Posted tagged ‘National Poetry Month’

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29th Day of National Poetry Month – Poem In Your Pocket Sonnet – WhitmanBack

April 29, 2010

Whitmanback, not Greenback (or, as it appears, Rasputinback)

April 29th–the 29th day of National Poetry Month–is not-so-traditionally “poem in your pocket” day, a day when everyone is supposed to carry a folded-up sheet of poetry on their person.  (In my experience, the main people who celebrate the day are students with good English teachers.)   Here’s a draft sonnet in honor of the day:

For Poem In Your Pocket Day

Amazing to think of a poem in
one’s pocket in place of all currency–
cash or gun—a bartered verse to phone in
to your broker, negotiable fluency;
“Song of Myself” read for a credit check,
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
serving for your OB.  For a higher tech
purchase, try a quote from Stephen Hawking–
not quite a poem but close enough—and
for those moments one faces something raw,
when, as they say, the going gets tough, and
life itself seems stuck in maw and craw,
what a gift to unfold one’s own scanned lines
and read in them word of other times.

F0r more on sonnets, look here, and also check out the poetry category from the home page.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, writing exercises
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28th Day of National Poetry Month – Train of Thought

April 28, 2010

The 28th day of National Poetry Month, and my 28th draft poem.  This one is very much a draft, but, I hope, interesting.

Train of Thought

I am thinking as I sit upon the train
that the person who invented rubberized eggs
should be shot, or at least, forced to eat them, when
a woman with a rubbed-out face
steps onto my car.  She’s been burned badly,
her face segmented into triangular wedges of scar that
web the skin from one ear to the opposite cheekbone.
Hard to read the history
in the hieroglyphics.
An explosion on a stove?
Acid thrown in warning?  Retribution?
Her skin tan, hair dark, ethnicity scratched out, I go
for the acid, knowing that whether or not she is a woman
purposely victimized, there are such women,
damaged for their difference, their efforts, to hold
things in place, women.
She stands, waits, her face turned
so that I can see only an edge of eye (though her eyes
are almost all edge).
I want to give her my seat, but the gesture feels
intrusive, a kind of stare, so do nothing but wonder
about a world in which eggs are turned
into seamless yellow squares, and woman’s faces into
a stitching of scars, and how our minds can hold such things at once–
the trivial, the tragic, the very very tragic–and this City too,
this train.

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27th Day of April – “Chalk Milkshake”

April 27, 2010

Banana

Here is my 27th draft poem in honor of National Poetry Month.

Chalk Milkshake

I knew that we would be married some day
when he drank down
the chalk milkshake I had made.
It was not really a chalk milkshake.
It was soy.  Powder.
But tasted like sidewalk
sweetened with banana;
a sidewalk freshly poured, or
covered with hopscotch on a sun-dried day,
your pick.
He smiled, after a sip,
a sweet smile shaped like a banana,
and, as I apologized, said,
“no, it’s interesting.”

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25th Day of National Poetry Month – “Thin Birthday”

April 25, 2010

Birthday Grapefruit

25th Day of National Poetry Month, and my 25th draft poem of the month.  As those following this blog know, I am writing a draft poem every day this month, and I sincerely hope that some of you are inspired to also try some drafts.

The following poem has a rhyme scheme I just made up;  I suppose it could be considered a modified (and much less musical) terza rima.  The stanzas are three lines, with the first two lines of each stanza rhyming as a couplet, and the third line rhyming with the third line of the next stanza:  AAB, CCB, DDE, FFE, GGH, IIH.  (It makes more sense if you look at the poem, although, because many of the rhymes are slant rhymes, it may not make that much more sense!)

Thin Birthday

On one birthday when she was very thin,
he brought out, after much whispering,
a half-grapefruit set upon a platter.

It was their birthday cake platter–wooden,
painted with blue ribbon swirl, holes put in
careful spaces along its perimeter.

The lone half grapefruit balanced in the place
for cake; a pink candle centering its face
like a faded, twisted cherry, stretched out tall.

He looked at her with such worry, not
(she thought) for her condition, but to please.  What
to give a child stuck in rigid refusal?

She’d disdain cake, she’d groan (he knew), oh Dad.
So, for her to weep, to get so very sad,
was quite unfair.  I wanted to give you

something you would take, he said, as they sat
out in the car and he awkwardly pat
her arm, reaching for something flesh and true.

