Day Twenty-Five. Today is the end of the fifth group of five, with one more group of five to go. Five more days. Five more poems. Though today, both Alan and I really up the ante and the numbers. Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt: "It’s the weekend, so I thought we might go with something short and just a bit (or a lot) silly – the Clerihew. These are rhymed, humorous quatrains involving a specific person’s name." Robert Lee Brewer's PAD prompt: write an across the sea poem. This could be a love letter, an electronic submission through cyber space and time, or a travel poem (by air or sea, though probably not car). Modern travel or back in the days of rugged explorers. Wandering or wondering, your choice. Combining Robert's "across the sea" prompt with NaPoWriMo.net's clerihew prompt. Here goes. Clerihews for a Famous Literary Sailor If you've been following Alan's bravura poeming all month, the cornucopia of clerihews below probably won't surprise you. Alan says, "The first two fulfill the two prompts. The rest are extra." Crossing the Sea Clerihews Some of those are really quite hilarious, Alan. Depending on which side of the aisle you're on, so to speak, I guess. Well, since you wrote a clerihew for me, I am only too glad to reciprocate. Associate Dean Thomas Alan Holmes,
I got a bit of help with these two clerihews from my girlfriend Kathy. She came up with "catacombs" to rhyme with "Holmes" — a brilliant word given what Alan often says about administration. Wait, did I say that? And also "exploits" for the storied derring-do of Thomas Crofts, medievalist. We both hope to "goon on pilgrimages" to Tennessee — mayhaps this summer? — to finally meet in person Thomas Alan Holmes, associate dean, and his 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 |
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Day 25 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015
Friday, April 24, 2015
Day 24 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015
Day Twenty-Four. Today is the first day, not of the rest of your life, as some say (though I suppose that's true enough), but rather the first day of the last week of National Poetry Month. Counting today, you could write seven poems more. As a kid, I was enchanted by 24: the numbers 6 and 4 can be multiplied to make 24, and the number 4 is not only one of those two factors but also one of the digits in 24 Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt: "I challenge you to write a parody or satire based on a famous poem. It can be long or short, rhymed or not. But take a favorite (or unfavorite) poem of the past, and see if you can’t re-write it on humorous, mocking, or sharp-witted lines. You can use your poem to make fun of the original (in the vein of a parody), or turn the form and manner of the original into a vehicle for making points about something else (more of a satire — though the dividing lines get rather confused and thin at times)." Robert Lee Brewer's PAD prompt: "write a moment poem. The moment can be a big moment or small moment; it can be a good moment or horrible moment; it can affect thousands or matter to just one person. Some moments happen in crowded rooms; some happen in the most quiet of spaces. Find yours and write a poem." I'm combining the NaPoWriMo parody prompt with Robert Lee Brewer's PAD prompt for a moment poem. Playing around with Dickinson's "Wild nights - Wild nights!" (shown below on the right).
