Tag: poetic forms

Remembering civil rights history, when ‘words meant everything’

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2014 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act (1964). As part of a series of stories on this subject, NPR has run several stories and videos.

Remembering civil rights history, when ‘words meant everything’.

In this one, U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and Jeffrey Brown recently traveled from Mississippi to Alabama on a pilgrimage to witness the historical struggles and sorrows people faced during the civil rights movement. On their 100-mile journey, they examine the role of poetry in advancing the movement’s message for justice and freedom.

The video is about eight minutes long, and Ms. Trethewey only recites part of her moving and calmly horrifying poem “Incident,” about a black family looking through their living room curtains at a cross burning in their neighborhood. Here is the poem in its entirety. The form may be recognizable to some of you; it is a special stanza form called a pantoum.

I hope you’ll agree, as is mentioned in the video, that poetry is a form of sacred language, a way to speak (and sing) when you are afraid to speak.

Incident

By Natasha Trethewey

We tell the story every year –
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn –
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.

We peered from the windows, shade drawn,
at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
the charred grass still green. Then
we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.

At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns.
We darkened our room and lit hurricane lamps,
the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.

It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns.
When they were done, they left quietly. No one came
The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil;
by morning the flames had all dimmed.

When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came.
Nothing really happened.
By morning all the flames had dimmed.
We tell the story every year.

Gentle reader, you might find interesting another poem, by an African American poet, Countee Cullen, also named “Incident.” Poets like to do this, comment and copy and call out after one another.

Incident

By Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

waltersk002

A Poem from Nothing but Words : The Column Poem (PAD Prompt #27)

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In honor of my daughter’s anthropology qualifying exams, which you can read more about in this Cupertino Poetry Exchange post, I wanted to write her a poem that celebrated anthropology. But, not being an anthropologist, I wasn’t really sure how to go about this. So, of course, I went to Wikipedia. I always start either there or at Stanford’s Green Library. General consumption of information that might be accurate or the deep deep scholarship of the ages. Sometimes you need one, sometimes the other.

So, Wikipedia defines anthropology nicely enough but didn’t give me much inspiration for writing a poem. Then I remembered a prompt/tactic/exercise I’ve taught and that I’ve also been taught by others (probably in the other order). Take a piece of prose (or write your own piece of prose) about a topic. Then circle 5, 7, 15, 31 of the best or most interesting words in the prose. Always an odd number. Don’t ask me why. Then put those words in a line down the center of the page in a single column and write whatever comes to you on both sides of those words. Voila, your poem. Like a column with wings.

I took Wikipedia’s definition of anthropology, picked the words that spoke to me, and came up with this funky, silly, sexy, and rather delightful poem. I doesn’t have much to do with my daughter, except perhaps the last two lines. And it’s got 14 lines, so I didn’t even follow my own advice.

Here’s what the prose looked like and then the messy wing-y column first draft. Finally, the poem (at the top of the post).

Your challenge, if you want to write today, is to write prose, pick your favorite words, and then make your own “column poem.”

Dog Park Rules

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To honor the opening of Cupertino’s Mary Avenue Dog Park, I’ve written a little villanelle. They’ve posted the poem at their website, but I offer it here, too. I read this on Tuesday at my April Fool’s Day reading, and it seemed to appeal to the people there. I hope dogs like it too.

Especially for my dog-loving friends, Michelle, Cristina, and Alice.

Dog Park Rules (A Villanelle)

Watch out for balls and feel the winter sun.
Remember who you came with, when you came.
Run and run and don’t forget to run.

The most important rule is to have fun.
Smell all the smells, then smell them all again.
Watch out for balls and feel the spring-time sun.

Spin your body, spin and when you’ve spun
yourself into a puddle, change the game.
Run and run and don’t forget to run.

Sniff the spots that human noses shun.
Pee and pee and all good places claim.
Watch out for balls and feel the autumn sun.

Stay with that stick until the chewing’s done.
Leap and wiggle your small body like a flame.
Run and run and don’t forget to run.

And now the Dog Park rules are almost done,
and you will learn them as you learned your name.
Watch out for balls and feel the summer sun.
Run and run and don’t forget to run.

