Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “take the phrase '(blank) Day,' replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles might include: 'Opposite Day,' 'Green Day,' 'Earth Day,' 'The Last Ever Day,' and/or 'The Day Before Yesterday.' Even 'Holiday' would work honestly.”
Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt, after referring to Sawako Nakayasu’s poem “Improvisational Score,” suggests: “[T]ry your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.”
Merging both prompts with a shadorma, a six-line Spanish poetic form with the following syllable counts per line: 3/5/3/3/7/5. Pretty tight little challenge of a form.
What a Day!
—a shadorma
Everything
went wrong: bacon burned,
TV died,
car totaled,
freak windstorm tree hit the house.
But . . . I’m still walking!
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Here's a picture of a torn tree I took after a freak windstorm in 2009. More in this blog post.
Here is Alan's fascinating prose poem about a strange teaching moment, that I think I may have felt from both sides, the teacher's and the student's.
Glossolalia during Ellison’s Invisible Man Lecture
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I am making a deliberate trawl through the prolog of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man because like an overture it introduces the major themes of a complex analysis of prejudice and social engineering, and I reach the segment where the unnamed protagonist responds to Louis Armstrong’s recorded performance of Fats Waller’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” and as he describes it sinks further into the Dantean depths of generational memories elicited by the music and finds himself surrounded by a charismatic congregation directed in a call-and-response sermon about unfixed identity, a “blackness of [B]lackness” challenge of Melvillian proportions where notions exist and do not exist simultaneously, as DuBois has led us to understand, when a well-intended but confused upperclassman who has during previous class meetings expressed an insistence on unfeasible fixed meanings of abstract concepts begins to ask a question in the kind of safe language that heavy reliance on Grammarly directs scared undergraduates to employ when its meaning breaks, creating a self-reflective cascading loop in which he attempts to answer a long question while in the process of asking it, forcing everyone else in the class, except me, who is already facing him, to turn around and gaze at him with some rapt expectation that a terminal point to his now increasingly distraught question will appear, as if by magic, because we are witnessing what is not a filling of a holy spirit but instead acclimated possession by external, impersonal malevolence enabled by his placing trust in hypergenerated text prediction models deteriorating as he speaks them, like inviting vampires into one’s house, his eyes filled with agony as his voice will not stop, hearing himself, getting more uncertain by the moment as his classmates begin to look away from him as I cannot, and I walk to him, see that he has been recording his question in preparation, I understand, to capture my response, and I place one hand on his shoulder while with the other hand ending the phone’s recording and suggest to him that if he has to take a breath in the middle of a question, it is too complicated to ask.
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—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Wow, in a decades-long writing career — 35+ years since getting my MFA in poetry — I have used the word glossolalia just once in a poem. Brilliant!
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1 comment:
Vince, the shadorma form is perfect to describe a day with so many little tragedies packed into it. And Alan's poem is really something - eloquent description of a moment of vocal unraveling, quite touching actually, and all the more effective as it's told in one very long sentence. Bravo!
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