A Poetry Dare for National Poetry Month

Today is the beginning of National Poetry Month, and we have a poetry dare from Tweetspeak Poetry.

It sounds simple: read a poem a day, preferably from one poet. Easy enough. But then you need to write the poem out to see how it feels, and then (on Wednesdays) go over to Tweetspeak and join in the discussion.

Actually, I think this is a pretty cool idea.

The book of poetry I decided upon for my response to the dare is The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. If I have a favorite poet, it’s Stevens, one of the three greats of modernism (the other two being T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas). My edition is the twentieth, published in 1980. It was first published in 1954. 

And the first poem in the collection is the one I read for today, “Earthy Anecdote:”

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
in a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
to the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

If you’re so inclined, join in the fun. All the information you need for the dare is at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner at the presentation of the National Book Award to Faulkner. Photo via Lumpy Pudding.

City of Exile

You listen to a sermon, you take a few notes, and then you begin to see something else. In this case, a poem. That’s the origin of a poem I recently wrote entitled “City of Exile,” and it’s featured today for National Poetry Month over at Robbie Pruitt’s place.

I “met” Robbie through The High Calling, and I’ve enjoyed his poetry and his prose posts. And it’s a blessing for me to be featured on his blog. Please visit and let us both know what you think.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Friday: The Violence

Manhandled, shoved
humiliated, judged
expediently condemned
hands washed
thorned beaten whipped
scourged
blood
dragged,
hauled to the hill
nailed torn to the wood
spiked skin ripped
tendons, bone
blood
filth, sweat-blood
pierced
pain unendurable
the turning away
the worst
pain the worst
blackness
finished.

Photograph: Jesus Christ on the cross, scene from The Passion, produced and directed by Mel Gibson.

Or is it moondust?

Walking the hard packed earth
(or is it moon dust?) in dying
sunlight, a cruising Crusoe
shipwrecked, seeking food
or any other hopeful thing,
a trail of footprints
(or breadcrumbs?) behind
for the wind to taste and
consume, an eroding
journey of a circular
gastronomy of air.

Seeking a way, the way
or even a Friday (willing
to settle for a Thursday and
a Saturday is too much
to hope), finding footprints,
totems of human breadcrumbs,
now pressing, emerging whole,
breaking through, an eruption
from the underside, a mirrored path
of walking the hard packed earth,
or is it moon dust?

This poem is submitted for the One Shot Sunday photo challenge sponsored by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems and the interview with iPhoneographer Iquanyin Moon, please visit the site.

Photograph: Footprints by Iquanyin Moon for One Stop Poetry. Used with permission.

Creative Destruction

Sky, sea merge
into fiery red;
sands gray, green,
kaleidoscope into color,
absorbing, swallowing,
consuming
trumpet blast,
siren call
of final shadows.
Time cracks open
at sunset;
day of destruction
becomes one flesh
with day of creation.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Sunday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see more poems prompted by the photograph (and an interview with the photographer), please visit One Stop Poetry.

Photograph by K.J. Halliday; used with permission via One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry.

A Sunset Fades

A Sunset Fades

A sunset fades
atop the hill,
snow-packed blue,
the barren aspens
streaking dying colors
of orange pink red
gray yellow purple
light.

Somewhere,
in the blurred line
between red and gray,
her face is fading,
her eyes paling,
her smile
a final ray of
light.

All that’s left is snow.


Over at One Stop Poetry today, Leslie Moon has posted a musical poetry prompt -- write a poem based on music by George Winston. You have your choice of two selections, and I chose "The Snowman." Visit One Stop Poetry to see links to more poems.

Canyon Dreams

Walk between walls of light gray stone.
Touch well washed sandstone, basalt,
silica, quartz; jagged
points, edges sanded smooth.
Experience strata of worn millennia;
God’s crushed calendar of
dryness and time not measured,
compacted into impermeable hardness.

Light, dressed in white, fills between the
walls.

Walk upon pebbles and tiny flakes
of rock, azure blue;
frozen sea, cooling, calming,
lifeless; a reflection of sky.
Feet bleed, leaving a trail
of dried red upon blue.
Follow the trodden bloody path;
listen to walls of slight gray stone sigh.

Waters rise into the light, now drenched in
sound.


To see other poems submitted for One Shot Wednesday, please visit One Stop Poetry. The links will be live after 4 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph: Avakas Gorge (Cyprus) by Petr Kratochvil. Used with permission via Public Domain Pictures.

I Fix Mess

My wife and I were talking the other night about some major decisions ahead of us, and I mused a bit about the career I’ve had for 37+ years. The musing took the form of a summary statement.

I fix mess.

This isn’t exactly a recent revelation; I’ve known this for a long time. It’s also easier to say and understand than “dysfunctional organization co-dependent.”