For more dog poems, check out Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, fans of dogs and fine poets.

Those of you interested in more information about villanelles, check this out and this.

Prompt #25 Ekphrasis : Poetry Confronting Art

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I love ekphrasis. I love saying it, and I love writing ekphrastic poems. Simply put, ekphrasis is the the process of writing about a piece of visual art: a dramatic or poetic response to a painting or sculpture. I like the way the Academy of American Poetry discusses the process: as confrontation. Poetry confronting art. If you click through to their site, you can read all about the history of the form (back to Homer) and check out over a dozen examples.

The following ekphrastic poem will appeal (hopefully) to everyone: “Stealing The Scream,” by Monica Youn. The painting is so famous it has become a pop culture icon — The Scream, by Edvard Munch. There are several versions of the painting (lithographic prints) and, as Wikipedia, explains, “The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts. In 1994, the version in the National Gallery was stolen. It was recovered several months later.” Monica Youn’s poem contemplates the irony of something actually happening to the painting — and to the people involved in the theft and its alarming discovery — as being suddenly worthy of the horrified check-slapping image we all know so well.

Stealing The Scream
by Monica Youn

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind–
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don’t know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything–the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure’s fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;

the guards rushing in–too late!–greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”

The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: “. . .but what does it all mean?”
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.

Isn’t that fabulous? Your challenge today, is to write an ekphrastic poem. If you’re not at a museum, look up art on the internet or open a book. I’m going to be writing an ekphrastic poem based on an art exhibit “Initial Public Offering” I visited yesterday at the San Jose Museum of Art. It’s a special poem for a special event, coming up April 17. Come back and read the poem later this month. Now, get writing!

 

 

Stealing The Scream

by Monica Youn

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind--
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don't know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything--the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure's fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;

the guards rushing in--too late!--greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: "Thanks for the poor security."

The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: ". . .but what does it all mean?"
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16477#sthash.qS5hIPDk.dpuf

Stealing The Scream

by Monica Youn

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind--
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don't know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything--the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure's fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;

the guards rushing in--too late!--greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: "Thanks for the poor security."

The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: ". . .but what does it all mean?"
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16477#sthash.qS5hIPDk.dpuf

the figure’s fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic by the fact of something happening; – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16477#sthash.qS5hIPDk.dpuf

Prompt # 19 Ode For An Odball Winter

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Hello poetry friends! Today’s prompt will serve double duty: I want to tempt you to write in one of my favorite forms, the ode, but also I want to create a sample poem on one of the themes for the Silicon Valley Reads Poetry Contest, sponsored by the Cupertino Library. Here goes!

An ode is one of the oldest poetic forms in Western culture. As my friends at the Academy of American Poets describe:

“‘Ode’ comes from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant, and belongs to the long and varied tradition of lyric poetry. Originally accompanied by music and dance, and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments, the ode can be generalized as a formal address to an event, a person, or a thing not present.”
I love to teach odes, because kids get the idea quickly. We talk about Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” which many of them have learned to play on their recorders if they are lucky enough to have music in school, and they readily understand praising and celebrating something or somebody. Read a couple of student odes at the CPitS website, in the Youth Poetry section.
Pablo Neruda, one of my favorite poets, wrote many odes (collected in translation and the original Spanish) in Odes to Common Things, common things like onions and chairs. He’s great to teach, too, especially if you have kids in class whose first language is Spanish. Neruda’s odes help dispel the silly idea some of us picked up in English Lit class that odes have to be about urns and dead athletes and other things we don’t care much about anymore. This one, “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” will give you a flavor.
pabloneruda
Today I wrote an ode to the oddball winter that is 2013-2014. The idea started when I read a news story about kids at Reed College who crashed a huge snowball (800 lbs) into a dorm wall, damaging it and setting of a viral news story. I didn’t really mean to write a poem with rhyming metered stanzas, but it happened, so I went with it.  (Use a web-based site like RhymeZone if you don’t have a rhyming dictionary.)
My poem (which I’ll publish in a separate post) is also an example of how you can hyperlink images, music, and other information to your poem, if you want to experiment. One of the prompts for the Silicon Valley Reads poetry contest is to “write a poem using technology as part of the process. Use hyperlinks, video, photos or music as part of the poem’s form.” This poem of mine, “Ode to An Oddball Winter” is just such a conglomerate mishmash kind of poem.
Enjoy!

