Day 22 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015

Day Twenty-Two. It's Earth Day, everyone! Both our official prompts are connected to that celebration, I think. Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today is Earth Day, so I would like to challenge you to write a 'pastoral' poem. Traditionally, pastoral poems involved various shepherdesses and shepherds talking about love and fields, but yours can really just be a poem that engages with nature." Robert Lee Brewer's PAD prompt: "write a nature poem. For many poets, the first thing that may pop to mind includes birds, trees, waterfalls, rivers, and such. But there’s also human nature, nature vs. nurture, and other things natural, including natural selection and being a 'natural' at something. Let your nature take it where it will today." I gotta confess, I'm not very nature-oriented, and pastorals don't come easily to me. I have lots of allergies to pollen and other plant-y whatevers, and so spring is not my favorite season, by a long shot. In fact, while probably many of you are happy that here north of the equator spring has sprung in the springliest fashion, I was up most of last night with painful sinuses, a congested head, and heavy sniffles — the antihistamine and painkiller I took not even making the littlest dent in the discomfort. So while probably many NaPoWriMo/PAD-ers wrote about flowers and such today, I did not. One thing I've wanted all my life, though, is to be able to fly. (I'm still upset about why we haven't gotten — as we were "promised" when I was a kid — jetpacks and rocketpacks available in stores and also flying cars like the Jetsons had. What's up with that?) Anyway, I wrote about natural creatures that can fly. I really wanted to slip dragons into the poem, but I'm told they've never existed in nature. You'll see how I solved that problem, though. Flyers Across meadows Bumblebees flutter, Cumbersome Dancers, Ever searching for the best Flowers, colorful faces above Green seas of grass. Hummingbirds dash and hover In wide loping arabesques, Jumping red yellow orange, Kissing the wide-open Lips of blossoms. Macaws, blue and gold Amazon Natives, dart sweep soar from One tangled branch to another. Pterodactyls, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, Ruled their kingdoms from vast Skies, gliding diving snatching Tiny furred mammals Unaware of wheeling death. Violet and teal dragonflies, Wings translucent X's, Yaw and Zip through azure air. Photo by fir0002/Flagstaffotos —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] About his pastoral/nature poem today, Alan said, "This one hurt me." I'd be interested to hear why you think he says that. Here's the poem. P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication.   Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!       This is an excellent example of alexandrines, also called dodecasyllables . . . that is, 12-syllable lines. Done very gracefully, Alan. He also says, "I was not concerned with end rhymes, more with echoes throughout, such as referring to cattle as 'beeves' to echo 'bees,' near rhymes within lines, and, of course, assonance, which can be the most emotive musical device one can write in words." Thanks, Alan. Friends, won't you comment, please? Love to know what you're thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don't find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

NAPOWRIMO / PAD 2015 • 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 21 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015

Day Twenty-One. The final day of National Poetry Month's third week. Counting today, 10 poems to go. And 20 poems done so far. I think I've done 22, though, because on a couple of occasions, I did more than one poem. But who's counting? Let's poem, friends! Robert Lee Brewer's PAD suggestion today is his usual "Two for Tuesday": "Write a 'what you are' poem" and/or "Write a 'what you are not' poem." Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo challenge today "is an old favorite — the erasure! This involves taking a pre-existing text and blacking out or erasing words, while leaving the placement of the remaining words intact." Let's begin today with Alan. "I am attempting to satisfy both prompts today, with a 'something is something' erasure," Alan writes. "The original source comes from Flannery O'Connor's essay collection, Mystery and Manners." The transcription of the erasure would read as follows: [T]he whole personality is a symbol or whatever makes no difference. Pain is joy, is love, and what they are is all well and good, but the whole range of human feeling finds lodging it tells the world makes a great difference bound like God in a double way: the artist's surest instinct when the natural world is seen and a world which reaches divine things. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Excellent erasure, Alan. You make it look so easy! I like how you found an apostrophe s at one point when you needed a possessive! Congratulations. Today, I didn't combine the prompts. First, I worked with the NaPoWriMo suggestion. I used Wave Books's nifty erasure-poetry generator at erasures.wavepoetry.com: you can choose a source text there and select words to erase or un-erase to create your poem. A little tip: erase the whole text first (you can still see it as light gray) and then click words to bring them back . . . a much more natural-feeling "writing" process. The source text I chose was an excerpt from "Out of the Fog" by C. K. Ober. Here's how that text looked beforehand. And here's the erasure poem I created from it. Inspiration came from my childhood in San Francisco, where nights were often punctuated by the lonesome sound of fog horns out by the Bay. Here's that erasure poem transcribed and relineated. The fog horn blowing hard and so near seemed almost the call of bitter disappointment perishing in the street a great cry out of the deep —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Second, I worked on a PAD "what you are"/"what you are not" poem based on the emotions and particulars of this erasure poem. True Story You are the fog horn booming out of deep sleep like a black whale. You are not the gay Filipino man lying on the sidewalk the next street over, blood leaking from his chest, where the hilt of a knife sticks out. You are not his last breath, the shudder of his death rattle leaking out into thick San Francisco air. You are his brother. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Well, there you go. Worked with the one Thorson prompt and both Brewer prompts. Not all in the same text, but the two poems interlace with one another. The best erasure poet in the US, as far as I'm concerned, is Carriezona, whose work can be seen at DeviantArt.com. Here's her poem "The Children" . . . note how she creates an esthetically pleasing visual shape around the un-erased words. Just brilliant. (Click on the image to see the original at DeviantArt.com.) I was honored to feature Carriezona in the blog in 2011 and 2012, when she was using the pseudonym Carrieola. I only hope one day to be able to do erasures as well as she does, both artistically and textually. Friends, won't you comment, please? Love to know what you're thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don't find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

