here is where it comes together
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Grab your peanuts and your cotton candy, the circus is coming to town!
Deb Scott, Jill Crammond-Wickham and Carolee Sherwood have started a new poetry prompt site and community called Big Tent Poetry. It looks like it’s going to be exciting! The first prompt starts on Monday, May 3. Mark your calendars.
Living with Cats
You learn to live with the grit
of kitty litter beneath your feet.
You become accustomed to waking
at 2 a.m. to the hwok hwok
sound of hairballs stuck in throats.
You lose your sense of smell, burned
away by the ammonia scent of urine.
You lose your sense of shame, buried
beneath layers of cat hair on clothes,
furniture, and food. You bear
puncture wounds on your chest
from the places you’ve been kneaded
at night. You sleep four feet away
from your husband or wife so your cats
can each have a side. You learn
about body language: tail up
means confident, ears back mean
back off. You learn about territory,
the sides of the house that are claimed
and the smaller side they leave
for you. You learn that there is danger
in every dust ball, a potential prey
in every loose Q-tip or shoelace.
You buy organic cat food, medicine
for bladder infections, stockpiles
of toys to alleviate depression. You learn
that our life is really not about you
and, frankly, it never really was.
***
(16 poems down, 14 poems to go.)
(10 on prompt, 6 off prompt.)
(2 unposted)
Yes, I am behind. I had a few rotten days, so on Thursday I wrote an American Sentence and on Friday and Saturday I wrote nothing. I plan on catching up over the next week.
Luckily, today’s prompt asked us to write about something I am very familiar with: cats. I have had Weetzie (top photo) for 11 years and Said(bottom photo) for five years. As you can see from the poem above, they run my life. Everything in the above poem is something I’ve experienced. I love my frustrating animals so much that I would still do it all over again.
***
You may click on the image for a larger view.
14 poems down, 16 poems to go.
(9 poems on prompt, 5 poems off prompt.)
Officially, this is the first poem I have ever written on Microsoft Excel. I was following the NaPoWriMo prompt written by Nicole Nicholson. She suggested that we write a cleave poem. A cleave poem is actually three poems in one: two vertical poems and the poem that results when you read the two poems horizontally. Appropriately enough, today’s prompt was entitled: “You want me to write a what?”
As big of a form nerd as I am, I took this as a challenge to write. I actually had a lot of fun making sure that my topic could sustain three poems, that each poem read well on its own, and that I was using capitalization and punctuation as clearly as I could. For my first one, I don’t think its all that bad. I definitely expect to try this form again.
Poem Starting with a Line from Norman Dubie
My favorite pastime has become
the imaginary destruction of flowers.
I conjure bouquets - lilies
or amaranth, tea roses dotted
with sprays of baby breath
like flakes of dandruff – and I see them
exploding in bursts of petals
and flame. As we talk, calmly, I am
linking daisies in chains just to snap
their green stems. I am blowing
dandelions, not to spread their spores,
but to strip them bare. I play
he loves me, he loves me not
in my mind, squeezing the juice
out of the decisions. I will not wait
for them to wither; I have no patience
for the inevitable. I prefer to pull
and tear. Say what you want,
at least I’m good
at breaking everything beautiful.
***
13 poems down, 17 poems to go.
(8 on prompt, 5 off prompt).
I am pretty straight forward on this one. I took Sarah J. Sloat’s prompt as literally as possible. She offered us 11 options for first lines, using Norman Dubie’s words. I chose number 5 (from “The Mercy Seat”, I think) and I wrote a poem on the bus ride home.
Yep, that’s pretty much it.
Things I Learned from Surgery
My leg read A-S-K, after
all my questions were answered.
Purple felt tip letters telegraphed:
This is your last chance. This
is when you escape. Instead I let them
mark me like a side of beef, claim
my incision points. Before they wheeled me
into an antiseptic room, I knew
exactly where they would open me, what stitch
they would use to close me up.
Knowing was not the same as experiencing
the procedure, not the same as watching
my husband wonder, “What part will they leave
for me?” Knowing never prevented me
from entering that room, feeling my leg dissolve
into a novacaine numb. It never stopped
the panic when I woke up
after my lost hours, immersed in pain
so permanent it felt like a poem
I would never stop writing.
***
12 poems down, 18 poems to go
( 7 on prompt, 5 off prompt)
(11 posted, 1 unposted)
Ah, revision. How I hate you. According to my records, this is the third full draft of this poem. This doesn’t include the multiple drafting stages before I consider a draft “done.” I am sick of this poem, but I think it’s finally getting on the right track.
After meeting with my writing group last night, they reviewed my chapbook manuscript draft and encouraged me to take another stab at this poem. To them, it still felt too narrative and didn’t center on a specific image. I hesitated and thought that maybe I would just cut the poem from the manuscript.
Then, I read today’s NaPoWriMo prompt from Carolee Sherwood, which encouraged us to make up (and translate) a secret code. This poem started with a secret message on my leg, left by my surgeon’s initials. (Surgeons initial you prior to a procedure, to make sure that they operate on the right body part. Both my surgeon, whose initials really are A.S.K., and my anesthesiologist initialed my leg before my surgery.) Using that secret code as the base, I then thought about what the code was trying to tell me.