Prompt #17: Surrealistic Football

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So much to write about this weekend: Chinese New Year, February and how it brings spring to California, and today, rain! But I was supposed to write this prompt yesterday and was planning to write about football, so I will stick to my plan. More people (in the US) will be interested in the Super Bowl today than in the rain, although I’m wiling to guess that most Cupertinians are thinking about the rain first and foremost. And almost nobody is thinking about poetry, but that’s nothing I can change. Except maybe with today’s poem. (From the Poetry 180 website, “A poem a day for American high schools.”)

This is my favorite football poem of all time, aptly titled “Football” by Louis Jenkins; it’s fun to read and to teach. It’s written in a prose poem form, which may seem “just wrong” to many poetry traditionalists, but which is, in fact, not “new” or “modern” and has been accepted as a true form by many literati.

My favorite things about this poem are its conversational tone — the way the speaker of the poem invites us into the experience and then asks us to share his surprise — and the surrealistic quality of the imagery. Most kids love that freaky question: how indeed could a football transform into a shoe? I’ve taught it together with Salvidor Dali paintings and sculptures  — the images of his lobster phone and melting clocks always delight younger children and seem aptly bizarre to teens.

ImageImage

But kids also respond to the speaker’s outrage, and they instinctively understand the fraud perpetrated on all of us by corn syrup masquerading as maple. (This is usually where I divert the lesson into a discussion of faux vs. true and what types of things accept in our lives because we can’t have/don’t want/aren’t allowed to have the originals.)

The end of the poem is a point of personal decision, where humor and  seriousness converge: “One has certain responsibilities, one has to make choices. This isn’t right and I’m not going to throw it.” I especially love how the word “throw” conveys both the physical act of hurling a ball down field, but also means to purposefully cheat — “throwing the game” to let the other team win.

And this is where today’s prompt comes in. Take several minutes to think about these questions and to write down your thoughts:

  • What choices do you face, both serious and lighthearted, where if you cheat, you might win?
  • What objects can you think of where the substitute is generally accepted but not really welcomed? (fur coats, fat-free potato chips, faux leather jackets, boots, purses?) What is better or worse about the substitute?
  • What objects are related to each other in a way that you wouldn’t expect? A football is like a shoe, as a guitar is like a cigar box, as a book is like a cereal box. What is the one thing they have in common; what are the important ways they differ?

See if a poem arises from one or more of these musings. And, if all that is too strange, difficult, or just weird, then write a poem about football — about the tastes, smells, sounds, as well as the visuals associated with this violent secular national holiday, Super Bowl Sunday.

Flat Stanley’s Poem

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Beach Dancing

— by Jennifer and Stanley

December beach
cold sunset and sand
kids jumping

Jostled but warm
inside your purple coat

Next to my heart
where no wind blows
still sandy

Safe from the bonfire
those marshmallows blackened
and burst so fast!

Smoke and clouds
dark against year’s end light

Pounding Pacific waves
wash my paper feet
clean

Stanley with his feet in the oceean!

Stanley puts his feet in the ocean!

Prompt #14 : Saturdays, Flat Stanley and Rengay

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Well, I’ve finally caved in to my (ridiculously busy) life and abandoned the “new poetry prompt on Thursday” problem. New prompts will still appear, but now they’ll appear on Saturdays. Here is the first prompt-on-Saturday. Today we are going to write rengay!

I’m not an experienced rengay poet. I love short forms (as you’ll recall from previous posts) but I’m not an expert. I have however used this form to teach before, as some kids find it wonderful to write together — it gives them a break for staring at the page alone. I hope today’s rengay prompt will get me writing something new as well as encourage you. Fortunately, there is a lot of information out there about this form, which we can all learn from.

