Popular Culture 101

Hello, friends. Sorry there hasn't been much by way of poetry since National Poetry Month. More to come later. For now I'd like to announce a book project I'm working on with my girlfriend Kathleen Lawrence (to whom you have seen poems dedicated for a couple of years now) . . . an undergrad textbook tentatively titled Popular Culture 101. Kathy and I are looking for pop culture essays to include in this book. The essays would be pretty short — 2-4 pages, about 500-1000 words — on any aspect of popular culture. You don't have to be a professional or an academic. You can write, for example, on being a fan of Doctor Who or video games or '60s soul music . . . whatever you are into. The deadline is Sunday, 27 July 2014. About four weeks from today. Won't you consider taking part? We'd really love to see and perhaps feature your essay. Or essays if you want to write more than one. For more, go to our Popular Culture 101 blog at http://popc101.blogspot.com. For the nitty gritty details about writing and submitting essays, click on the screenshot from the blog directly above. Comments, anyone? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

My National Poetry Month 2014 Reading

During this year's National Poetry Month, I had the pleasure of giving a poetry reading at Southeastern Community College in Burlington, Iowa, in their SCC Visiting Writers Series. Here's a video of that reading, from 14 April 2014. Vince Gotera Poetry Reading, 14 April 2014 Southeastern Community College, Iowa

Many thanks to my gracious host, Professor Charles Burm, and also to the lovely students who hosted me at a really pleasant dinner, as well as to the generous and responsive audience. Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

Day 30 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2014

Day 30. The last day of National Poetry Month in 2014, the last day of NaPoWriMo, the last poem of Poem-a-Day. But not your last day — one hopes — and not your last poem — one hopes again. Poems can last many many MANY days if one writes them down . . . so write them!   ヅ Today's "official" prompts . . .   Maureen Thorson: "a poem of farewell" (NaPoWriMo). Robert Lee Brewer: "a 'calling it a day' poem" (Poetic Asides). Thanks, Maureen and Robert, for prompts that fit together so well, from those of us who are merging them. They fit together marvelously but are not at all the same, so brava and bravo. Fare Well                             for KL Was it the ancient Romans who used to say ave atque vale, hail and farewell? From an ode, it seems, written by the poet Catullus. Kathy, when you and I call it a day, In your queen bed in New York or in my double in Cedar Falls, or on the phone, with us in thousand-mile-apart recliners, I say farewell. Not as in goodbye, like we’ll never meet again, but just good wishes: May our life be evergreen, fresh. And may                                                       we always love us. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Kathy and I always look at the official prompts together first thing, and she was disappointed this morning upon seeing this last set. I knew she was thinking "no love poem today." Although a couple of my April poems alluded to our relationship sweetly, I hadn't written a proper love poem yet. So this poem is a surprise for my love; yes, I was able to write a love poem while also saying farewell and calling it a day. Hurray! In terms of this curtal sonnet's craft, its sonnetly charms, I replaced the usual d rhyme with an a, so the rhyme scheme is abcabc/abcac. Aren't those three repeated abc's cool? Beyond that, in fact, the last line contains (accidentally) an internal b rhyme within it — "al" . . . in which case the rhyme scheme would be abcabc/abca[bc], with the brackets indicating two rhymes within a single line, the last. Thus, it's abc's all the way down. Ha! (Though maybe I'm stretching here because that "al" sound is in the middle rather than the end of a word.) Okay, now here's Alan's final NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day sonnet. He says, "I believe I have combined Brewer's 'call it a day' with Thorson's 'poem of farewell,' if you can call a 'kiss off' poem a 'call it a day' poem. Why is it sometimes easier to write a poem when I'm ticked off?" To the ’70s Era Avocado Refrigerator I was not there when they wheeled you away, although I emptied almost all your shelves. I wish that we had rolled you out ourselves and done it long ago, before that day your coupling broke, permitting water spray behind to saturate the floor and bow our basement ceiling, water filled below, until the drywall burst, God damn it. Say goodbye, good riddance, thank you, go; but may somebody find a use for all your parts — your whole is worthless — and, with all our hearts, we will be glad to meet with you someday, converted to some lids on pickle jars or stamped into a set of Hot Wheels cars. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes     [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Ah yes, fridges can be infuriating, right? But sometimes they can be cool for the oddest of reasons. In the early '60s, we had a Fridgidaire that made a soft whirry, bubbly noise that sounded exactly like the Blob. You should google a clip from that movie to "hear" my childhood fridge.    ヅ    Actually, here's a suitable clip; this link should start you up at 3:47 where the sound is pretty clear for the next while. Oh . . . uh . . . sorry about the bad pun on "cool" in the second sentence of this paragraph, regarding fridges. In terms of sonnetly charms, Alan's is an interesting example of a Petrarchan sonnet: in the closing sestet's rhyme scheme of addaee Alan begins with a third envelope quatrain — so cool! — and then ends with a Shakespearean-ish couplet. Fun. The poem is fun in its content (if you don't think too much about the water damage) and in its bravura technique. Bravo, Alan! Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ POEM-A-DAY 2014 • Pick a day in April: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Day 29 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2014

