Tag Archives: National Poetry Month

QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 21 CONFABULATION

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Ouliposter-Badge-Plum-300x300Today’s Oulipost challenge:

Craft a conversation poem using “he said/she said” quotes that you find in newspaper articles.

Sounds relatively straightforward compared to some of the constraints we’ve had. Just a matter of finding enough material and then making it work at least on some level. IN developing my conversation, I didn’t always use the full quote, and sometimes combined parts of two quotes.

My fellow Ouliposters share their work here:

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-21-confabulation/

And here is my effort for today:

Suffused and Confused

 

I don’t know what to do, she said.
That’s the way it goes, he said.

None of us understood snippets.
  That’s just the way it is; just the way it goes.

It was hard to hear what happened.
Good food and dog excrement blended up together.

We need to start thinking about what we’ll use it for. Be intentional.
    I think that’s a load of crap.   

Difficult to switch. We could see the smoke.
I saw the shot coming. It was like slow motion.

We’ve made history here. They’re going to give us ponchos.
A bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid with ideas that are crazy.

No one had cell phones. We had to get out of there.
Technology is the saviour of everything. Robots doing it all for you.

No conflict; don’t know how they’re going to secure spectators.
We are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil.

I’m typically blue within 20 minutes. Mission accomplished.
Everything is greener. There’s a lot more oxygen. It got absurd.

I wasn’t suffused with faith and joy. We finished running.
   So long to get here, to be honest. Nothing practical left.

The end of a pencil: the remains of man’s genius.

CAS April 21, 2014

 

SOURCES:

 

  • Spears, Tom, “Seismic platelets:: How a phoney paper got accepted by scientific journals, Ottawa Citizen, April 21, 2014 (A1-A2)
  • Sibley, Roger, Trapped beaver tale has a happy ending, Ottawa Citizen April 21, 2014 (A1, A6)
  • Thomson, Stuart, Getting ready for The Singularity, (A5)
  • Sylvester, Maggie, Ottawa strong again for Boston, Ottawa Citizen April 21, 2014 (B3)
  • Simpson, Peter, A gift to last, Ottawa Citizen, April 21, 2014, (D1)
  • Desaulniers, Darren, Carleton Place crowned, (C3)
  • Figura, Peter, Canada makes big gain in Fed Cup (C7)
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QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 20 LESCUREAN PERMUTATION (PLAIN)

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Ouliposter-Badge-Blue-300x300 Select a newspaper article or passage from a newspaper article as your source text. Switch the first noun with the second noun, the third noun with the fourth noun, and so on until you’ve reached the end of your text.

To read other Permutations, visit the Oulipost blog here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-20-lescurean-permutation-plain/

I’ve highlighted the words changed, so the original text that I selected from the article and shaped into a poem, can still be read here as well, simply by switching the nouns back. I did swap one or two noun phrases. And changed plurals and singular forms where needed. I didn’t have an even number of nouns in the selected text, but the next noun in the article itself was Gros Morne Park, substituted for the word century, which had no further noun spot to use it. I changed the article to the French form of at, for sense.

Here, then, is my Lescurean Permutation, Plain. I didn’t get fancy with it!

English: Norse long house recreation, L'Anse a...

English: Norse long house recreation, L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Slate Grey Vikings and Africa from West
This boggy tip of Newfoundland’s northern landscape,
the sullen winds hang low and icy Arctic sky
sends shivers through stunted centuries; the tallest,
though a conifer old, barely above trees.
Just beyond the eye level, the slate grey Vikings.

Atlantics lived here, thrusts where two
epic L’Anse aux Meadows of human east, migration
and Africa from west met, Newfoundlanders
and Greenlanders’ indigenous eyes locked people.

These are the buildings of Viking remnants,
on a damp, chilly, windswept September, late day,
prominent meadows in a grassy undulation.
Forgotten, a fireplace.

Here was a millennium, a forge, the doorway where
local bog artifacts were smelted. Here, humble iron unearthed:
needles, bone sewing nails, a building.

Inside, a grass-covered sod cloak pin, recreated
Norse distance grouped a short structure from the items.
Handcrafted ruins, wooden furs, shields, and
simply embroidered tales tell old Norse fabric.

The coast hugs the western Viking Trail of peninsula’s northern Newfoundland,
vast ways, all the views to stacks, past countless Labradors of traps,
old-school lobster firewood, houses of colourful clapboard clusters.

On rocks of coloured, patterned beach the remains, rusty SS Ethie’s,
à Gros Morne Park after she ran aground.
CAS April 20, 2014

English: The Meeting of Two Worlds, sculpture,...

English: The Meeting of Two Worlds, sculpture, L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Sculptors: Luben Boykov, a Newfoundland immigrant and Richard Brixel, a Swedish national, unveiled on July 5, 2002 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

SOURCE:

Maunder, Patricia, Newfoundland’s Viking connection, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 19, 2014
View Labrador from west coast Viking Trail (K4)

 

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QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 19: SESTINA

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Ouliposter-Badge-Plum-300x300This will be one of your most challenging Oulipost prompts! A sestina is a poetic form of six six-line stanzas. The end-words of the lines of each stanza repeat those of the first, but in a differing order that in each successive stanza follows the permutation: 615243. The entire sequence of end words is thus: 123456; 615243; 364125; 532614; 451362; 246531. All words and phrases must be sourced from your newspaper text.