Here’s what Michael Dylan Welch has to say: “The rengay is a collaborative six-verse linked thematic poem written by two or three poets using alternating three-line and two-line haiku or haiku-like stanzas in a regular pattern. The pattern for two people is A-3, B-2, A-3, B-3, A-2, B-3, with the letters representing the poets, and the numbers indicating the number of lines in each given verse. For three people the pattern is A-3, B-2, C-3, A-2, B-3, C-2. Unlike renku, […] a rengay stay[s] in one season and develop[s] a single theme. Since they are brief, rengay are also more easily remembered than renku, and more likely to be published in the various haiku journals. […] Rengay was first publicly introduced at the November 1, 1992 meeting of the Haiku Poets of Northern California in San Francisco.”

Rengay is a recently invented form, similar to renga, also a collaborative form of poetry from Japan. Rengay is also related to renku, a longer collaborative Japanese form.

Because rengay are long-ish, I won’t reproduce any here. Frongpond (the Journal of the Haiku Society of America) offers this sample.

I am planning to write a rengay today with my daughter. She’s agreed to collaborate with me. We are doing this in part to complete a visit of Flat Stanley to our house. I want to write a poem together with Stanley, but he’s mute on the idea. So, Stella will help and channel Stanley’s poetry onto the page.

(For anyone who’s unfamiliar with Flat Stanley, you can read more here and here and here.)

The resulting poem will also be posted on here and on Tumblr.

Have fun with your rengay and a friend. Please let me know how it goes.

Prompt #13: January 2, 2014

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Happy New Year!

Short on time while the holiday bells of family, friends and parties are still ringing, I have been writing snatches and snippets, but no real poems. Then! I stumbled upon a delightful little (and surprisingly powerful) form called the zip.

My friend Michael Dylan Welch, the current PL of Redmond, Washington, is a renowned poet, specializing in Japanese traditional forms. You can check out his work starting with his blog Graceguts. Michael shared the news earlier this week that the English poet, John Carley, passed away after a four-year battle with cancer. Michael challenged us, as a way to celebrate Carley’s life, to write a poem in the zip format he invented. Never having heard of a zip haiku, I was intrigued!

According to a 2001 article by Carley, a zip is “proposed as an analogue to the Japanese haiku, but uses a form more suited to the innate phonic and semantic qualities of English. The zip employs fifteen syllables, two weak pauses and one strong. The poem is centred on the caesura.”

What could be better. Short poems for the crazy holiday season, or those crazy days in my PAD project when I am stuck at work late, exhausted, grumpy, etc. And a “real” form. So, I took up the challenge. I’ve written two in the past two days, and whether they are good or not, only time will tell. I love them. The first is a moment remembered from my daughter’s beach party and the second is a reflection on my mother’s upcoming birthday in Maine.

Write your own!!!

#1

making faces     around the fire
beer bottles      marshmallow smoke

# 2

    January      glittering blue and white
the shape of     windows

Forsythia

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Many people post their own poetry to their blogs and websites. I am still unsure what I think about the practice, being hard-wired-wedded to the idea of peer review and publication hierarchies. However, today I will make an exception and post a poem, directly, without the safe “it’s still a draft” cover story I use in my poem-a-day project. Here is a poem I wrote for my daughter’s 21st birthday, which is today. (The title and first image are “found” from my friend Simon, who lives in North Carolina, not Georgia, but I altered the state for the meter.)

A poem written for a birthday doesn’t have a special name, but many poets do write for birthdays, their own and those of loved ones.

Forsythia

You are born
and the forsythia is confused again in Georgia
pushing out its yellow lips
against December-short days.

You are born
and the calla lilies rise in California
on green limbs
among the frost-stunted ferns,
white cups for sky.

You are born
and twenty-one years fly with their crows,
the hail storm of that night melting again
every morning
against your warm head.

Once, I held your spine in my hand,
straight beyond my making,
the spheres that had been buoyant in me
unfurled.

Now you are white and yellow
and waving with your own light,
daughter, at the lip
of an ocean
you will taste
in your own right.

for Stella
December 30, 2013