NaPoWriMo 2016 FPR Impromptu #9 What We Carry with Us

Posted on April 9, 2016 by quillfyre

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

NaPoWriMo 2016 Impromptu # 7 Cento: Only About Light

Posted on April 7, 2016 by quillfyre

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

Posted on April 6, 2016 by quillfyre

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

NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 5 a Three-Fer

Posted on April 5, 2016 by quillfyre

Today I have a poem for each of three challenges, the NaPoWriMo.net, Poetry Super Highway, and the Impromptu #5 from Found Poetry Review.

At NaPoWriMo

The daily prompt challenges us to consult seed catalogues and seek out heirloom plants as inspiration for a poem today. I chose the suggested tomato plants, for the reason given: the names are so wonderful. Here is my poem, Heirloom:

My source is an Ontario location, in order to use plants that I could actually grow here in the Ottawa area http://www.terraedibles.ca/index.html

HEIRLOOM

Various heirloom tomato cultivars Wikipedia)

No one there is who does not love tomatoes
is what Frost should have said each spring, as gardeners
turn to catalogues and dream their August dreams.

No Belgian chocolate for me, instead an Amazon Chocolate,
full of flavour in its flattened oval, sliced on a plate
beside the yellow-red streaks of Allegheny Sunset.

Ghosts in the shadows, silver-sheened leaves
of this year’s prize Angoras garnish a summer salad:
yellow Apricots jostle Azoychkas and just ripe Banana Legs.

Believe It or Not, every one of them tomatoes.

Carol A. Stephen
April 5, 2016

(first line paraphrases Robert Frost’s Mending Wall)

At Poetry Super Highway, today’s prompt was a fun write, encouraging us to write a Creation Myth poem for a kitchen item. Here’s my attempt, a Creation Myth for Oatmeal.

CREATION MYTH: OATMEAL

In the beginning was the Flake,
flat, without colour. Flake needed substance,
to cling to its brothers, to form a greater whole.

Oatmeal directly from the packing. ( Wikipedia)

With the first rains from the heavens, each Flake knew joy.
Each Flake swelled into greatness as it welcomed
the worshipping moisture.

But the Flakes were not yet whole.
Their joy soon dimmed as they floated
without substance upon the waters.

Behold, the rain passed away and there came the sun.
And a second time each Flake swelled but
joy was elusive.

And the Flakes dreamed they must know water and warmth
together. They consulted Oracle who told them verily
to seek out the Lord High Bowl, that they must cluster there.

And the Flakes sought out Lord Bowl, and climbed inside
Bowl’s vessel. For the first seven days, they waited. The eighth day
the heavens opened and behold, there fell a sun shower.

Rain poured down into Bowl. Sun heated Bowl till it glowed.
And Flakes were transformed. On the ninth day Bowl beheld
Oatmeal and it was good!

Carol A. Stephen
April 5, 2016

Breakfast of raspberries, blueberries and oatmeal. (Wikipedia)

Oatmeal Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies. (Wikipedia)

Finally, the Found Poetry Review prompt, today from Sarah Blake, calls for a poem that follows the rhythm of a song.Found Poetry Review

At first, I was imagining I’d need a month to even start to tackle this one. Until I remembered the blues. It may be a bit of a shortcut, copout or cheat to go with that, since it is a rather simple form. But it’s what I went with and on a day when the thermometer has slipped well below zero (Celsius) the lyric is appropriate!

English: Comparison of Centigrade (Celsius) an...

Centigrade (Celsius) and Fahrenheit thermometer scales (Wikipedia)

Weather Blues

Don’t want that chill wind hangin’ outside my door
Said I don’t want that chill wind hangin’ outside my door
Bringin’ me blue fingers like it done before

It brings me the shivers, it brings me cold feet
Yeah, it bring me the shivers, an’ it bring me cold feet
Cold bringin’ me down when the weather ain’t sweet

Don’t want that chill wind hangin’ round my door
No, I don’t want chill wind hangin’ round my door
If it ain’t good for springtime, don’t want it no more

Wind blows in the mornin’, and all afternoon
I said it blows in the mornin’, and all afternoon
It ain’t good for springtime, and it ain’t good for June

Fridays it blows in, blows all weekend too
yeah Fridays it blows in, blows all weekend too
Come Monday morning, man, colour me blue

Don’t want that chill wind hangin’ outside my door
Said I don’t want that chill wind hangin’ outside my door
Bringin’ me blue fingers like it done before

Carol A. Stephen
April 5, 2016

Quillfyre

Aspiring to poet

Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo

NaPoWriMo 2016 FPR Impromptu #9 What We Carry with Us

you’re so tired. lie down.

don’t ask for light.

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

NaPoWriMo 2016 Impromptu # 7 Cento: Only About Light

NaPoWriMo 2016 Impromptu #6 Storm Sonnet

NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 5 a Three-Fer

you’re so tired. lie down.

don’t ask for light.

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

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