NaPoWriMo (guest appearance by PoMoSco)

[bodkin]

Prompts coming from here: http://www.napowrimo.net/

Append any resulting poems below. Say which prompt you are using. Also we are rebels, feel free to do them in the wrong order!

[bodkin]

Day#1 "Negation Poem"

Not Edith

She isn't fat, or pale
and interesting. She hasn't much difficulty
in giving a toss and often lacks
a problem in extending that
into a fight. She isn't slight
but not stocky either. She won't admit ignorance
about anything
except technology. She has
no embarrassing early history
of exploitation movie walk ons. She's not dull
but also won't interest you
if you don't interest her.

You don't interest her.
She doesn't lack charity
but equally not clarity
and won't flog a dead cause.
She didn't bore me
when I was four.
She isn't a burden
if I pop around
once or twice a month.

[bodkin]

Day#2 "Stars"

Type II

Stars generate
nuclear
Unlike the Sun, massive
the mass
to fuse
atomic
greater
albeit at higher
temperatures
pressures
shorter
life.

The degeneracy
gravity
prevents
collapse.

The star
higher
hydrogen and then helium,
progressing up
until a core of iron
no further

equilibrium is broken.

"BOOM!"

[David]

I like your negation poem a lot, Ian. Or, at least, I do not dislike it. Heartily. And I do not lack an Edith either. (Literally.)

The short lines in the stars poem are interesting. It feels as though this ought to be a concrete poem. Perhaps it should get bigger and bigger, and brighter and brighter, before finally collapsing on itself.

I remember from my vaguely Carl Sagan-soaked teenage years that the order of brightness (apparent or absolute? Can't remember) of stars is WOBAFGKMRNS. An acrostic, perhaps?

Cheers

David

[bodkin]

Thanks David,

"WOBAFGKMRNS!" could be a dialect swear word and your concrete idea is clever. Although an animated video which just goes white at the end...

Today's prompt is a fourteener, and I'm choosing to do this with no research whatsoever.

The least most

I call fourteen the least mystic of number kin.
It sits against that tredecim beloved of all
who strive to curve reality towards the dark,
that's: necromancers, warlocks and the revenue--
to be precise, and fourteen is so nice. It's neat
the way it blocks the heat of thaumaturgic fire
from fifteen, who's a love and just not strong enough
(outside the tennis court) to thwart malevolence.
And what of other numbers in the field, there's twelve--
a whore who will divide in any way you ask--
and sixteen who's so pure and binary, that tasks
beyond the crystal realms of academic spires
will stress it more than is desired in normal use.
No, fourteen has the greatest value, that's the truth.

[Ros]

and sixteen whose so pure and binary, that tasks

Should be 'who is'.

I do envy your ability to write something as good as this off the cuff! It's great, though a little strained by 16.

Ros

[bodkin]

and sixteen whose so pure and binary, that tasks

Should be 'who is'.

I do envy your ability to write something as good as this off the cuff! It's great, though a little strained by 16.

Ros

"who's" actually, fixed thanks!

[bodkin]

Apropos the last poem but one...



"Imagine this old prison in Rio is a dying star..."

Brian Cox, poet.

[Ros]

Brian Cox: dangerous to have round factories.

[Ros]

Distracted by the star


Even Brian Cox does not convince me
that this old prison in Rio is a dying star,
the surface light of Betelgeuse flaring
through the window bars, though I concede

it’s dense and hotter down the rubble shaft
where inmates saw their world implode
in iron doors and concrete. Brian spray-paints
yellow hydrogen and helium

across the board where rotas for the guards
held back collapse. The temperature
is rising as he ambles in his tight black tee
and tells how carbon, oxygen

and his own right hand can be produced
from the pounding heart of a derelict jail.
Two minutes and we’ve produced the elements
up to and not excluding iron and now

we’re outside in the light as the block
explodes to dust and our presenter, like
a laid-back action hero, saunters into camera,
our little sun eclipsed by Brian’s head.

[bodkin]

Nice, but you stole my last line...

[Antcliff]

http://www.pomosco.com/

[bodkin]

Feel free ToPoMoPoScoPosToNatPoWriMoFo...

[bodkin]

Day #4 - Love w/o love

It's not for me to say

It's not for me to say quite what the World
is now supposed to mean. I am no judge
of metaphysical perfection. Budge
some star a couple of feet and are you whirled
towards oblivion, or heaven lies
now easily in reach? They do not tell
these things in any school. Let me spell
it out. Rings have significance. Surprise

someone with simultaneous assaults
upon the spirit and the vulgar flesh.
Try to mesh, mechanically. Be fresh
and try to live the love of zero fault.
The perfect way to win a hand is giving
attention to the gentle art of living.

[Antcliff]

"What a day it is, it is!"



A change of tune, then.
A flutter of leaves.
A fastidious brewer of tea.

I open a can of peas
and open up.
Mischievous berries
release the drug.

I was the philosopher
watching a pair of butterflies.
I would lie down with you here,
side by side.

I have located it, my ghost town.
Imagine, among these meadows,
I see as through a skylight in my brain.

Imagine Uncle Matt,
head full of Henryson.
It is Halloween, Turnip Head.
Let me make room for bog cotton,
a desert flower.


........
A PoMoSco entry. The challenge = to make a poem out of the first lines in the index of poems in a collection. I used the Collected Poems of Michael Longley, 2006, Cape Poetry.

[bodkin]

Repunctuate Emily Dickinson

A strange prompt this time, to take an Emily Dickinson poem, remove all line breaks and punctuation, then put back your own...