NAPOWRIMO / PAD 2015 • 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 20 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015

Day Twenty. Exactly 2/3 of National Poetry Month gone, or just about. At the end of today, the poems to be written will be half of what we've already written. Nonetheless, still 10 poems to go! Hang in there, friends who are writing poems. Robert Lee Brewer's PAD suggestion: "For today’s prompt, take the phrase 'My (blank), the (blank),' replace the blanks with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: 'My Dentist, the Torture Expert,' 'My Lunch, the Thing I Got Out of the Vending Machine,' 'My Father, the Comedian,' or 'My Life, the Punchline.'" Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today, I challenge to write a poem that states the things you know. For example, 'The sky is blue' or 'Pizza is my favorite food' or “The world’s smallest squid is Parateuthis tunicata.' Each line can be a separate statement, or you can run them together. The things you 'know' of course, might be facts, or they might be a little bit more like beliefs." Unfortunately, I had somehow read a prompt from 2013 this morning (I think I checked NaPoWriMo before Maureen had posted today's prompt). What I saw was: Today I challenge you to write a poem that uses at least five of the following words: owl generator abscond upwind squander clove miraculous dunderhead cyclops willowy mercurial seaweed gutter non-pareil artillery salt curl ego rodomontade elusive twice ghost cheese cowbird truffle svelte quahog bilious. I emailed that prompt to Alan and so he started off the day thinking about the wrong prompt. As did I. Anyway, here's Alan's intro: "Today, I treated prompts more like suggestions than instructions; I saw a list of words that appeared unrelated and accepted the challenge of including at least five of the words in the poem (I pretty much blasted through that requirement). I needed to write about something "I know," and respond to the structure "My ______, The _________." The list of words led to my thinking of a self-deprecating poem, so I am following that tradition, with allusions to Greek mythology, besides. P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication.   Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!       Alan, quite a hard act to follow! Good job with the form — a Petrarchan sonnet — and the "I know" requirement plus the word list (cyclops, dunderhead, owl, willowy, mercurial, elusive, and rodomontade — seven). An adroit mix of three prompts: the two "official" ones for today as well as the one I accidentally resurrected from two years ago. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Polyphemus (1802) I had an extremely busy and full day, so I wasn't able to write my poem until after seeing Alan's Greek-myth-infused offering. I decided to go with basically the same title but went in a more tongue-in-cheek direction while similarly skimming the Greek-myth connection. My poem is predictably more colloquial and — let's face it — maybe a bit silly. Blank verse, combining the two official prompts and the old word-list prompt: cyclops, dunderhead, willowy, svelte, and ego. My Cyclops, The Dunderhead Here’s what I know. In Homer’s Odyssey, Polyphemus the Cyclops was a doofus, a moron, an undisputed dunderhead. That doesn’t matter though, ’cause we’re talking about my Cyclops, my one-eyed brown dragon. What I know: mine’s also a first-class dunderhead, but willowy, svelte, and hard to put down. Although he’s got a giant ego and thinks he’s bigger than he really is, I also know Richard’s a stand-up guy. A world-class spelunker who’d give you the coat off his back. He’ll be your BFF for life. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won't you comment, please? Love to know what you're thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don't find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

