual vividness
I stood here too aware. I was
made in reverse, then
believed that image mine.

That Word

I admit I’m being straight-up cheeky with this piece, after a very long and dismal day that I’m trying to erase from my memory. Tried over and over to do the NaPoWriMo prompt, but the trouble with being a language nerd and translation industry professional is that I can’t just not-quite-translate a poem from an unfamiliar tongue. First, there’s few that are truly unfamiliar to me, at least among ones that you’re liable to find poetry in easily. At the very least, I can usually identify the language itself, the pronunciation, and hazard a few guesses about words. Then, I get very hung up on trying to capture the sounds perfectly into English words, rather than just mucking about with what the text looks like. So instead I did Miz Q‘s prompt to re-line a chunk of prose.

And she may recognize where I got it from. ^_^

That Word

By rights,
each line should have
a reason for being a separate line, a reason
for beginning where it does,
and a reason for ending with just
that word. Even if
that word is there,
as in formal poems, for the rhyme
or to complete a syllable count.
And if that word is there
in free verse because you want it to shout,
the word is still only
part of the line,
and the line is only
part of the poem.

Fire Ecology, remixed

Too much chocolate, I think, has left me with an unhappy stomach this evening. At least, that’s what I’m blaming it on, because the very idea of being sick simply won’t do in my life right now. For dinner, I have eaten an avocado sprinkled with salt, and I think that will be all I need. Meanwhile, catching up some poetry business… tomorrow is the Rainbow Book Fair, which will eat up a lot of time, but since I already feel slumped from work today, I will redouble my efforts to get some things written in the scraps of time available. On Sunday I’ll do a count of poems, because it will be nigh the halfway point, and I’d like to check. The goal this month was 2 poems + 1 prompt per day + an extra prompt/poem whenever I could toss one in. (Not all of them have been online.) I should be up to 24 and a few. What the hell am I thinking?

Miz Quickly was asking for remixes of stuff we’ve already written this month. I took “Fire Ecology” from last week and tried a cut-up remix, as well as an erasure. I miss the actual Erasures site; I hope they come back soon. Meanwhile, this is what I’ve got; I’ll count it as some progress for the day, I suppose!

Fire Ecology, remixed

endless upward tongue give tongue and
risen his god indifferent, want fortunate sun,
wide-as-the-world throw the kerosene,
cage cage seas said;

I paper crackling finger, thinking kerosene,
stand on your white moth seas as India
your kerosene of want crossing me
the prayers, and

oil god sawtoothed inside give sierras
and ink, dissolve the well, thinking your love that is
the prayers, and to sacrifice breaking well,
to climb with your fact;

all kerosene, atmosphere to fortunate sun,
wide-as-the-world comet wet grazing inside prayers,
and India be atmosphere to stand on
endless, itself risen as I, thinking

…

Fire Ecology (rmxd)

give me
love that blinds,

the flame grazing wet white
free of atmosphere

throw it into
black ink,

dissolve your tongue and
endless wick

prayers, your tongue
your cage, quiet god

out of his indifferent burn

Cana

Well, I find myself somewhat bemused, but also chuffed, that my blog showed up on the WordPress Freshly Pressed site this morning. (Although, like when they show those sweepstakes winners on TV, and they answer the door in housecoats or sweatpants with, I don’t know, pizza sauce in their upper lip, I feel like the particular post that was featured was one of my clunkier ones.) Honestly, I have no idea how that process works, but: thanks, WordPress! I hope that means people like the blog, and that if there are new people cruising my writing, they like it, too.

So, I’m doing a couple different challenges for the month, some of which I will put on here, some of which I won’t. I think that the NaPoWriMo.net ones will all find their way here, as will other prompted poems as the occasion arises. There will also be daily Recursions, and occasional Refineries. But then, as always, I will keep my workshop poems offline, along with other prompt work that happens when I least expect it. (Tomorrow I’m going down to DC, so I hope a long bus ride will be fruitful. The next day, a ride back up!) Got in two today, though, so I hope that’s a good start…

I’ve been thinking about writing some more lurid-dream poetry. The intersection of sexuality, religion, gritty city things, elemental imagery, and lyric turns of phrase is still, ultimately, my favorite assortment of things in a poem, so probably the NaPo ones will lean heavily on those this month. I’ll get chaste and prudish and whimsical again later. The prompt for Day 1 was to use the first line of another poem for the first of your own, and I ended up using “Life is Fine” by Langston Hughes. Although, this is pretty much as opposite a direction you could go in as possible from his piece. Um, enjoy!

Cana

I went down to the river
Saturday night. I wanted to see her
disassemble the moon, make
little lamp-mirrors to mark the path.
And the men were walking on water
over to the boys’ side
to celebrate the first of Spring. It was
open-up-your-zippers weather
with two cold teeth subtle in its mouth.
The river hummed to be trod on,
sacred and sure in her alto murmur
under a stinking bridge.
I was waiting on a wooden bench.
I was the witness for sudden weddings
dripped from the earliest rosebuds.
And the river: the priestess.
One man pissed in her steady lap, then
sat next to me to make his proposals.
But I said, no, I am only here
changing the night into a story.
Watching the river spell out her name.
I perform no miracles, I kissed
into his ear. And the water is
a bitch tonight, wanting so much to be
more like us, who seem so alive.