Day 29. Two days to go. Or, at the time I'm writing this, one day and one hour to go in National Poetry Month! Robert Lee Brewer has a two-for-Tuesday prompt in honor of Gabriel García Márquez: "Write a realism poem" and/or "Write a magical poem . . . Or write like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and do both!"(Poetic Asides). Maureen Thorson's "prompt is called the 'Twenty Little Poetry Projects,' and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. . . . the challenge is to use them all in one poem" (NaPoWriMo). Twenty Little Poetry Projects     by Jim Simmerman   1.  Begin the poem with a metaphor.   2.  Say something specific but utterly preposterous.   3.  Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.   4.  Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).   5.  Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.   6.  Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.   7.  Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.   8.  Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.   9.  Use an example of false cause-effect logic. 10.  Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand). 11.  Create a metaphor using the following construction: "The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . ." 12.  Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities. 13.  Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in "real life." 14.  Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person. 15.  Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction. 16.  Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective. 17.  Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense. 18.  Use a phrase from a language other than English. 19.  Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification). 20.  Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that "echoes" an image from earlier in the poem. Okay, here we go. Not trying to channel Gabriel García Márquez at all. Just trying to channel both real and surreal (which I hope evinces some magic) while trying to do the Simmerman projects in order. Thus mixing all three prompts. Carnac the Magnificent & Dancing Cactus The sun rises in the east like a bubble of lava, streaking the sky with stripes of flowing magma that smell like pine tar & taste of cinnamon, loudly sounding red & white like candy canes forged by Santa Claus & his elves in Hell. Yes, the sky was riddled with Christmas suns, riddled wth Easter grass, riddled with Chinese firecrackers that sh-boom sh-boomed merrily. The sky's blue was caused by the fireworks. &, speaking of fireworks: "sis boom bah!" The magnificent Carnac of happiness brings us the Light of Truth: "Describe the sound when a sheep explodes." Johnny Carson will surely rise from the dead, just as Vince will not. Incandescent water, the hard texture of incense smoke . . . let's get real. Let's get down & dirty. Johnny Carson lives in all our hearts, a celebrity who was respectful of all people & all cultures, who raised a diseased camel from its egg to its coffin. El camello enfermo de amor. Let's get back to the real world. Where a saguaro cactus pulls its legs out of the ground & dances a poisonous tarantella, a lovely fandango, bowing to the west like a man of green lava. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] I don't know how Johnny Carson came to be in the poem but when I was driving to Chicago last week (a five-hour trip) I heard a talk show about TV comedy and heard the Carnac the Magnificent "sis boom bah" bit. (That's when I actually heard this "piece of talk" recently.) I bet not many people know anymore that "sis boom bah" was connected in the late 1800s to fireworks watching and then later in the mid-1900s to cheerleading. Now on to Alan's poem for Day 29. "I think that I have managed to merge Maureen and Robert's prompts for today. I am not certain what to make of this attempt, though." Thomas Crofts and I Consider Haruspication and Routine Examinations of Middle-Aged Men Outside the English building, near the street, I hold the map to my most inner self, the pink and rounded corridor of flesh, provided me when I awoke from dark in digital, 600 dpi, my name in bold across the top, results of tests, the endoscopic plumber’s snake they probed down my esophagus, to foretell all. My printout prophecy provided me and Thomas Crofts, medievalist, the chance and welcome opportunity to mourn the mystery of life, now mapped the way an unmanned Google car can plot a town. I told him how the sweatbee sting, a vein on my right hand, felt nothing like the bland green plastic guide they had me bite down on so that the camera probe would never touch my teeth, my swollen, bitten lips, my fog and doubt of what I might have said as I awoke from anesthetic sleep. “And yet,” he said, “far more routine and comic goes the colonoscopy, in through the out, as Led Zep punned, another orifice, another oracle, to the same end, to read our guts and tell us times to come.” “In times to come”—before us stand in scrubs of rainbow hue to designate the role of each, a surgeon’s staff encircling one who lies beneath an arc of burning white, his abdomen split open to reveal the sum of what has been and what’s to come. The surgeon speaks, “Let’s have a poke around. He has a chance at twenty years, but see his gut distended, tears in tissue here, the liver knobbiness—just close him up.” Supine, the patient turns to smile at us, to gesture Blue Cross has o.k.’ed our turn, extended palm of state-insured in full. I smirked to mask my gasp of churning guts, reminded of a vivisected frog my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Freeman, flayed in front of us, its spinal cord in two from her deft ice pick plunge. Her thumb was black from silver nitrate. She had stopped me once when I was wiping off electrolyte from naked wires my partner had plugged in. “If diagnosis tells the future, I’m an ass!” Regret I said it followed; here I was, aware that part of me is mess and tubes, aware Yossarian has learned the same, “There, there,” a spoken breath as Snowden shows a truth that I have printed on my desk, refute it as I might, repeat, “Wo ist der Schnee vom vegangenen Jahr?” I taste that blank white bitterness and nurse my ruptured lip. Then Thomas said, “Entrance intransigence!” and laughed that anyone would transfix on his frailty. “I guess nobody told you, Cousin, why it is that men die early? ‘Cause they can!” I heard it echo from the science hall. Then I fell hoarse from laughing, flecks of blood sprayed on my wrist, and I took off alive, relieved to have a rank companion free to chide me, send me home to feed my kids, to fall asleep turned on my side to grasp my sweet one’s side, behind me the machine that forces breath down through me as I sleep. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes     [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Well, Alan, that was fun. Though I gotta say, I have no idea what to make of any of either of our poems. I certainly am not sure how to even come close to illustrating your poem with an image! Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

