Category Archives: My Poetry

NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 10 : Cracking the Spine

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For today, I chose to do the prompt posted on napowrimo.net

 

Today’s prompt comes to us from Lillian Hallberg. She challenges us to write a “book spine” poem. This involves taking a look at your bookshelves, and writing down titles in order (or rearranging the titles) to create a poem. Some fun images of book spine poems can be found here. If you want to take things a step further, Lillian suggests gathering a list of titles from your shelves (every third or fifth book, perhaps, if you have a lot) and using the titles, as close to the originals as possible, to create a poem that is seeded throughout with your own lines, interjections, and thoughts. Happy writing!

 

I’d been working on a 10-word, 48-hour contest poem for the CV2 annual April event (sorry registration closed Apr. 4) and there was just not enough hours today to tackle an intricate prompt. This one was indeed, a change of pace.  I simply scooped up an armful of poetry books and used those as my source. For the poem I selected about two thirds of the titles, and inserted four words (in parentheses) to round it out. The names of the poets appear below, in the order I used their titles.

 

Cracking the Spine

spine and hip bones

wood engraving (Wikipedia) spine and hip bones

Sailing the Forest
On Glassy Wings,
The Eternal Ones of Dream,
Coping with Emotions and Otters  (play)
Hide & Seek.

Bye-and-Bye,
Stowaways (go)
Sprinting from the Graveyard.

Some bones and a story (make)
(A) Satisfying Clicking Sound.

Just Saying.

Carol A. Stephen
April 10, 2016

English: Skeleton animation

 

In order, titles from Ariel Gordon, Goran Simić, Robin Robertson, Anne Szumigalski, James Tate, Dina Del Bucchia, Susan Glickman, Charles Wright, Alice Major, Jason Guriel, Rae Armantrout

NaPoWriMo 2016 FPR Impromptu #9 What We Carry with Us

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Today’s IMPROMPTU prompt comes from Frank Montesonti:

“Find an erasure text from a usual source – the book rack at Goodwill, a newspaper, an old manual. When you approach the erasure text, however, don’t think that you are trying to uncover just one voice. Think in terms of creating a dialogue. Highlight some phrases or words in one color, then feel if there might be a response to those words somewhere else in the text. How many voices do you hear in the text? Two, three? If so, highlight them each in their own color. What is the conversation that is happening between the colors and in the text?

There might also be places where you feel the two voices overlap. In this case, since you are using primary colors, if you highlight the same words in two different primary colors, they create a new color, a secondary color representing a choral aspect of the erasure.

A fun aspect of this activity is that it can collaborative. Two or more poets can work on the same erasure project by handing a book back and forth and creating a conversation.”

For more about Frank Montesonti, and to view the whole post: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/impromptu-9-frank-montesonti/

 

Here is the poem that emerged, each voice shown in its own  style:

 

What We Carry with Us

 

Bear witness.  We carry our own pain.
Hatred of the body is deep. Distrust
the process.

Experience the pain of women
consciousness going backward,
denial peeled away.

 you’re so tired. lie down.

 

 My tiredness profound,
I felt how good I was
at pushing down tears.

don’t ask for light.

 
And I wept for myself,
for my mother, for the endless grief
of losing two children.

 I felt my grandmother’s grief,
her mother died in childbirth
wailing for all women,
not my pain but the pain.

 

 I knew why I was on earth.
There are no mistakes, no other path,
no words beyond reason.
The veil between is thin.

 

Carol A. Stephen
April 9, 2016

 

My source text is the book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom by Christiane Northrup, M.D. ©1994 from Bantam Books. pp. 640-641

 

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NaPoWriMo 2016 Impromptu # 7 Cento: Only About Light

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Today’s prompt at Found Poetry Review comes from Simone Muench, who wrote a favourite of mine, a collection titled Wolf Centos. Please click on the link to access the full post, and for more information about Simone, as well as to view other poems answering the challenge today.