 

(This poem was posted some time ago, but I’m linking it today, May 31, 2012 (the day before my birthday in fact) to Imperfect Prose, hosted by Emily Wierenga, who’s publishing a book on anorexia.

Since this original post, the poem has also been published in my book of poetry, “Going on Somewhere,” by Karin Gustafson, available on Amazon.   Check it out!!!!

(As always, all rights reserved.)

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23rd Day of National Poetry Month – Slant Sonnet About 22nd Day of National Poetry Month

April 24, 2010

Helicopter

23rd Day of National Poetry Month! Here is a sonnet written (oddly enough) about the 22nd day of National Poetry Month, that is, April 22, 2010, the day that Obama came to speak to Wall Street (though the poem is not really about Obama so much, or Wall Street, but just that particular day.)

Although the poem is, I suppose, technically a sonnet (it has fourteen lines), it uses slant rhyme and run-on lines rather than ending the lines with a rhyme or slant rhyme. (A slant rhyme is a “not-quite rhyme.”) This gives the poem an assymetry which tonight (I started late!), may be a function of lack of time, and fatigue; however, this assymetry can also be a useful tool as it avoids the cutesiness that can sometimes plague a rhyming poem.

April 22, 2010, NYC (Day of Obama Visit)

The meteor shower that I didn’t see
was seen yesterday, as was the fox outside
our country shed, painted white and faded green.
It ducked down in the spring grass, only orange spied–
orange-red. (Why they call it a red fox.)
But I drove down the FDR so early
I only saw the police and the blank box
of heliopad, waiting for the whirling
blur of polished light that seems to form
around anyone whose picture is taken
often enough. I saw too my cabbie’s worn
shirt collar (grey with black and white flakes of
contrast.) Wife was from Belize, he’d never
been. We talked of that by the dawn East River.

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22nd Day of National Poetry Month – Another Kind of Earth Day

April 22, 2010

22nd day of National Poetry Month.  My draft poem of the day honors “Earth Day”.  A little obliquely, I admit.

One Kind of Earth Day

We dug well beyond blisters.
The earth was not like the dirt at home–
yellow, dry, always hard-packed below
its aura of dust.
This was soil; it held ground, sweat
of its own accord, curled wormlike,
clung rootlike, and was dark enough
that we were sure it hid black crude
just beyond the point of our spade.
When it oozed, then pooled,
our certainty turned to disbelief even as,
Eureka, we ran to tell
our grandmother she’d be rich.
As it was, she had to pay
to get the pipe fixed.

 

 

This poem was kindly distinguished by a Perfect Poet’s Award  from Promising Poet’s Parking Lot, a very active website supporting the writing of poetry.   Thank you so much, Ava, and all those being PromingPoetsParkingLot Blog.

 

 

I am supposed to nominate another poet from the participants.  Frankly, they are all interesting and promising poets, and it’s a very hard choice, which I’d rather not make, but since I’m supposed to do it, I’ll name NefariousX, a very subtle funny poet I discovered this evening.

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21st Day of National Poetry Month – The Body Is Not Your Good Dog.

April 21, 2010



Good Dog! (Not Your Body)

The 21st day of National Poetry Month, and I have a terrible, terrible cold.  So far, I’ve managed to spare you the poem devoted to “rhinovirus,” but I found, in trying to write tonight’s draft poem, that I could not stay completely away from the subject of the fickleness of the body.

Note, in reading the draft poem, that pauses are only intended to be taken based on punctuation–commas, semi-colons, periods–and not at the ends of lines (unless punctuated.)

Here, Body

The body is not your good dog.
It may sit, lie down, roll over,
do tricks for food, and seem to love;
but there’s a limit to its Rover

aspect.  It will get sick just when
you tell it not to.  There’s no yanking
on that leash.  It will decay
when you say stay;  there’s no spanking

with a rolled-up newspaper,
not even the Times, which can train
it to heel, to keep
to the right side of that called sane.

It won’t obey you even when
it knows what you desperately want,
when its lesson has been learned
before, again; still, it will vaunt

its own fleshly, furry ways,
taking up all room upon your bed,
refusing to hush when hushed,
and, except when dancing, to be led.

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20th Day of National Poetry Month – Sonnet – “Couple” (Fill in the Blanks.)