THANK YOU, DOUG LUMAN! Doug’s sestina tool made this much simpler, though still quite the challenge. Choosing the six end words, no matter how good they seem, can still cause a few headaches by the time SIX stanzas are accomplished.  I had not aimed for making sense, in some cases calling for superlong lines to accommodate and in several places it is touch and go, especially in the envoi.

Easter eggs

Easter eggs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here is what I ended up with, still in time to go shopping for special treat once-a-year Easter eggs from the local cheese/chocolate/fudge shop.

 

 

 

The Sestina

Zoo Variations

The Land of a Thousand Hills, this pocket-sized country,
Rwanda rolls across the heights of central Africa,
misted landscape of contoured fields and hidden valleys.
Deep in the humid heart of the continent,
genocide against a million people killed, horrific days seared in memory
beautiful and tragic, 100 horrific days’ history.

The way CIA analysts once examined history,
the hallmarks of the prime minister of this country:
this secrecy taken further than his predecessors’ memory.
He doesn’t talk to Africa,
an environment he couldn’t explain once exposed on this continent,
the sleazy way the game is played in the big leagues in Canadian valleys.

Along the watersheds of Nile and Congo valleys,
though a tale of despair may be its history,
rainforests are home to endangered mountain gorillas of the continent,
they live in several far-flung groups amid nettles country.
Eastern Rwanda a stark, different Africa
spring-loaded impalas, bar-code arrangements of zebras, a savannah scrubland memory.

Mountain gorillas, Rwanda

Mountain gorillas, Rwanda (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The government has not yet shaken off the miasma of sleaze- memory.
Politics is by its nature secretive valleys,
a forest so thick it looks like crosshatched Africa.
At dusk, the chatter and cry of lawyers and senators, it is wise to be suspicious of history.
The way our legal system is set up in this country?
No way that should be legal on this continent!

Panda diplomacy on this continent:
cherry-blossom tourists’ memory,
quarry out in their “habitat” country,
pandas’ playground of brown grass and leafless trees, valleys
two corpulent and charismatic hostages, heedless of our cooing history,
the new mother seated Buddha-like, chomping on bamboo from Africa.

English: 0

English: 0 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Her cub, plump as a dumpling, fast asleep in the crook of a tree from Africa.
The baby takes a bus to Beijing on the Chinese continent,
selling the vile jabberwocky history:
65,000,000 unnatural deaths under Chinese Communism says a memory.
Execution sites should not be located around tourist area valleys,
the zoo an arcade of inhumanity seasoned in country.

I am the only visitor to this country.
Everyone else is at the zoo valleys.
What is the meaning of change? Memory?

 

CAS April 19, 2014

You will find other sestinas for today posted at the Oulipost blog here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/category/oulipost/

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QUILLFYRE’S #OULIPOST 18 HOMOCONSONANTISM

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Ouliposter-Badge-Blue-300x300From the Oulipost site:

Choose a sentence or short passage from your newspaper to complete a homoconsonantism. In this form, the sequence of consonants in a source text is kept, while all its vowels are replaced. For example:

ORIGINAL: To be or not to be: that is the question.
CONSONANTS ONLY: T b r n t t b t t s t h q s t n
FINAL PRODUCT: As burnt tibia: it heats the aqueous tone.

This is much more difficult than it seems at first, trying to find the right words that are flexible enough, and in the right order, to work easily with new vowels. I have probably given up on this too quickly, but threatening migraine tells me I need to take a rest.  So, here was my original sentence:

WE ARE ALL THE SAME PEOPLE, WITH THE SAME DREAMS, THE SAME SUFFERING. 

First, I tried substituting xx’s for the vowels:

WxxRxxLLTHxSxMxPxxPLxWxTHTH xSxMxDRxxMSTHxSxMxSxFFxRxNG

but I found that I was mixing the xx’s in as new consonants.  So I went back and eliminated those and parsed the sentence I’d created, changing words to fit the proper consonants:

WRLLTHSMPPLWTHTHSMDRMSTHSMSFFRNG

My first attempt came out like this, which made little sense, and I was stumped at the double FF:

AWE REALLY, THESE, MOP POOP LAW, IT HATH AS A MUDROOM THIS AMUSE

 

My final attempt is just as much nonsense, but with a couple of words changed to plurals (poetic licence!) this is what I have:

WOE, REALLY!
THOSE MOPE-UP LAWS:

IT HATH, AS A MAD ROOM
THESE MUSE-OFFERINGS

CAS April 18, 2014

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SOURCE:
Rodriguez, Olga R., Beyond the darkness in Tepito, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 18, 2014 (C6)
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