Sometimes poetry comes to us from unexpected places. This found poem is dedicated to Craig Price, whose voice brings life to so much poetry (and whose words these are).
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
Apocalypse
Why would anyone sleep
past 6 a.m. ever? I’ll never live
to find out because I have two cats
that act like the four horsemen
are at our door if I’m still asleep
at 5:45.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Craig Price, found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, poetry practice
I came home from a meeting to find the kids had been playing Boggle. I decided to see what I could do with the words on their score sheets. It isn’t poetry for the ages, but it was interesting.
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
Boggled
met the muse
foe not poet
tied pet pit
pen tint tins
penny
coy boy toy
oboe hot cove
timed times ten
meme beam vain
froth
sun fun run
tow pew pub
wet pave heat
den swept
neat
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Boggle poetry, found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo
I spent the day not being selected for a jury (the first time ever my number has not been called) so I was more easily able to read than write. I found the following (including the title) on p. 139 of Violent Stars, a novel by Canadian poet Phyllis Gotlieb.
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
The police helicopter swept the sky
The morning was laying
its first deep blue
streak along the limb
of the world as if no blood
had been spilled ever.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, Phyllis Gotlieb, poetry practice, Violent Stars
June is Lexington Poetry Month, and once again I’ve signed up for the LexPoMo challenge: to write a poem each day and post at least five. As part of my preparation, I compiled a list of prompts from various places, and the list itself took on the shape of a poem in places. So here is a kind of found poem, cobbled together from a bone pile of prompts.
Bone pile
it’s just hard
to know what to do
with her
booze like water
chugs and weeps
a broken faucet
I once knew
how to celebrate
humdrum: cook
with these old men
smother them
with kindness
I understood
this before
we traded places
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, poetry practice, prompted poetry
Book titles are a great source of inspiration. I pulled these from some catalogs I found while cleaning. Found poetry, indeed.
The secret library
the odd one out
in the great green room
is lost among the living
no time to clean
the mist in the mirror
in simple circles and quick curves
touch the wild
garden at the dragon’s gate
an antidote to venom
the eve of a hundred midnights
the desire of the everlasting hills
nothing is worth more than this day
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Month, National Poetry Writing Month
Some time ago I picked up a discarded library copy (first edition!) of Alan Garner’s The Moon of Gomrath. I finally got around to reading it and found the following passage. The language was so fantastic I could not resist the urge to make a poem of it. The line breaks are mine.
It was dusk: branches stood against the sky, and twilight
ran in the grass, and gathered black
in the chasms and tunnel eyes of the old
mines which scarred the woodland with their spoil
of sand and rock. There was the sound of wind, though
the trees did not move.
– Alan Garner, The Moon of Gomrath, p. 12 (Henry A. Walnick, Inc., New York, 1967)
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Alan Garner, found poetry, NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Month, National Poetry Writing Month
Well, the summer got away from me for a while, but I’ve caught up enough to be able to show my face again. I didn’t lose too much ground with reading, but the writing declined in quality as well and quantity. (I’m sure the two are related.)
During a brief overnight retreat last weekend, I read Sena Jeter Naslund’s Sherlock in Love. Some lines from the afterword (pp. 222-3) kept trying to shape themselves into a poem, so I played around with them a little. The description of depression struck me as particularly accurate.
Light of a day
This morning when I woke up alone
in my cell, sunshine was in my eyes. I sat up
in bed and looked at the great beauty
filling the room. This is what it is
to love, I thought. Someplace the sunlight
falls on your face.
Sometimes imagination fails me: the world
is no longer continuous. A great black cap of depression
sits first on my forehead, then covers
my face, my body. As the years wear on I know
I may live in perpetual darkness. The morning sun
may lose its power.
Love light
This morning when I woke up alone
in my cell, sunshine was in my eyes. I sat up
in bed and looked at the great beauty
filling the room. This is what it is
to love, I thought. Someplace the sunlight
falls on your face.
Haberdashery
Sometimes imagination fails me: the world
is no longer continuous, and we are not
connected. A great black cap of depression sits
first on my forehead, then covers
my face, my body.
As the years wear on I know
I may live in perpetual darkness. The morning sun
may lose its power. The black cap always
waits: “Deny yourself and enter into darkness”
reads the banner twisted in its folds.
Here, now
Sometimes I think of the forbidden and my body
thinks the impossible. What my eye falls on, I love
to see. What the ear hears is thick
with joy. I live in this moment
as I did not before: loving
the texture of the carpet, the glowing
globe of the lamp and its light
falling on my moving hand.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged depression, found poetry, poetry in progress, poetry practice, poetry process, Sena Jeter Naslund, Sherlock in Love
Today’s prompt was “text message,” and something popped out at me in some text I was reading this morning. Found poetry adapted from a passage in Chapter XXXVI of Adam Bede, by George Eliot.
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
The journey
The next morning she rose early and set out
walking the road towards Ashby under a leaden
sky with a narrowing streak of yellow
like a departing hope on the edge of the horizon.
It had not yet occurred to her that she might get money
for locket and earrings, and she applied all her small
knowledge calculating how many meals and rides were contained
in two guineas and the odd shillings, which had a melancholy
look of pale ashes to the other bright-flaming coins.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Adam Bede, found poetry, George Eliot, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, poetry practice, prompted poetry, writing practice
Carla McGill over at writingcustoms.com has posted a lovely piece in appreciation of Pat Conroy, who passed away a few days ago at his home in South Carolina. She quotes a passage from his 2009 novel, South of Broad. The language put me in mind of a poem, and I could not resist the urge to shape it as such.
Charleston
I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged
shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and
sun-hardened
and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness
each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons
rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees
pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St.
Michael’s calling
cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones, I knew
early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians.
— Pat Conroy, South of Broad, p. 1
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Carla McGill, Charleston, found poetry, Pat Conroy, South of Broad, writingcustoms.com
So what has happened to my Blog Elul poetry, you ask? I’ve been writing, but the poems have been either too drafty (rough, unfinished) or too personal to post. That’s a good thing, though, because it means I have material to work with later, when I don’t have a daily prompt to inspire me.
I spent a couple hours with a friend at the library today, and I can never resist the urge to make poetry out of book titles. So here’s something I cobbled together using words that jumped out at me from the stacks.
***
to whisper her name all day and a night
unbroken against the tide
white hot light of the world long gone
a life of joy in a heartbeat
burning once upon a river
too late to say goodbye
guilt by association
hidden places never far from home
The Daily Compost 