April 20, 2010

Glue

Twentieth day of National Poetry Month.  I keep expecting this experiment (writing a draft poem a day in honor of National Poetry Month) to get easier–for topics to appear at my beck and call.  But it was a bit hard to come up with a draft poem today.  All I could think of on the subway this morning was “rhinovirus”.  (I have a cold.)  That topic was not all that appealing.   So, this evening, I fell back on my old standby form–the sonnet, and an old standby subject—relationships.

Couple

Sometimes it’s best to just do nothing,
to stare blankly at a wall and not to
wonder how the crack was made, to toughen
your perimeter nerves till you’ve got to
feel more than a jab of despair to fête
despairing.  Sometimes it’s best not to run
your finger down the plaster, but to let
crumbling crumble; not to reach out one
overheated foot from the blanket, bed,
to climb the chill of that almost smooth plane.
Sometimes it’s even best to leave unsaid
words that will fix everything, that saying
that’s aphoristic but so true, the glue
you’d like to think would make all whole, all new.

For more on sonnets, and more on National Poetry Month, check out the poetry category from the ManicDDaily home page.  And, as always, check out the link to 1 Mississippi on Amazon, a counting book for kids, parents and their pachyderms.

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19th Day of National Poetry Month – “Shoeshine”

April 19, 2010

Shoe

I got my shoes shined today for a special evening event (which delayed my posting till now).  I don’t get my shoes shined very often, so it provided useful material for today’s poem draft (as well as a beautiful dark sheen.)

Shoeshine

He stiffens his finger with
a wrapped flap of plastic then, with the precision of
a surgeon, binds it with a worn swathe of
fabric.  In a world in which all is disposable, his cloth
is ragged, frayed, stained, authentically used.
Like so, like so—he sprinkles a dose of something clear, then,
after rubbing my dark
rounded toes, delves his finger into the thin can which holds
the black, more tar than jet,
the color of spider bellies, widows’ skirts,
that shadow in the cheek of certain saints outlined by
El Greco, the eyebrow of Frieda Kahlo.
He is short, as they tend to be, born in mountains,
where height adds insult to
uphill climbs, a slight tilt a part of the landscape.
He strokes the sides of my shoes
as he paints them; I feel the strokes
in the sides of my feet,
the ribs of the arches, like a very
polite massage, the caress of the humble, and think of the feet
of certain statues, whose insteps have been worn
into silent tongues by those
seeking blessings, though I
feel blessed by him, his attentions, the worn, made new.
It is something of which we don’t speak.

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18th Day of National Poetry Month – “Second Marriage” (and more on Sonnets!)

April 18, 2010

Iron Pan

18 days of draft poems!

I have to confess that it was hard today to come up with something to write about.  My mind felt blank;  anything I did come up with seemed too personal for a blog post.  (It’s one thing to be personal in a finished poem;  another to be overly personal in a draft.) Finally, I bugged my husband for a topic;  in the middle of cooking, he came up with “iron frying pan.”   Although this seemed a promising starting point, my blank mind had a hard time fitting words around it until I decided to try my own advice from prior posts, and turn to a traditional poetic form, a sonnet.

The sonnet is one of my favorite forms:  the interlocking lines lead you through the poem, which, because it is only fourteen lines, thankfully, can’t, go on too long.  I heartily recommend trying one!

A couple of hints:  it is useful to number your lines (in the margins) after you get to the 8th or 9th, as it is amazingly easy to lose track of where you are.   Also, I find it easier to write sonnets in a notebook by hand, than on the computer.   Nearly every time I begin to run out of steam, I re-copy what I’ve done up to that point; sometimes tearing out my prior page so I can see it better.  The re-copying allows me to refresh my momentum, and also to clarify where the poem is going, or stuck.   Weirdly enough, it seems  easier to cut out whole lines and phrases when you are writing by hand and re-copying than when you are on the computer.   It is much easier to give undeserved authority to words in typeface than to barely legible scribbles.

Anyway, here’s the draft of the day:

Second Marriage

He’s the kind of guy who carefully seasons
an iron skillet, oiling the surface,
eschewing soap.  I know all the reasons,
understand rust, stickiness, nonetheless,
I squeeze Dawn right onto the blackness,
and when I smell that low-heated oil, I
rebel.  “Are you,” I charge (nearly senseless),
“seasoning my frying pan?” As if to try
traditional method, some slow process
of caretaking, is intended to defy,
deny, descry, the rushed independence
I’ve professed, those hurry-up lone years I
scraped so many sharp implements across,
getting rid of the hard bits, loss and loss.

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