Greetings fellow poets!

Today I began thinking about political poems because of a thread in the Poetry Criticism & Reviews section of the Poets.org online discussion forum On Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”. This is one of my favorite poems, probably because I read an interview of her speaking about it before I read the poem. Here is the interview: Carolyn Forché (from an interview with Bill Moyers)

Here is Forché’s poem: The Colonel

Another more recent poem of hers that deals with the political is from her book, The Angel of History. The opening poem states:

Some more of that poem can be seen here. These poems make me think about poetry’s place in the larger world of human culture. How does poetry affect the common person? How does poetry effect change in the political universe? How do poems speak of the unspeakable? On Poets.org there is an essay titled Poems about War and in it is an excerpt describing a Neruda poem:

Here is Neruda’s poem: I Explain A Few Things

Even now, poets are being imprisoned for what they have written. Damned Freaking Poets! is a conversation about several such poets over at the blog, Bud Bloom Poetry.

Your spark this week is to write a political poem. However, I’m going to make it easy and give you 10 words, chosen at random from Carolyn Forché’s book, The Country Between Us:

what
know
resemble
country
chosen
amounted
running
taken
scattered
belongings

Write your poem using all or some of these words in any form, style, or combination. Good luck!

“Tonight I walked into the sunset”
—Georgia O’Keeffe

Here the fragile white of age-bleached skull
curves through a hinge of jaw like youthful skin,
and there, two restless eyes seem fraught with all
she could not say. She didn’t paint within
the lines, couldn’t choose the safe belief
that everything is simple. Stark as grief
her violet buildings rise beneath a moon
so white that bone shows through. There the noon
sun lights the mountains. Here you see how hands
crack wide her heart: she painted sound, used blood
to mark the earth. Because she knew that strands
of life are drawn of clay and bone, not mud,
she wrote: “so give my greetings to the sky. . .”
And in her art the skulls nod in reply.

© 2006 Christine Klocek-Lim

See Georgia O’Keeffe’s art here.

Greetings fellow poets!

Today is Memorial Day here in the U.S., and I woke up thinking of one of my favorite poems by e.e. cummings: “next to of course god america i . This marvelous little poem is a sonnet, albeit a modern interpretation of the form. Poets.org has an excellent page on the sonnet– Poetic Form: Sonnet.

Here’s the short version explanation of the form from that page:

And here are your examples for this week:

Robert Lowell History

Edna St. Vincent Millay What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

e.e. cummings “next to of course god america i

Your task this week is to write a sonnet. Don’t worry about paying strict attention to the form, rather, take liberties with it, as does cummings. Instead of looking at the sonnet as a form that restricts your words, use it to control what you want to say. You may be surprised. As always, have fun and be creative!

Hello fellow poets!

Today an odd thing happened just as I got in the car to pick the kids up from school. I’d been thinking about what to write for this week’s spark and decided to talk about song lyrics, but it was 3 pm and time to go. Of course, Fresh Air with Terry Gross is on NPR at 3 pm and I often listen to the show. Surprisingly, today’s show featured Leonard Cohen, a songwriter, poet, and novelist: Fresh Air with Terry Gross May 22. His latest book of poetry is Book of Longing. After some searching, I found the lyrics to the title song of his album Dear Heather.

I haven’t heard the song, but the lyrics function luminously as a poem. They don’t rhyme, they aren’t very long, nothing is repeated. How is this a song? How is this a poem? Yet it is both. Here is the Poets.org page on Leonard Cohen: Poet, Novelist, Musician.

Of course, there no way to talk about lyrics and poetry without mentioning Bob Dylan. He has a page at Poets.org, too: “I’m a poet, and I know it”. The snippet of lyrics on that page delighted me with their irreverence:

But enough of history. What about lyrics? What about how to write a song that works as a poem? A very rough explanation of what a song might look like is this: Most song lyrics have a great deal of repetition. Most of them are built of phrases that have rhyme and rhythm; it makes them easy to remember and sing. These phrases are separated into different sections. Sometimes the chorus is its own section and is repeated several times.

However, I’m of the opinion that with songs, the best way to understand how they are put together is to read some lyrics. Learn by example. Here are some:

Sting, from the album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” — Shape of My Heart

Eminem, from the album “8 Mile” — Lose Yourself

Alanis Morissette, from the album “Under Rug Swept” — Hands Clean

This week’s spark:

Write a song.

OR

Share your favorite lyrics and tell us why you think it succeeds as a poem as well as a song. Just a small paragraph will do. Please provide a link to the lyrics and do not quote more than 4-5 lines.

As always, have fun and be creative!

Here’s some news that just came over the wire from Rus Bowden, a fine poet. There’s going to be an article about online poetry in Sunday’s edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s books section, written by Frank Wilson of Books, Inq. blogger fame, and incidentally, the Inquirer’s book review editor. Be sure to click in on Sunday at: www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/books/.

Here’s a bit from the blurb Rus posted at numerous venues:

“Years of hoping for online poetry participants, comes into fruition this Sunday, when Frank Wilson’s article gets published at the Philadephia Inquirer’s Books section–and goes out over the wire, to be picked up and published through the paper world, and where those papers have internet presences.

Instead of waxing promotionally, let me be a bit reflective at this time, to get some grounding for us, as the exciting and important news comes out. We use to have a sense that there were the published poets and there is us online, some sort of heirarchy that keeps us out. I have found that this is not the case. “

Salutations fellow poets!

Today as I began reading my copy of Poetry, I found the following paragraph:

This is from Kay Ryan’s essay, “A Consideration of Poetry,” the full text of which you may read here: Poetry: Featured Prose.

This essay and some of Ryan’s ideas on nonsense in poetry brought to mind some poems I’ve read that feel like nonsense at the beginning, but by the end of the poem the reader has been ushered into a world of startling insight. How is this achieved? How can a poem that makes no sense at first glance become a thing of beauty? Or emotion? Or realization?

In thinking about this, I feel the above paragraph is particularly interesting. When brought together, seemingly unrelated things, ideas, or images take on a relationship together. The reader is forced to compare the things and often, surprisingly, the result is sense. Some examples of this kind of poem follow.

e.e. cummings (This is a poem of startling strangeness that nonetheless opens within the reader a greater understanding of grief and love.) love is more thicker than forget

Mónica de la Torre (How does one begin to understand a poet in terms of a greater human relationship? One reads this poem several times) On Translation

Ted Kooser (This poem begins with an impossible assertion. How does the speaker know about a glacier? Yet this is how the poem illustrates the sense of the speaker’s underlying emotion which is too huge for normal images.) After Years

This week’s spark: write a nonsense poem. Use the above poems as examples of what can be done: no punctuation, no capitals, no rules of grammer, impossible comparisons, hyperbole, etc. Let go of the formal rules and see what happens. Be creative and have fun!

For those who are curious, you can read an interview, Magna on Magna, over at the Magnapoets blog. My friend Janet asked some interesting questions which made me think more clearly about how and why I write than I’ve done in some time. . .