The first stanza is an actual fortune cookie fortune. The second stanza seemed to follow from the first.
Variation on a fortune cookie
The river seeks its own level.
It will not fight the rock:
it flows around it.
The rock sits lightly
and does not fight the river.
The rock becomes its own center.
I’ve been collecting fortune cookie fortunes to use as prompts. These three seemed to form their own poem.
Perspective
Prejudice
is the child of ignorance.
Wealth
is the ability to fully experience life.
Your flashlight
is a case for holding dead batteries.
A final found poem from Gary Shteyngart’s “Thinking Outside the Bots,” in the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine (pp. 78-80).
The cult of perfection
will extend to every part of us, and the cosmetic-surgery bots
will chisel us
and suck out our fat
and give us as many eyelids as we desire.
Our grandchildren will be born perfect; all
the criteria for their genetic makeup
will be determined in utero.
We will look perfect, but inside we will be
completely stressed out and worried
about our place (and our children’s place)
in the pecking order, because even our belt buckles
will come equipped with the kind of AI that could beat us
at three-dimensional chess
while reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets
and singing the blues in perfect pitch.
And so our beautiful selves will be constantly worried
about what contributions we will make to society, given
that all cognitive tasks will already be distributed to devices
small enough to perch at the edge of our fingernails.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged 30 in 30, found poetry, Gary Shteyngart, poetry practice, poetry writing, Smithsonian Magazine, writing challenge
Gary Shteyngart’s “Thinking Outside the Bots,” from the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine (p. 80), once again provided the material for this found poem.
As the great rush of technology envelops us
and makes us feel as small as the stars used to
make us feel when we looked up
at the primitive sky, we will be using our Samsung
NewBrainStem 2.0 to send out streams of emojis
to our aging friends, hoping to connect
to someone analog who won’t beat us at Go
in the blink of an eye, a fellow traveler in the mundane
world of flesh and cartilage.
Others of us, less fortunate, will be worried
about our very existence, as armies of Hubos, built
without the safeguards developed by kindly scientists
like Professor Oh, rampage across the earth.
And of course the balance of power will look nothing like
today; truly, the future will belong to societies – often small
societies like South Korea and Taiwan – that invest
in innovation to make their wildest techno-dreams a reality.
Can you picture the rise of the Empire of Estonia, ruled by a pensive
but decisive talking toilet?
I can.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged 30 in 30, found poetry, Gary Shteyngart, poetry practice, poetry writing, Smithsonian Magazine, writing challenge
Everything seems to shift in September. The angle of the sun is distinctly different, the amount of daylight is perfectly balanced, and the temperature and humidity become once again bearable. Everyone is in school and we can settle into a productive routine.
To that end, I’m setting myself a writing challenge for the month: produce 30 poems in 30 days. This year’s NaPoWriMo was a terrific warm-up for Lexington Poetry Month, and I hope to use this month to do the same for NaNoWriMo in November (though I have no intention of working on a novel). I even created my own logo!
So here is the first poem, a found poem from “Thinking Outside the Bots,” by Gary Shteyngart, in the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine (p. 80).
Seonbawi (Zen rock)
a weather-eroded rock formation that looks
like two robed monks, said to guard
the city – where women come to pray
for fertility, often laden with food
offerings for the spirits (Sun Chips seem to be in abundance
on the day I visit) the women bow and pray
intently – one young worshiper, in a thick puffy
jacket and a woolen cap, seems especially focused –
squarely in the center of her prayer
mat she has propped an iPhone
later I ask why – one tells me
the young woman was recording to prove
to her mother-in-law that she went to the fertility
rock and prayed for hours
another suggests that the phone belonged
to a friend – the woman is creating
a connection between the timeless and immortal
spirits and her childless
friend – this explanation I like the most
the young lady journeys from her city of 25 million to spend
hours on a mountain in the cold, promoting
her friend’s dreams, hands clasped
tightly in prayer: in front of her, a giant
timeless weather-beaten rock and a small
electronic device steer her gently
into the imperfect world to come
Posted in Poetry
Tagged 30 in 30, found poetry, Gary Shteyngart, poetry practice, poetry writing, Smithsonian Magazine, writing challenge
This passage is from the essay “This Dog’s Life,” in Anne Lamott’s book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (pp. 81-82).
Bumping up against it
you want to protect your child
from pain, and what you get instead is life,
and grace; and though theologians insist
that grace is freely given, the truth
is that sometimes you pay for it
through the nose.
Still playing catch-up from my weekend travels. I suppose you might call this a kind of found poem, another exercise from The Daily Poet. I’m going to take my mother to get her hair done more often.
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
Overheard at the hair salon
The pain is a ten, but every time
I feel it I say, There’s that blue
five again. Sometimes it shoots
down my arm like a river
branching into my hand.
And my shoulder grates
like gravel. I can picture a plate
with holes in it, grinding
and catching as it moves.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, poetry exercises, poetry practice, The Daily Poet
Another exercise from The Daily Poet.
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
Found poetry: Twitter
In his dictionary, Dr. Johnson defined a stoat as “a small stinking animal.”
Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts would hit rural patients hard
All the characters are on trial in any civilized narrative. — William Empson
Poetry can do many things. But what I value is a poem’s ability to make me simply reconsider: a single word, an image I see daily, a thought
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, poetry exercises, poetry practice, The Daily Poet, Twitter
I found a copy of Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook at the used book store last week. I picked it up this morning and these sentences jumped off the page.
(Found poetry from p. 9)
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
Beyond the margins of the self
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem
after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river
waves. None is timeless; each arrives
in an historical context; almost
everything, in the end, passes. But the desire
to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive
it—indeed, the world’s need of it—
these never pass.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, Mary Oliver, poetry practice
I love the library, for more reasons than I can possibly express. While working there today I made a list of intriguing titles as I wandered the stacks. Each line of this poem, including the title, is from that list.
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
History of the rain
what the waves know
the yellow eyes of crocodiles
exposed
the time between
love and ordinary creatures
hard to handle
the night falling
untethered
into the beautiful north
they may not mean to, but they do
listen to me
a city breathing
secret of a thousand beauties
chasing fire
reckless disregard
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Eastside Branch, found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, Lexington Public Library, LexPoMo, poetry practice
The Daily Compost 