Sunday, April 2, 2023

Day Two ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2023


Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a B-movie poem. Our family has a tradition of watching a B-movie every Saturday night. Some of them are kind of funny, some of them are so bad they're good, and some of them are just torture (until I inevitably fall asleep from boredom). And some of them have excellent titles like The Tingler, Kingdom of the Spiders, Teenagers From Outer Space, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies.”

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo suggestion today involves an exercise based on Paul Celan, to produce surrealist statements from a list of words, including fog, miracle, mercurial, ghost, quahog, and others, then fashioning a poem from those surreal phrases.

I must confess the surrealist statement portion of today's NaPoWriMo exercise did not appeal to me, so I merely wrote a B-movie poem using some of the words from Maureen's list, and attempting a surreal feeling of sorts. Nevertheless, still a poem melding the prompts. Again, a curtal sonnet today.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Out of the fog’s thin skin I rise, thick green
armor, mosaic of iridescent
quahog shells, like some mercurial ghost,
freak miracle. I seek human women,
you say, thinking I am somehow hell-bent
on kidnapping mammals to slake some thirst

too gruesome for you to imagine. No.
My motive is simpler, more innocent
than you may first fathom, dear friends. Like most
visitors to this seacoast town, please know
                                                        I’m just a tourist.

—Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]

Here's what Alan wrote me about his poem today: "I did not find today’s prompts that helpful, Vince, but I did struggle. Taking the surrealism invited by one prompt and thinking of B movies from the other prompt led to this attempt."

Harryhausen

The sun does not clap as the sky can.
Let hearing provide what orientation sight cannot.
Light penetrates at varying intensity.
Whose voice carries from element to element?
Without flesh, the skeletons can only chatter.

—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]

Thanks, Alan. This brought to mind one of my favorite movies as a child: Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Here is a video of the famous skeleton sword-battle scene from that movie, animated by the master Ray Harryhausen. Still fun! And here is Harryhausen himself with one of those stop-motion skeletons.


Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks!

Ingat, everyone.   


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6 comments:

Lynn Dow said...

I loved this! It was right off the bat very visual and had a tick tock rhythm of opposites for me that was satisfying. Once, when my sweetie and I decided to spend a day in Monterey delaying our arrival at my uncle's house in San Francisco,my uncle objected, saying, "But it's so touristy there!" I had to tell him, "Uncle Danny, we ARE tourists!" So, I identified with the monster.

Bruce Niedt said...

Good poems today~ I see you're on a curtal sonnet kick, Vince. I'll have to work some sonnets into my output this month. The tributes to The Creature and Ray Harry Harryhausen were great - that skeleton fight is still one of my all-time favorite special effects scenes. I didn't combine the prompts today - I wrote two versions of Maureen's prompt and a separate B-movie poem.

Vince Gotera said...

Lynn, thanks! That's a very funny story. Yes, I'm a San Franciscan, and we feel that way about tourists!

Vince Gotera said...

Bruce, thanks. I often write curtal sonnets. It might be my go-to! Yes, I saw your two poems for Day 2 and commented on both!

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