Reverie Forty-Five: finder, keeper

There is a great injustice to being sick on a weekend. I feel that it just shouldn’t be allowed; but on the other hand, I suppose I feel there’s a great injustice to having to come to work when I’m sick. I demand some kind of arrangement to remedy both kinds of injustice… in the meantime, at least I don’t have any crazy plan today aside from sitting here at the cafe writing away for hours on end. Still working at the old NaNoWriMo (almost caught up from my delayed start!), and still so much other stuff to do; thus does sickness make lazybones of us all, I guess.

This week: “finder, keeper“

This isn’t a particularly unique prompt, and I’m sure that every prompt site has covered it at one time or another, but I don’t think I’ve ever focused on it as the entire scope of a Reverie. Let’s talk about found poetry. There are some truly clever found poems out there, that manage to turn the most inane segments of text into something beautiful: my favorite (when they actually work) might be the ones made out of spam emails. On the other end of the spectrum are centos (or more properly, centi, I suppose), where whole lines of other beautiful poems are specifically stitched together. We’re going to appropriate a few different ideas for the construction of our found poem, which will only be kind of a found poem: a Frankenpoem, if you’ll pardon the belated Halloween reference.

You must begin with observation. Many writers already carry around a Moleskine, scraps of paper, iPhone or whatever, to record the snippets of dialogue they overhear, the inspired slips of text around a city, or random thoughts that occur while waiting for the bus. Play that up! But try to focus on being extra-receptive to language, images, and happenings around you for a couple of days. There is a semi-Taoist principle that I always keep coming back to when I’m having a shitty day: to live in the world fully, one must love the world, and to love the world fully, one must love all the pieces of it. And to do that, try and spend some time being mutable, allowing the world to speak through you rather than trying to define it in your own poetic terms.

Try to gather words from the most unlikely places: fast food menus, advertisements for sales, crazy old men ranting on the street corner, greeting cards, the publishing information in the frontispiece of a book, photo captions in a magazine, news website headlines, blog comments, etc. (Barbara had a blog comment recently which I insisted was a poem in turn.) Glancing around the cafe, I can see start with a banana and scoop of tuna on the menu (not in the same dish; ew), Col de Vence as the name of a photo on the wall, documentary moviemaking on someone’s textbook, and first aid for at the top of a Heimlich maneuver poster. None of these are particularly elegant, and they aren’t that interesting in context, but the trick with good found poetry is to transform the meaning and use of the phrases, rather than try to find a prettier way to say them. So what if I used scoop of tuna as the taking of a killer whale’s mouth, rather than an ingredient in a salad? What if first aid for was followed by a breaking heart? And can Col de Vence be interpreted as the proper name of a wine, a house, a memory, rather than just a (photograph of a) hill? Using scraps of found text doesn’t mean you can’t let your imagination play with them a bit.

When you have a nice little heap of interesting pieces (maybe thirty bits of language?), expand the field a bit. You may wish to use the cento trick to actively go hunting for a line or phrase or two from a poem. As the classic proverb goes, good writers borrow, great writers steal outright; my process for a cento is usually to go to poets.org and click through randomly until I find something. Another option is, if you have lines lying around from drafts that haven’t become full poems yet, you can try clipping them and splicing them into this piece. Again, believe in the transformative power of a desperate poem: you might have a draft that uses the phrase smiling coffee flower in its botanical sense, but use it now as a metaphor for a person, or the scent of a cafe. At this point, we are moving the pendulum back from allowing the world to speak through us wholesale to actively choosing which parts we want to come through.

And finally, fill in the gaps. Arrange all those lines and words however you want, and use (as little as possible) of your own individual voice to give the bones some flesh. If I took Col de Vence and smiling coffee flower and first aid for and — to grab one more as I’m looking out the window — “this is the best place to start” and — to grab two more unused, unusual lines from poems I have lying around — kiln-fired body and white wine evening, I might end up with:

This is the best place to start
first aid for a kiln-fired body
in pieces: a white wine evening on
Col de Vence, a smiling coffee flower
evening, breathing in relief.

The blue text is really the only part that was created for this poem, though “evening” was borrowed and re-applied twice. Your poem doesn’t have to be very long, and indeed found poetry can be difficult to keep up, which is why I recommend getting such a hefty list of phrases first. Beauty and interest comes from how the words are used unexpectedly, rather than the amount of them.

To go in further directions: in a sense, all poetry is found poetry when it’s observational. People that you pass in the street become found characters, and images that you see in the world around you become found images. The difference is that you have freedom to put these abstract things into your own words, while being forced to use the words of others works a different muscle of adaptation and re-appropriatation. Try to work in reverse; instead of coming up with ways to describe the things you come across, come up with images and people to fit the words you’ve gathered. And the last step I want to suggest is an inversion to the prompt: leave your poem somewhere for another person to find. (There were some really cool ideas when we tried this before, and I suggest presenting the poem in a distinctive way. Maybe you want to sew it onto fabric, or tramp it out on a beach, or typeset each borrowed line differently before printing it out and stapling it to a telephone pole.)