NAPOWRIMO / PAD 2015 • 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 19 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015

Day Nineteen. Just like April 17, today's numeral and the number of days left in the month are both prime numbers: 19 and 11. If you're writing a poem a day this National Poetry Month, I hope you've been sticking with it. Both my writing buddy Alan and I have in some way written to both "official" prompts by Maureen Thorson and Robert Lee Brewer, whether by combining them or else composing two poems, one for each prompt. Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt today: "I’d like to challenge you to write a landay. Landays are 22-syllable couplets, generally rhyming. The form comes from Afghanistan, where women often use it in verses that range from the sly and humorous to the deeply sardonic and melancholy." Robert Lee Brewer's PAD prompt for day 19: "write an authority poem. Maybe you are an authority on something or know someone who is (or who thinks he or she is). Maybe you respect authority, or maybe not so much. Maybe you are on the run from the authorities." Cover, I Am the Beggar of the World (Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy) There has been quite some interest in the landay poetic form (pronounced LAND-ee) across the US literary landscape lately because of Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy's 2014 anthology I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan. Two reviews of this book are particularly helpful in learning about the landay: Elisa Castari's "Landay Poetry in Afghanistan" and Daniel Bosch's "Beauty and Subversion in the Secret Poems of Afghan Women." You can also find more landays in Sayd Majrouh and Marjolijn de Jage's 2010 anthology Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry. Reporting on a presentation by Griswold and Murphy about landays and their work in putting together I Am the Beggar of the World, Eleanor Stanford writes, "In a society that sees many women illiterate and hidden by carefully maintained restrictions on their daily freedoms, this artistic form is both an expression of resistance and of unity. Men may tell their own landays, but the vast majority of the voices speaking the poetry are female" ("Female Poetic Resistance and the Afghan Landay"). For more on the landay, take a look at the Introduction to Griswold and Murphy's Poetry Magazine feature, which can be read at the Poetry Foundation website. Given that in Afghanistan currently the millenia-old landay form is being used by women to express themselves subversively and dissidently against traditional male authority, I'm worried about appropriating or colonizing here by writing landays. At the same time, all poetic forms must of course be available for all poets. All I can do is assure my readers that I write landays with all due respect to the Afghan women who risk their lives in order to speak their minds. I began by trying to write in the voice of Clara, my aswang speaker, whose poems I've written so far are set in the '20s and '30s in the Philippines and in the US (see, for example, my Day 4 poem). But as I worked the typical -ma and -na landay rhymes, something else began to develop: the voice of a young rural Filipina unhappily married to an elderly man in the 1980s. I realize this poem is derivative of landays quoted in the articles I mention above — I thank and applaud the Afghan women for whom the landay is true personal expression. As you no doubt know, I am combining today's two prompts . . . landays against masculine authority. It's fortuitous that Thorson and Brewer came up with prompts that work so well together today. Young Wife, Old Husband —landays, in a Philippine province, 1980s He wants me to be his Madonna yet also bring in pesos sewing with makina. He falls asleep fast: a quick dreamer, whose small piledriver too — thank God — is in a coma. His work's shifting TV antenna. I hope soon the old pig gets eternal nirvana. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] The word makina here is the Pilipino word for machine, referring specifically to a sewing machine. In the last landay, the speaker conflates Buddhist nirvana with Catholic heaven. The Philippines is a predominantly Catholic country. Our friend Alan also merged the two prompts today: the landay and authority. "Given that I am from Alabama and attended the University of Alabama," says Alan, "I had no problems knowing what to write and what authority I needed to cite. Therefore, Roll Tide, y'all." Tuscaloosa Landay Whenever I’m in Alabama, I understand why Paul “Bear” Bryant called her “mama.” —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Well, Alan, the lay of the landay was ours today. (I hope all y'all readers will forgive my recycling the more-than-slightly sexist connotations of that age-old phrase that has been with us several centuries. The language play was just too hard to resist.) Good use of the -ma rhyme, by the way, Alan. Great too that we're both working with our ancestral lands.  ヅ Friends, won't you comment, please? Love to know what you're thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don't find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