I’m hoping that this is the last draft of this poem, for now. Like a good kid, I’m going to check in with my writer’s group and see what they think of it.
Creative Goals for the Week:
***
In addition to my NaPoWriMo responsibilities, I have to finish my (almost done) chapbook manuscript, so that I can submit it to the qarrtsiluni chapbook contest. Luckily, I have put in the majority of the work on my manuscript throughout the winter, so I feel like I am ready to reach this goal.
Creative Goals for the Week
***
I enjoy seeing all of that green lettering saying “Finished” on my creative goal list.
The nice thing about NaPoWriMo is that it removes excuses. Just like committing to an exercise plan, when I commit to a writing plan, I prove that I have time to write poems every day. I may not sustain this kind of output past April, but I can remind myself that I am capable of writing daily. After April, I have no excuse for not meeting my creative goals.
Celebration
This morning, the sun
hung red and yellow streamers
for an April dawn.
Magnolias burst
their brown branches and revelled
in early spring warmth.
My forsythia
once dormant, now a gala
of eager green shoots.
This morning, I breathe
deeply, listening to shouts
of riotous spring.
***
10 down, 20 to go. (30% completed)
(6 on prompt, 4 off prompt)
I work 22 Saturdays each year, since I serve students who attend classes on the weekend. Sometimes, it can be very difficult, especially in the middle of winter.
Now that it’s spring, the sky has been getting a little lighter each weekend, so that it doesn’t feel like I’m going to work in the middle of the night. This morning, as I drove in at 6:30 AM, I saw the most beautiful orange sunrise as I drove across the freeway towards my school. And as I pulled up to the parking lot, I saw that the magnolia trees were blooming. I was a little bit early so I watched a field of clouds travel across the sky before going inside. I was (and am) bursting with spring fever after this experience.
It was quite possibly the best part of my day so far. So, when I read that todays NaPoWriMo prompt, written by Pamela Sayers, was to write about a celebration that I recently attended, I immediately knew what I wanted to write. As an added challenge, I decided to write in haiku, just to get myself writing.
The Language of Poetry
(after Fereydoun Faryad)
The language of poetry I learned
from winter, on days so cold
we burn. From salted streets
and rusted car doors, from the stamp
of my shoes in snow. I learned
the language of poetry from silence,
the quiet of snow, the nothing
of too early nights. From building
fires, from huddling close, from never
feeling warm, despite my best efforts.
Around here, the language of poetry
is learned from numb fingertips, from not
licking light posts, from waxy tubes
of Carmex, from black ice, from gaining
winter weight and shedding
on the first sunny day.
I learn (and relearn) the language
of poetry in layers
like striated blocks of ice
that slowly melt in me each spring.
***
9 down, 21 to go.
(5 on prompt, 4 off prompt)
I loved today’s NaPoWriMo prompt, but I just couldn’t make it work. I tried to write a poem about the taste of broccoli, my least favorite vegetable, and I just couldn’t get it to work with the suggested words. I also couldn’t just produce my own poem out of thin air.
So, I went to my poetry shelves and began thumbing through pages. I came across a book called Heaven without a Passport by Persian poet Fereydoun Faryad. I opened to a random page and found this poem: “The language of poetry – I learned / from stars, from birds, from leaves / and from itinerant knife sharpeners.” I fell in love with that poem and I decided to borrow the first line and write about where I learned the language of poetry.
Through this NaPoWriMo challenge, I am remembering that I can use many different resources to write poems, from prompt sites, to my own inspiration, from found texts and borrowed first lines. I have to use all of my resources in order to keep going.
How to Care for the In Love
I.
When a person becomes in love there is always a change, due to love of the brain. Sometimes the change is concealed by the lover. Sometimes, it is so great as to attract immediate attention, when it may present the features of raving madness, or of the most abject melancholy.
II.
To illustrate this change, we may suppose both a king and a pauper to become in love: there is, of course, a vast difference between them, but the king may be so changed by the love as to believe that he is a pauper; or a pauper may think himself a king, and try to act like one.
III.
Delusions are false beliefs.
The king, who, under the influence of love, thinks himself a pauper, and the pauper, who thinks himself a king, with all the wealth and power of one, has each in love delusions. Some delusions are fleeting and changeable, lasting a few days, weeks, or months, while others are fixed, lasting a lifetime ; some are impossible and beyond rational belief.
Other delusions are possible, as when a king thinks himself a pauper, because such a thing may happen, or when a pauper thinks himself a king.
We do not expect such things among Americans, much less among our lovers.
IV.
In love, the truth and existence of delusions are fully believed in, and the lover cannot be argued out of the belief, however absurd or unreal it may be.
***
It’s been a hectic couple of days at work, so writing a poem was hard today. But I did it. Dammit.
So, this poem is a found poem. While working, I had the notion to find a how-to manual and replace the significant nouns and verbs with the word “love”. When I got home, I used Google Books to find a public domain How-to manual. My choice: How to Care for the Insane: A Manual for Attendants by William D. Granger, M.D. (1886). I used a random number generator to pick page number 15. Then, I started replacing and snipping.
I am lucky in that I landed on the page that described delusions and hallucinations, which is a pretty good description of love. And a poem was born.
Jessica
