NaPoWriMo April 1, 2016 FPR Impromptu – Remembering Cement

Posted on April 2, 2016 by quillfyre

Still working on April 1st, from the Found Poetry Review prompt generator provided by Patrick Williams. His generator takes stacks of books he has compiled (as a librarian) and suggests a random prompt to be applied to the located text. Link to the site: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/national-poetry-month-2016/

My first prompt: Write a poem on the first memory encountered in “these two pages” from the generator. That gave me this: an article on concrete, with the following text actually readable: concrete stone in brushed-out surface, used in military academy buildings. The building is the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy at Lake Geneva Wisc. My memories of concrete come from childhood, rather than go the cemetery statuary route :

Remembering Concrete

I was six or maybe seven the day we went walking while
they changed the electric cycle from sixty to one-ten.
Grey grit still draws its dark scar across my knee, in memory
of where I fell along the cinder walk.

Soon after, we kids were happy when great lumbering trucks
arrived with workmen dressed for spreading cement: new sidewalks
over the cinder bits. We no longer needed to walk awkwardly
on steel wheels of roller skates that wouldn’t skate over grit.

A year or two after that, I’d remember the concrete road outside our house,
where I first learned to ride my electric blue two-wheeler. Rainbow streamers
and fancy reflectors did nothing to keep me stable and I went down hard,
no scars but these days — my back aches when it rains.

Carol A. Stephen

April 1, 2016

Line art drawing of a roller skate. (Wikipedia)

NaPoWriMo April 2016 Day 1

Posted on April 1, 2016 by quillfyre

Today’s the first day of National Poetry Month, and the first prompt I’m tackling is from NaPoWriMo.net Here’s the prompt from that website: ” Today, I challenge you to write a lune. This is a sort of English-language haiku. While the haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable count, the lune is a three-line poem with a 5-3-5 syllable count. There’s also a variant based on word-count, instead of syllable count, where the poem still has three lines, but the first line has five words, the second line has three words, and the third line has five words again. Either kind will do, and you can write a one-lune poem, or write a poem consisting of multiple stanzas of lunes. “

I might even get away with saying that the first lune fits the Poetic Asides prompt to write a foolish poem for April Fool’s Day. Almost.

My attempt at this one:

Day 1 April 2016

Lunarversity

Ventnor seafront from the shelter above Rene Howe Gardens Wikipedia)

First April day
weather fit only for fools:
sunny with rain.



Embed from Getty Images

Cat paw syncopation:
does he wear tap shoes
chasing those balls?

Stubborn as rams
no April showers
douse the fire sign Aries

Fol. 34v Aries (Wikipedia)

Poetry Prompt: THE OLD, ROUGH STONE AND THE GNARLED TREE

Posted on November 8, 2014 by quillfyre

Found Poetry prompt is to write an erasure poem from the short short illustrated story “The Old, Rough Stone and the Gnarled Tree” (it’s about an old rough stone and an old gnarled tree). You can find a link to it on the FPR site here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/poetry-prompt-the-old-rough-stone-and-the-gnarled-tree/#comment-4283

This is my effort:

Second Theory of Petrification

Rough stone beneath—
Years upon the stone
grow into tree.

Some other place,
tiny shoots in the stone
grow into the air to the blue sky.
In winter snow and cold rain fall
on rough stone, a tree lying on the ground.

Count the rings in three hundred axes of hot summer
the sun beat down the old stone to tree.

The great stone lay all alone
knowing little creatures would
sit upon old stone, keep him company.

And stone to never know need.

English: Petrified trees, Slapton Sands, South Devon 1976. Slapton Sands comprises a shingle beach with a nature reserve , Slapton Ley, behind it. Start Point is seen in the far distance. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Carol A. Stephen
November 8, 2014

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST EXIT INTERVIEW: THE AFTERMATH

Posted on May 1, 2014 by quillfyre

As a kind of farewell and wrapup, we’ve been asked to post an exit interview, discussing the Oulipost experience. It will take awhile still to absorb and understand Oulipo, I think, but that’s why I purchased the Oulipo Compendium. That will keep me going forever! And thanks so much to the Found Poetry Review, for pulling this all together! What a ride, as one of my fellow Ouliposters said!

