Poetry Superhighway Day 5 Fears

Posted on April 6, 2015 by quillfyre

Day 5 prompt from the Poetry Superhighway challenge is a fear-based prompt. My poem is titled Segue, as it segues from childhood to adulthood and from dreams to daily worries.

A Prompt-A-Day for National Poetry Month: April 5 – ‪#‎napowrimo ‪#‎poetry Lions and Spiders and Fears! Oh My!

Make a list of your childhood fears. If you are feeling really brave, try to come up with one fear for every year of life until you turned age 18. If you can’t recall what you were afraid of when you were very young, try to imagine what might have frightened a typical infant, toddler, or young child in your family back when you were a kid. What images plagued your nightmares, and what scary thoughts ran rampant through your mind on sleepless nights?
Turn this list into an image driven dream where you come face-to-face with each of these frightening images. Describe them with as much poetic detail as you can. They may each be only a brief presence in the dream returned to try to scare you again, or perhaps they will try to explain to you why you shouldn’t have ever feared them. Perhaps these “fears” were each trying to teach you something. One fear may take over the whole dream and become an extended metaphor or spokesperson for the rest of the fears. Follow the poem wherever it takes you. Even if it’s down a dark tunnel filled with lions and spiders. Have fun with it!
Try to end your piece with the most comforting image you can imagine. Perhaps something that comforts you now.
For even more frightening fun and perhaps a deeper analysis of your work and your psyche: circle words and images that stand out to you as powerful or meaningful (10 to 15 is plenty, but feel free to look up as many as you like. If you write a lot of poetry, some of these images may already be familiar themes in your work)
Look each of these images up on a dream interpretation/analysis website and write a second poem which “psychoanalyzes” the writer based on the images in the dream.

Good news is that you likely aren’t crazy, you are probably just a poet. Submitted by Raundi Kai Moore-Kondo ( http://www.theloveofwords.com/raundi.html

Segue

When I was 9, I dreamed the Creature from the Black Lagoon
lived our backyard swamp, legacy from winter’s skating rink melting
At night the creature tapped on my window

Monsters might chase me in dreams where I can’t run, my feet
stuck in the mud, or working only in slow motion

I still dream my teeth are crumbling, I chew
dental fragments in my sleep

In other dreams I run down streets, lost, no keys
I look down. I am naked. It might be snowing
It might be raining, or even summer. Still I am naked
And running

Daylight fears are different. The regular mundanities:
Girls travelled in threes, but when two of us quarrelled, one
would be outside the circle and walk alone. I feared being the third girl.

I was afraid of baggy-knee jeans. Always wanted tight pants.
Before spandex, there was lycra. But the knees were still wrinkly.

Planet of the Spiders (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I fight my fear of spiders with the vacuum cleaner.
I am afraid to use the telephone because I fear rejection.

I love red tulips and coral-coloured roses. I have no flowers at home.
I am afraid because my cat eats anything green. He spits up later.

One afternoon in the back field a cat running, a potato chip bag
over its head. Backwards, mostly. I scared it into losing one life.
I fear pain, mine, yours, theirs, that cat’s.

My first bank account, I took out two dollars each day. Didn’t know
how to ration. Afraid to run out of things. I still stock up at 3 for 1 sales.

I’d rather eat white bread. When I was a child,
my mother would cut off all the crusts. Not fear. Just loathing.

I fear illness, dependency, the way my body ages.
Not death. I won’t know, I will be dead.

My greatest fear is fear.

Carol A Stephen
April 5, 2015



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NaPoWriMo 2015 Day 4 After the Jettison

Posted on April 4, 2015 by quillfyre

Today’s prompt (optional, as always). Love poems are a staple of the poetry scene. It’s pretty hard to be a poet and not write a few – or a dozen – or maybe six books’ worth. But because so many love poems have been written, there are lots of clichés. Fill your poems with robins and hearts and flowers, and you’ll sound more like a greeting card than a bard. So today, I challenge you to write a “loveless” love poem. Don’t use the word love! And avoid the flowers and rainbows. And if you’re not in the mood for love? Well, the flip-side of the love poem – the break-up poem – is another staple of the poet’s repertoire. If that’s more your speed at present, try writing one of those, but again, avoid thunder, rain, and lines beginning with a plaintive “why”? Try to write a poem that expresses the feeling of love or lovelorn-ness without the traditional trappings you associate with the subject matter.

http://www.napowrimo.net/

After the Jettison

English: Flotsam and jetsam Evening at Ardmore; flotsam and jetsam clearly visible on the beach. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Room after room the silence folds in
no muffled chatter of keyboards behind a closed door
nor muted music just below the level of interpretation

there’s no visual clutter here, no tossed heaps of unclean clothes
My sink holds no whisker wisps, nor spent soggy teabags,
and no discarded cheese wrappings on kitchen counter.

What vacant really means. A sense of adios, ciao, adieu
without the sad songs on my radio. In calm air,
my sense of self returns to me. Bonjour, ¡Hola!

and happy music.

Carol A. Stephen
April 4, 2015

Day 1 NaPoWriMo

Posted on April 1, 2015 by quillfyre

Today’s prompt is a poem of negation – yes (or maybe, no), I challenge you to write a poem that involves describing something in terms of what it is not, or not like. For example, if you chose a whale as the topic of your poem, you might have lines like “It does not settle down in trees at night, cooing/Nor will it fit in your hand.” Since I had already worked on a poem with dragons in the title, I just stayed with the theme for this poem:

Red dragon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

NEVER TICKLE A SLEEPING DRAGON

He doesn’t use mouthwash against his fire-hot breath
nor quench thirst with his cool words. He doesn’t breathe
out C02, nor eat ice cream or frozen yogurt hot days in summer.
There are no soft sofas in his den, nor paper books, nor quilts
to cosy up his scaly skin. He doesn’t soften his pelt with lotion
nor rub on sun protection, he isn’t thin-skinned like humans
are supposed to be. Instead—

his breath boils with fire, with requisite brimstone, with a ripe mix
of hydrogen and methane fermenting in his gut till flame
bursts into life heating teeth, tongue and those not standing
far enough away.

He doesn’t want you to tickle him when he sleeps nor when he wakens.
He’ll burn you twice and two times more if you try.

Dragon Green (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Carol A. Stephen
April 1 2015

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!