Tell all the truth but tell it slant
By Emily Dickinson
Broken by bodkin

Tell all the truth
but tell it slant.
Success in circuit lies too bright
for our infirm delight. The truth's superb
surprise as lightning
to the children
eased with explanation. Kind,
the truth must dazzle
gradually
or every man be blind.

--

Hmm... do I hear some steady turning in a grave?

[bodkin]

"What a day it is, it is!"



A change of tune, then.
A flutter of leaves.
A fastidious brewer of tea.

I open a can of peas
and open up.
Mischievous berries
release the drug.

I was the philosopher
watching a pair of butterflies.
I would lie down with you here,
side by side.

I have located it, my ghost town.
Imagine, among these meadows,
I see as through a skylight in my brain.

Imagine Uncle Matt,
head full of Henryson.
It is Halloween, Turnip Head.
Let me make room for bog cotton,
a desert flower.


........
A PoMoSco entry. The challenge = to make a poem out of the first lines in the index of poems in a collection. I used the Collected Poems of Michael Longley, 2006, Cape Poetry.

A nice balance between heavily mixed and strangely coherent...

Nice one.

Ian

[bodkin]

Day #6 - Aubade

If should there be a morning after

Grandiloquent towers, four a.m.
I've woken in this place one further time
and what, on this occasion calls? Am I still wrapped
in badly papered walls? Is there still no heat
at four a.m.? And so things turn
to glass of milk and window once again,
to the dressing gown and cellular blanket
observation platform...

...and lo! There is blue light, clearly,
one-siding pillars in the underpass and
flashing complex patterns, stronger yet,
in rain black tarmacadam
underneath. See! Somewhere through there mill
police, and some poor sod's dead, either
fallen from high off and on his head, or else
knifed in casual debate. My milk is cold.
It is too early and too late; the blue lights syncopate;
no sign of dawn.

[bodkin]

Day #7 - Money poem

Make $$$ fast

The credit value acceptance,
the balance, the rating, the secret
that high street banks do NOT want YOU to know
the money in the pocket
of the man on the Clapham omnibus
(e omnibus unum) is valued
or devalued at the whim
of CERTAIN international FIGURES
get the best forex rates and make
a daily income with GUARANTEED bonds
and be a DAY TRADER in your spare time
(which is money [citation needed])
--this is my prize winning begonia
and this is my daughter, Becky--
send NOW for this SIMPLE book of TOP investment tips
--neither one of which is for sale.

[bodkin]

I'm starting to quote the whole prompt, may as well...

And now, without further ado, our prompt (optional as always) for Day Eight: today I challenge you to write a palinode. And what’s that? It’s a poem in which the poet retracts a statement made in an earlier poem. You could take that route or, if you don’t have an actual poetically-expressed statement you want to retract, maybe you could write a poem in which you explain your reasons for changing your mind about something. It could be anything from how you decided that you like anchovies after all to how you decided that annoying girl was actually cool enough that you married her.

Maybe not

Maybe it was not that wise
to say I'd write one every day
it seems the smallest wrinkle fries
intention, such as a day away.

--

Pants, yes, I can't say that the idea of palinodes grabs me...

[bodkin]

Day #8 -- Calligrams

As it is written

wordle.png (69.13 KiB) Viewed 21568 times

[bodkin]

I totally failed to get to grips with day #10, and this in turn has made me late for day #11...

However I like the sound of day #11:

Our (optional) prompt for today departs from such concerns, however. Today, rather than being casual, I challenge you to get rather classically formal, and compose a poem in Sapphics. These are quatrains whose first three lines have eleven syllables, and the fourth, just five. There is also a very strict meter that alternates trochees (a two-syllable foot, with the first syllable stressed, and the second unstressed) and dactyls (a three-syllable foot, with the first syllable stressed and the remainder unstressed). The first three lines consist of two trochees, a dactyl, and two more trochees. The fourth line is a dactyl, followed by a trochee.

It may be easier to hear the meter than to think about it – try reading this poem in Sapphics aloud to yourself, and you’ll see what an oracular tone it produces – the stressed beginnings of the lines produce a feeling of importance, while the unstressed syllables of the trochees keep the pace measured. Rhyming is optional, and if you begin to bridle at the strict meter, feel free to loosen it up!

So I will try to come back later with something for 11, and maybe even 12...

[Antcliff]

Admirable keeping up, Ian. I have rather strayed from the path.

[bodkin]

I may be about to also, principally trochaic sentences fight you all the way...

...I think the usual approach is you start with a striking sentence, and then are surprised to discover it is trochaic, trying to start with an empty page and write in trochees... well I said it before, it fights you, every next pair of syllables turn out to want to be iambic. I guess it is true that English is mostly an iambic language.

Ian

[bodkin]

Day #15 -- Self referential poem

Taking selfies

╔═════
║Picture this, and I mean this, the words themselves;
║possibly perhaps they're scrawled in day-glo marker paint
║by hurried workmen on the ground and wrapped
╙◍.............................✕⟤
[tab]in cryptic symbols. Alternatively,[/tab]
[tab]imagine it engraved in letters of fire,[/tab]
[tab]eternal on some rock somewhere, and marred[/tab]
[tab]by just one minuet mistake, the words[/tab]

of heaven being only by the smallest part
more accurate than those for whom the
of precision thought is so much shit
and I don't care for those who visit ⏚

on only second Thursdays and maybe now
imagine these words:

1. ∀books, ∀occasions, where
2. ∃ poet, ∃ reader, ∃ poem ⊢ ƒreads⦅poem, reader⦆, but
3. [1, 2] ∧⊢ ƒrespects⦅reader, poet⦆

and there we have it.