Right after I graduated from college, I worked on the copy desk of a newspaper. Turnover was high; within three months I was #2 on the desk and #1 had a drinking problem, which meant that a 21-year-old kid was essentially responsible for the copy desk for three editions of a newspaper. I held it together.

My next job was working for a large corporation. The first two years were good, and then I got another boss with a drinking problem. I held that together, too.

I didn’t have to deal with bosses’ drinking problems after that, but there came a line of mediocre people expected to do extraordinary things, people making major mistakes, businesses teetering on the brink of disaster, nasty issues, dysfunctional personalities and a few good bosses thrown in for good measure. Even as an independent consultant, who I was for almost four years, my job was almost always to fix the mess. I have a good boss now, and it’s been rare enough that I consider it a special blessing.

But down all the paths my career has followed, there’s been one constant.

I fix mess. Sometimes it’s mess of omission, and sometimes it’s mess of commission. But that’s what has characterized a good chunk of what my career has been about: fixing the mess caused by others.

She doesn’t describe it that way, but that’s what L.L. Barkat has experienced, as she describes it in God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us (Week 10: Self-care): “I’d always been the person who tried to play the part of bridge, who tried to hold things together.”

The bridge metaphor is an apt one – the bridge between chaos and safety, or disaster and resolution. It can be a self-imposed metaphor.

She goes on: “Acting as bridge puts a strain on our souls. Always being the one to handle things, neglecting our needs and dreams to stand in some supposed gap…” I didn’t stand in “some supposed gap” in the lives of family or friends; my supposed gap was invariably work.

In the last year, I’ve begun to muse and ponder about this. I’ve also been writing stories and poetry more.

The two are not unconnected.


I didn’t know the man

I didn’t know the man
but I did, because I
knew his father, who
knew me years before,
another lifetime ago.
My father, he said, spoke
of you as a talisman,
a charm, a rabbit’s
foot they couldn’t lose,
but they threw you away.
I didn’t know that, I said,
but I did.


Related:
Chameleon by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

National Poetry Month: Silence of the Trees

Friday concludes National Poetry Month for the United States and Canada (the British do theirs in October), and we’ve been talking it up a bit over at TweetSpeak Poetry. We’ve had a daily post that was usually a short feature on a poet with some of his or her poems, with an occoasional poetry review thrown in. We even did a random giveaway of a opy of InsideOut:Poems by L.L. Barkat, and Karen Eck of Phoenix-Karenee had her name chosen, received her book, and actually drew some illustrations in it.

The poets featured included Rupert Brooke, Sara Teasdale and Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Jack Gilbert, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, John Ashbery, Gary Soto, Gwendolyn Brooks, L.L. Barkat, Robert Frost, Maureen Doallas, Derek Walcott, Mona Van Duyn, Edgar Lee Masters, Nancy Rosback, Emily Dickinson, and John Keats. (Friday’s feature is Edgar Allan Poe.) Some old, some new, some published, some unpublished. In putting this together, I had the opportunity to read poems I haven’t read since high school and college.

Take a look; the English language has a rich legacy in poetry, and the posts at TweetSpeak only scratch the surface.

For this last day of National Poetry Month of 2010, I offer one of my own. It’s not based on a true story, but it is based on a story.

The Silence of the Trees


He stands within the silence of the trees,
wind filtering morning light on
his bare limbs,
not hearing the rustling of new leaves.
Beneath a green dome of soundlessness,
he stares at the house,
unmoving; remembering.

He hears her voice, lilting in
laughter as she leans from an
upper room,
the voice of the girl becoming
young woman, a voice vanished,
a voice he hears
now only in memory.

A voice silenced in violence, a
violence that came to him,
too, later.
He listens now for ghosts,
lingering traces of ghosts,
whispering soft words
in the silence of the trees.

"Last Light," Photograph by Nancy Rosback. Used with Permission.

My Western City, Dreaming

“How many times I saw my western city/Dream by her river.”
--Sara Teasdale, “Sunset: St. Louis” from Flame and Shadow

"A mourning figure walks, and will not rest..."
--Vachel Lindsay, "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight"


That’s what old river towns do,
dream by their rivers, dream of the
days of glory and wealth and triumphs,
when the making of things was important
and the shipping of things was vital and the
banking of things was critical and the litigating
of things made and shipped and banked was lifeblood;
and now old river towns doze and occasionally half-wake,
with ears closed and one eye open, dreaming by their rivers,
and with ears open and one eye closed, dreaming of the
mourning figure walking
the prairie streets.


This is a poem for the Random Act of Poetry sponsored by the High Calling Blogs. L.L. Barkat provided the prompt: Begin with a sentence with a picture in it, like from a poem, and then write from a memory or event or simply what comes to mind. I chose the lines above from the Sara Teasdale and Vachel Lindsay poems, both of which are featured today at TweetSpeak Poetry for National Poetry Month.

And Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy got inspired by all of this and wrote "River Deep."