So, what now and what’s next? Herewith:

Oulipost Exit Interview: Oulipost Ends Where the Work Begins

Question 1:

What happened during Oulipost that you didn’t expect? What are the best (or worst) moments for you?

Well, going in, I didn’t know a lot about Oulipo experimental writing, although I’d had a bit of an intro while taking Modern & Contemporary American Poetry with Al Filreis UPenn, through Coursera.

Some of the scariest sounding prompts turned out to be the most fun. And often the ones that sounded really quite straightforward turned out to be anything but. And I never expected ever to write a poem with zombies in it, much less a zombie sonnet on a day that was not a sonnet prompt. It was Day 9, create a poem from headlines. Zombies just jumped out from the page and off I went. And I found the hardest ones were the ones with selected letters to be used or to be avoided.

I also enjoyed the discussions with the other Ouliposters and their ideas, which often helped me get started in the mornings.

Question 3:

What does your street look like?

Aha! We encounter Oulipo even in the questions. Ok, I will do Q3 next then about something totally off-track. My street is a cornucopia of cars and kids cavorting. No, actually it often looks like a parking lot. Mostly townhomes, and a bedroom community for Ottawa. Everyone has more vehicles than their driveways and single garages will hold. But lovely in spring and fall when the trees, now nearly 20 years old, are either in blossom or in full fall colour.

Question 4:

Who is your spirit Oulipostian? I didn’t have one going in, and I am not sure I have one coming out. On occasion, John Beryman, on others Christian Bök, a Canadian poet who wrote Eunoia, which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, which had 5 chapters, each using a single vowel. Interesting concept, read more about him here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k Perhaps also Tristan Tzara, although not an Oulipolian, did create Dadaist poetry.

English: tristan Tzara Español: Tristan Tzara pero en Español (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Question 5:

What are the top three poems you wrote during this project?

Ooh, not fair! I’m not sure I can narrow down to three. Day 7’s N+7 poem, Behind Closed Doors on Parliament Hill is one. Strangely enough, Day 19’s sestina poem, Zoo Variations. Of course, thanks are due again to Doug Luman and his wonderful tools, which made this a whole lot easier, and actually do-able in a single day. Probably the last one would be the Patchwork Quilt, In a Vacant Lounge in Canada, I Too sat Dowse and Wept,taking lines from all the poems written over the 30 days, simply because it does revisit some of the best lines from all the poems, but then again, there are the two Antonymy poems from April 22, Buy the Pigeon, Sell Carnivores and A Silence Out of Mid-Summer. Both these have a combination of sensical lines and nonsense. I think overall, I liked the ones that had interesting and startling juxtapositions, and were a bit or a lot outside my usual “coherence.”

A city pigeon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Question 2:

What questions do you have for your teaspoons? What questions do your teaspoons have for you?

Questions for my teaspoons:

Teaspoons (Photo credit: eltpics)

Why don’t you hold more sugar?

Why is there only one of you in a set of measuring spoons, at least one for wet and another for dry?
Why are you almost always heaping when you are not scant?

Questions my teaspoons have for me:

Why do you scoop around the slice of stale bread, the clay honeybear and the measuring scoop instead of moving them out of the way first?
Why don’t you use more jam and less oil, since we all have a sweet-tooth too?
Why do you keep us here in the dark when we really want to watch Big Bang Theory?

Teaspoon… (Photo credit: vanherdehaage)

Question 6:

What will you do next?

Hoping to put together a regular submission plan (and implement it!) and to work on the three chapbooks/collections I have in process, including, now, the Oulipo ones. My title for that so far is Newspaper Clippings. And definitely, definitely doing more Oulipo!