The prompt:

“The Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira created the cento “Anthology” (see below) using lines from his own poems, instead of employing the traditional method of cento-construction (in which you build a poem entirely out of lines from other people’s poems). Following his example, write a cento that is a self-portrait, or anthology of your life, utilizing lines and fragments from your own work.

Or, alternatively, create a “self-portrait” cento using lines and fragments from other people’s poems (the traditional method), or song lyrics, or prose (fiction and/or nonfiction)

*To see the basic stipulations for writing a traditional cento, see http://myenchiridion.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html 

I decided to use my own poems as source material.  To keep it simple, I chose only from poems written in 2016.  My attempt is titled “Only About Light”

Only About Light

Sometimes I wake, not because there was music—
here the silence deafens as only silence can.

Suppose the world was only about light—
the ultra-sentient particles.

I convince myself each fear is a chimera
while we sleep the Earth rotates east

the song dog
lifts his muzzle to the wind

and desert dog song soars skyward in a moon moan
but he doesn’t understand the depth of sky.

 

Carol A. Stephen
April 7, 2016

 

*the phrase, song dog is quoted from Alice Notley’s Culture of One


Embed from Getty Images

 

For more centos also check out Newfoundland poet, Mary Dalton, who wrote Hooking.  Each of the poems in this collection used lines from a specific location in the source poems, for example a poem might consist of lines that were the 9th line of each source poem.  Her process is detailed at the back of the book. Hooking, from Vehicule Press

At this link, Mary discusses her book in an interview with The Malahat Review’s John Barton.

 

 

NaPoWriMo 2016 Impromptu #6 Storm Sonnet

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Today’s Impromptu prompt over at Found Poetry Review comes from Noah Eli Gordon. Well, actually 10 prompts. You can see his suggestions (and poems by the other participants!) here at FPR.

So,  #1 sounds like a fun challenge, but I can’t see dining and recording the conversation of seven friends, then transcribing it and still writing a poem before midnight.  #2 was in a similar vein, but I needed to find 100 friends who’d have a fave anecdote about me… yeah, that isn’t happening today either (do I have 100 such friends?)  Those prompts both seemed like something from Kenny Goldsmith, I think.  And beyond the scope of what I can achieve today.  But something to keep in mind.  #4, maybe, taking all my inbox emails and removing the mail addresses (personally addressed ones though, no forwards, no listserv stuff) but would it be a poem?  #10 is funny, find and contact someone with the same name as Harvey Keitel and then ask him repeatedly for comments on his roles, to the point of making him on edge.  And then transcribe it. Oh, not done then, now you pitch it to mainstream media, then compile responses to your pitches and to the interview, and transcribe THAT into a work….well that’s another longtermer and not the kind of thing I do now.

I may try some of the others later on, but for today I decided on the sonnet, long enough to be a challenge and to offer some opportunities for quirk.

Here’s the prompt: #5: Write a sonnet in the modern key:

Line 1: narrate action, include at least two nouns
Line 2: ask a question without using “I”
Line 3: make a statement without saying “I”
Line 4: now say “I” in another statement
Line 5: use a fragment
Line 6: narrate another action, include one of the nouns from line 1
Line 7: ask a question using “I”
Line 8: use a fragment that
Line 9: spills into the next line
Line 10: now say “I” and include the other noun from line 1
Line 11: answer your first question
Line 12: make a statement that is in total opposition to line 3
Line 13: combine phrases from lines 5 and 8 here
Line 14: answer your second question

And my attempt:

 

Storm Sonnet

 

Wind howls through dim alleys—
What price the snows of early April?
No birds sing in this early spring storm.
I hear grey sadness in the voices of the wind.
A trick of the ear.
The alleys between these houses narrow to deadends.
Am I the only one to hear their music?
Their hollow echoes, their blank walls, not
even the mockery of graffiti–
I hear the wind in all its many voices.
The brave green shoots of budding plants lie dead with cold.
Outside my window, the robin’s cheerful song.
A trick echo glances off hollows in the walls.
And I am the only listener.


Embed from Getty Images

Carol A. Stephen
April 6, 2016