I am a great fan and long-time reader of Smithsonian Magazine because it offers so much: beautiful writing, brilliant images, and fascinating stories about science, culture, and history from all over the world. I’ve found inspiration (and words) for many a poem in those shiny, colorful pages.
Tag Archives: Smithsonian Magazine
Day 3, LexPoMo 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Dara Horn, found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, Smithsonian Magazine
Day 3, NaPoWriMo 2020
Derived from an essay by Robert Ballard in the October 2014 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-we-must-explore-sea-180952763/
The bottom of the ocean
is not what some imagine: a giant bathtub
filled with mud—boring, flat, dark.
Most of it is unmapped; the far side of the moon
is known more intimately than three
quarters of the planetary surface on which we live.
Beneath the oceans lie the largest mountain
range on earth, rifts that make the Grand Canyon
seem like a scratch, vertical cliffs
three miles high. If you threw a giant blanket
over a table set for a dinner party, you would know
more about that meal than satellites
or surface sonar will ever tell us about
the bottom of the ocean.
Day 17, LexPoMo 2018
I think I overdid it yesterday (or maybe I spoke too soon about needing less cough medicine): the cough is back. It’s hard to go slow when you start feeling better after being under the weather for a while.
Listen to the forest
trees with roots entangled
like lovers, joined by soil
bacteria and mycorrhiza
leaves and branches arch
overhead, interlace, form
a bower, a sacred canopy
try to parse the language
of fungus and pheromone,
electron and ion channel
close your eyes and tune
your skin to the wordless
sea of conversation
Inspired by an article in the March 2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine: “The Whispering of the Trees,” by Richard Grant.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/
(Reposted from the Lexington Poetry Month web site: https://lexpomo.com/poem/listen-to-the-forest/)
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine
30 in 30, day three
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
30 in 30, day two
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
30 in 30, September day one
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
Found poetry: Okavango
This passage from an article in Smithsonian Magazine just presented itself as a poem when I read it this morning. The article, “Into the Okavango Delta,” by Paul Theroux, is beautifully written, haunting and lyrical, and accompanied by lovely photographs. (Smithsonian, April 2013, p. 81)
On safari
past the cushions and the lounge
chairs, beyond the rails of the wide
platform, the lagoon on this reach of
the Okavango was dark and depthless-
seeming, in shadow as the sun set
behind it, but the slanting sun gilded
the reeds of the marsh and glittered
on the boughs of the acacia trees on what
looked like floating islands in the distance
– Paul Theroux, “Into the Okavango Delta,” Smithsonian, April 2013, p. 81
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Okavango Delta, Paul Theroux, safari, Smithsonian Magazine
The Daily Compost 