NAPOWRIMO / PAD 2015 • 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 18 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015

Day Eighteen. The number "18" is fascinating . . . in many countries and cultures, it marks the age of majority. So 18 is a borderline of privilege: the boundary between child and adult. It's interesting to google images of 18. Click on the sign to the right and you'll see. Be warned: some of the images are — how shall we say? — naughty.  ヅ  Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo challenge: "And now for our (as always, optional) prompt, which takes us from 2015 back to the 1700s. After all, it’s the eighteenth of April, which means that today is the 240th anniversary of the midnight ride of Paul Revere! Today, in keeping with the theme of rush and warning, I challenge you to write a poem that involves an urgent journey and an important message. It could be historical, mythical, entirely fictional, or memoir-ical." Robert Lee Brewer's PAD suggestion: "For today's prompt, pick 2 vowels and write a poem using words that only contain one or both of those vowels. For instance, write a poem with words that only have a 'u' and 'o.' Also, the letter 'y' is wild–so the words 'my' and 'gypsy' are freebies. And I’ll allow text-speak (or maybe I should say 'txt spk')." Well, today I couldn't combine the "official" prompts. I really wanted to do something weighty with the journey/warning prompt and the two-vowel approach seemed too constrictive for that intent. You may remember that on April 4 my poem was in the voice of Clara, one of my two aswang lovers, about her man Jesús. He's a shapeshifter, a werewolf, and she's a body-splitter whose top half can grow wings to hunt and feed while her bottom half is safely hidden from monster-killer eyes. Today, I imagined a crisis for the two lovers: she is being suspected by the people in their town of being an aswang and he realizes he must save her. The poem is a curtal sonnet — like Clara's on day four — in the mind of a fearful Jesús. Aswang Peril Dios mío, I must warn Clara right now! Rumors have been flying about how she Was missing the night a manananggal was seen In the moonlit sky last week. And also how She seemed to wince in the market yesterday when someone handed her garlic. Tonight my cousin says men are gathering with guns. I bow my head and feel the pain of bones grinding as they lengthen and shift. As fur sprouts, my skin burns. I howl. The moon is flaming red.                                                         My love, I’m coming! —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] After I finished that curtal sonnet, I wondered if I could manage another curtal sonnet fulfilling the two-vowel prompt. I hated the idea of not writing to both prompts. Since allowing just two vowels would severely limit the words that could be employed, I decided to use just two words per line, meaning then only one word in the closing tail line. Instead of meter, syllabics: two syllables per line and a one syllable tail. Here goes . . . hope it works. Cyberbullying spin grin tell fell slid skid thin skin belle shell did mid teen scene yell hell kid hid screen seen                         rid —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Today, Alan had an interesting, alternative approach to merging the prompts. "Of course, it was going to be TCm's journey, and I made a character repeat a single vowel sound. It sounds better read out loud. I hope I successfully fit the two prompts together." (Alan and I have taken to abbreviating Thomas Crofts, medievalist to TCm.) Thomas Crofts and the Cold Ghost Where does Thomas Crofts, medievalist, search to find the secret of life? An artesian spring rises past Elizabethton toward Roan Mountain. One day a woman dressed in a gray winding sheet sat at the spring’s mouth. “Go home, lone soul! Go!” she spoke, her lips thin as rime, as was her garment. “Rolled stones show old woes; hold close those woes; know those bode lone roads for bold souls.” Thomas did not stop. He asked her name. She replied, “Rose Jones,” and fell still. Thomas, shivering, saw ashes near her bare feet. “No hope for cold bones.” He gathered bracken, lit brown, dried grass for kindling, and built a good fire. The figure came near the fire and melted away, dousing the spent flames. Mist rose from the ash. Thomas cupped his hand to drink from the cold, clear stream. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Alan, I love the ghost's round, single-vowel utterances. Nicely done. And a very convincing ghost as well. Thomas Crofts, medievalist, is of course as lifelike as ever. Great idea to use linked haiku as a skeleton — sorry! — for the narrative. Bravo! Friends, won't you comment, please? Love to know what you're thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don't find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

NAPOWRIMO / PAD 2015 • 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