POEM-A-DAY 2014 • Pick a day in April: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Day 28 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2014

Day 28. We're 14/15 done with National Poetry Month. Crazy, huh? "Official" prompts today. Robert Lee Brewer: "a settled poem" (Poetic Asides). Maureen Thorson: "Today I challenge you to find a news article, and to write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article! You can repeat them, splice them, and rearrange them however you like" (NaPoWriMo). I decided to create an erasure poem to satisfy Maureen's prompt, and it took up an inordinate chunk of the day. I found a "news" article and used only the words in it. So basically a found poem. The article is "Jennifer Aniston's Brief Romance Revealed!" by Jackie Willis, from the website Yahoo! TV. I've retyped the article below and circled the words I'm keeping. You should follow the red lines to get the sequence of the narrative. If you need to see the erasure poem larger, just click on the image. I was able, just barely, to mix in Robert's prompt as well, basically in the last sentence. It was very difficult to accomplish. Hot Teenage Romance Settled The poem is really the altered page above, but to help you read: They dated back in the day, a romance based on 17-year-old smoldering. To we immaturions the torrid romance seemed extra hot. [N]ow married they can offer little dirt. —Erasure Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] I do want to make sure to point out, just so there's no misunderstanding, that the cool phrase "To we immaturions" is not mine. It was coined by Jim Nelson, editor of the magazine GQ. Of course, since it's a found poem, and more specifically an erasure poem, I didn't coin any of the language. And now on to Alan's poem: "I got out early this morning," Alan tells us, "and looked around; I mowed grass all day Saturday, and the yard got a good drenching last night from one of the thunderstorms moving through the region this week. Being outside so early in the morning reminded me of being ready to go outside as soon as possible when I was smaller. I cannot recall seeing a mimosa here in my part of East Tennessee, but the further south I drive, the more I see them." Mimosa A forked mimosa grew some yards away from our back porch; I never climbed it far because its branches would not bear my weight, but I could climb it high enough to see its yellow gum ooze from the breaches torn through outer bark, the stress from violent wind or maybe me as I shinned in it. Late most afternoons, I saw its fans of leaves fold closed; some mornings, I might catch the sun and watch the leaves respond to light. July would bring the last of its red blossoms, puffs of pink unlike most flowers everywhere. I sawed its broken branches off; my fingertip, like rays of light, could make its leaves fold, too. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes     [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Ah yes, I remember getting leaves like those to fold up when I was a child. I like in your poem how the speaker's finger, the body, really, is likened to light. Bravo, Alan. Nice blank verse sonnet, by definition unrhymed. Mimosa Tree Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

POEM-A-DAY 2014 • Pick a day in April: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30