Keep your eyes and ears open, and your recording device of choice handy! Then put the pieces together and show us the mosaic you’ve made.

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Reverie Twenty-Nine: d.i.y.

This is perhaps the most beautiful Saturday of the year. The temperature is perfect, last night’s rain has been banished, there is a cool breeze and the low hum of life. Trying to knock this prompt out before traveling home for the weekend and my aunt’s birthday, so we’ll see how it goes. I made a point of bringing books to occupy myself on a recent long train ride, and I need to do that more often… I realized how much poetic work I could get done when I have nowhere to go for two hours.

This week: “d.i.y.“

For those who are not up-to-date with punk/hipster aesthetics or the latest crazes in home decoration, “d.i.y.” stands for do-it-yourself. (I think it’s a Briticism originally? And of course the French have had the term le bricolage forever.) But it’s more than just the sum of its words, as all good catchphrases and acronyms are: there’s a sense of frugality, repurposing the old to service the new, using some elbow grease to transmute those found bits into something just a little bit closer to the ideal you were envisioning for this or that task. It applies to clothing, furniture, home improvement, arts and crafts — so why not poetry? Although trying to figure out how exactly to apply the same principles to poetry might be a bit difficult.

First and foremost, similar to the foundry prompt two weeks ago, you’re going to need some raw materials. I’m going to talk about two versions of this prompt, so be attentive: you’re going to either need a pile of words or some other poem. Taking craft into your own hands is an admirable business, but you always need some element from elsewhere to work with. This prompt was forming in my head as I stumbled across today’s poem at poets.org, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s sing-songy and veers into a Christianity cul-de-sac, as most of his poems do, but the first line is quite nice:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.

This, in my opinion, demonstrates a d.i.y. principle that might be the most basic and my favorite: make things (including words!) do what you want them to do. (I also call this the Humpty-Dumpty principle, after Lewis Carroll’s version.) While the line could be highly visual and metaphorical (the small fish snatched up by the kingfisher become scraps of fire; the dragonfly, with its wings, reflects light in fiery patterns), take it in a more literal, almost mythic sense. The natural purpose of the animals here is to interact in particular ways with fire. Metaphor is a way of shifting readers’ brains towards an interpretation that we’re looking to express. For this prompt, I want you to approach words not by what they mean, but how you want them to function, and the two can be rather different.

No d.i.y. excursion would be complete without a shopping trip. If we’re talking about individual words as resources, allow me to drop seven semantic fields here, from each of which you might draw one word: flying animals, celestial bodies, rooms, sports equipment, vehicles, utensils, and art objects. Try to come up with a list (scarab beetle, the constellation Lyra, boudoir, ski poles…). Then, try to get away from what the object is/does, and give it a more metaphorical purpose: the scarab beetle doesn’t buzz loudly across the room, it plays a deep blue violin through the air. The boudoir is not for dressing and putting on makeup, it is a gatehouse of truth and secrets.

This isn’t quite found poetry, and you are welcome to use words you stumble across from anywhere, but the idea is to re-invent them. And once you feel a bit more practiced with that, using metaphor and personification and ambiguous shades of meaning to your heart’s content, try re-appropriating whole lines from elsewhere. That line by Hopkins already has a lot of music in it, so let’s say I want to take that and push one interpretation of it into a new poem thing:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flames
with long brushes on the sky. And the birds all pose like
town square fountains, spit burning flowers,
magnesium flares almost too bright to behold.

Where can a stolen, re-woven line carry you? If you want to go a little bit further, you might try a mini cento by plucking a line from each of several poems, and then making each line into a couplet or tercet, re-creating it to summon a particular mood or narrative. You don’t have to plan out the poem beforehand (although you’re welcome to: most d.i.y. projects have at least an idea of a final shape, even if they don’t get there the way that’s expected), but rather allow the words or lines themselves to build the poem up for you. Roll with whatever springs to mind.

Two final important points. First, if you do steal lines, be sure to cite your source to be polite; the advantage of spinning individual words into their unexpected uses is that you have more freedom to do what you want. And second, you can take the aesthetic even further by getting off the computer and coming up with an actual crafty project to build your poem. Maybe you can cut up an existing text and choose a few random words, then glue them to another page and write the lines of your poem around them. (Include a few images too: do it in a truly indie zine-style.) I know that it’s not the most intuitive process, but that’s kind of the point: d.i.y. is supposed to be a break-away from the easy trade of having other people do the work for you. Get away from pre-determined forms and styles of poetry, and single meanings for language; create your own and take on new perspectives. And by all means, if you have additional suggestions to jazz things up (I am not a zine-maker, myself), feel free to share.

As always, we look forward to see what you come up with…!