You probably know that in the early book publications of Dickinson's work, which appeared after her death, editors removed the dashes she used in most of her poems. To the readers of her own time, the dashes could have been too unusual and even shocking. When I first encountered Dickinson's poems in school as a child, there were no dashes, I'm pretty sure. It was not until quite some time after those early books that scholarly editors editing the poems to be studied re-inserted the dashes. An interesting fact about Dickinson's dashes is that they are not uniform. She used several different kinds of dashes, if that's indeed what they are. In this single handwritten manuscript, we can see at least two distinctly varying kinds. Most resemble hyphens, though they are different lengths. The marks after "Futile" and "winds" in line 5 are shorter than the ones in the middle of line 1 and the end of line 9. Notice, though, that the mark after "Ah" in line 10 is more vertical and not dash- or hyphen-like at all to my eye. It's more like an apostrophe, don't you think? But the various scholarly editors have all rendered that mark as a dash. It's a tough call. The dash has become the consensus among Dickinson experts, but really we don't know with certainty how she herself might have had those marks rendered in print as opposed to handwriting. Okay, on to our good friend Alan. "The combined prompts call for a parody and an important moment," he says. "I have been working with both Flannery O'Connor and Gerard Manley Hopkins lately (there's a project I'm perhaps participating in), and it just struck me that there is a moment in 'Good Country People' that could fit the dual prompts. One character in the story is named 'Manley Pointer.' I think you have an idea of where I am going." The Wooden Leg Again a Petrarchan sonnet. Bravo, Alan. I'm impressed at how you can spin out these rhymed and metered forms so easily and gracefully. And I love the Gerard 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 |
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Day 23 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015
Day Twenty-Three. I don't know what to say about 23. I think last year I pointed to that surreal Jim Carrey movie, The Number 23. Year before that, I pointed out that 4/23 is Shakespeare's birthday . . . that's pretty cool. Okay, on to the prompts. Robert Lee Brewer's PAD prompt: "write a historic poem. It could be a poem about a landmark event, specific battle, an era in time, or whatever you consider a historic happening." Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today, I challenge you to take a chance, literally. Find a deck of cards (regular playing cards, tarot cards, uno cards, cards from your Cards Against Humanity deck – whatever), shuffle it, and take a card — any card! Now, begin free-writing based on the card you’ve chosen. Keep going without stopping for five minutes. Then take what you’ve written and make a poem from it." A couple of years ago, Kathy gave me an "Authors Card Game," which you can see in the photo below. The card I happened to choose at random was Washington Irving, author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" — two of my most beloved stories as a child.  I gotta say, though, I had hoped for Nathaniel Hawthorne (really, I wanted Herman Melville but he's not one of the authors sanctified by this deck). I thought I could write a historic poem about the moment when Hawthorne and Melville first met. Hawthorne wrote his wife that Melville was "rather heterodox by way of linen"; I’ve never forgotten that phrasing, which meant, I'm pretty sure, that Melville could have changed his underwear more often. Of course Hawthorne could only have known that by sense of smell, I would guess, so Melville’s underwear must have been pretty ripe. I also wished I had drawn Louisa May Alcott, the only woman in the deck, pretty surprising for a game from the late 1980s. Did we learn nothing from the Equal Rights movement? I also kinda hoped for Shakespeare, simply because it's his birthday today, and he would be a half millennium old if he were still kicking. Well, I’m not sure he’s not kicking, though he’s probably nothing but bone fragments by now, if that. Sir Walter Scott would have been a good draw too because as a child I loved Ivanhoe almost as much as "Sleepy Hollow." Well, maybe more, actually. You gotta love good swordplay in a story. There’s only bowling — nine-pins — in "Rip Van Winkle" and crazy horse riding in "Sleepy Hollow." There would have been plenty of possibilities for a historic poem with those writers, other than Irving. (By the way, those author cards are depicted in the photo Anyhow, Washington Irving was the card I drew and so Washington Irving it is. Here we go. The Birth of the American Short Story Irving never admitted that Captain Ichabod Crane was the namesake for his hero in "Sleepy Hollow." An anti-hero, actually, because Irving's character was no soldier. The real-life Ichabod Crane served almost 50 years in the American military, both the Marines and the Army, and died while still on active duty as a Colonel. I surmise that while the bookish schoolteacher inherited the Captain's name, perhaps the Captain's personality might have been the model for the schoolteacher's rowdy competitor for Katrina Van Tassel's hand. That's the premise for my poem, anyway. Incidentally, Colonel Ichabod Crane was the great-uncle of Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. Since his great-uncle would have been well-known as a soldier in the Crane family, the younger Crane's novel was surely influenced in some way — even if negatively — by the storied military career of his great-uncle. The protagonist of Red Badge is himself also an anti-hero, not at all like the Colonel, who served and fought in four wars. Moving on to Alan's poem for today Four of Cups Here's that very card. Alan, I like how you drew the card not today but almost 20 years ago. Good play with the prompt. And the matching Edouard Manet painting, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (The Picnic). No Speedo for the guy on the right. 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 |
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015
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 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.
This is an excellent example of alexandrines, also called dodecasyllables 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 |
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
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:
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 The source text I chose was an excerpt from "Out of the Fog" by 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 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 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" 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 |
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