Tag Archives: poetry

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Say it in a Shade of Succint: Cell Poems

You can buck the system and resist the un-filtered verbal onslaught of a new and frighteningly social world, or you can embrace the fascinating and fantastic possibilities it may create.

Take for example a site I heard mentioned in a recent Poetry.com podcast: Cellpoems.org

I love the idea of super-condensed poetic license  where the poet is constrained by but flourishes within 160 characters.  Also adding to the appeal is the amusing addition of poem notes and author bios that far, far exceed the length of any of the works themselves.

Below are the two most recent submissions to the site:

I do it the old-fashioned way
tie string around the finger
except instead try rope-to-throat
though the last word’s still “remember.”

 

And the moon

Erika Meitner

shut in cold blue light,
in blown snow, my son’s
breath a forgiveness a road-
side x a windshield a
tunnel a handful of pebbles.

 

Sign up for the poems as an RSS feed or to of course receive via your cell phone…

 

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Reposted From Wired.com: “Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA”

The below posted is content copied directly from this recent and fasincating post on wired.com that was too fascinating not to share:

By Bryan Gardiner Email Author March 22, 2010  |12:00 pm  |Wired April 2010

Illustration: Nishant ChoksiIllustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply
Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem
After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA
Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish.

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My New Favorite Poetry Anthology – From the Fishouse

Firstly the word “fishouse” didn’t seem strange to me until I tried to type it and realized I would have assumed it was spelled “fishhouse”.  I digress…

At any rate, this book was purchased w/ a Barnes and Noble gift card, part of my holiday “loot”. First off,  I was already in a small sort of ecstasy when found that the poetry section had not just one short set of paltry shelves, but four.  But I saw this book – it’s full title being “From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great” (Fiona, put that title in your pipe and smoke it) – and everything just clicked.

The book is divided into 10 sections with alluring titles like “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire: Poems that Make Various Sorts of Address” and “Spangling the Sea: Poems with Convincing Consonance and Chimes of Internal Rhyme.”

The book plays to the truth of its title and comes with a cd containing author readings of many of the poems. Also, I really enjoy the addition of author’s comments on different aspects of the writing process that are provided at the end of some poems.

The book is borne out of a non-profit foundation called From the Fishouse (their about section actually comments on the spelling as well), dedicated to the oral tradition of poetry. They host a website with an audio archive of work from up and coming poets. They also host a youtube channel, a facebook page, and an i-tunes podcast (these folks really know how to exploit the social media!).

There’s so many I’d like to share, but I chose to include two short poems from the anthology, to give a taste of the book’s invigorating content:

Christian Barter
The Phoenix

Being ash, being dust,
being what’s left on the plate
being the bungalow with a moss eaten roof
a stone’s throw off from the new glass house,

being bone and gristle,
being biomass,
being something stuck to the fridge floor
whiffing of a long-turned tide,
being shredded, un-sought secrets,
being car exhaust,
being half-buried rusted-out bed springs,
sleeping it off in the woods,

being what was washed from the photo by the years,
being what will never wash,
being what’s in the storm drain hurrying off,

the dust flaring up in the comet’s tail,
the toe-nail clippings feeling around under the rug,
the sticks laid out on the highway after a storm,
the pennies on the dashboard short of a dollar,
the hollow core of an old swamp cedar,
the crumpled butt of the sweetest cigarette
you ever had, I am

everywhere and demand my wings.

Mark Conway
The Past Described, As A Figure

What were those days like? Remembering
is like remembering

white, or water. It’s another resemblance,
the libraries packed

with broken metaphors, book after book filled
with “water is like …,”

“white as…” When Alexandria caught fire,
the librarians burned like candels,

like suet. As for the manuscripts and their similes,
nothing was lost – it was like a fire.

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Say It Out Loud (On Paper) – A Little Poetry in Your Everyday Things

I wrote a post about the poetry that inspires me, but I’ve also have written much of my own over time and taken a handful of workshop classes during college. I’ve always kept series of blank notebooks with unlined pages that can leave my mental workings almost torn asunder by the possibilities for filling all that empty space. I’ve had significant dry spells in my life where what I wrote was subpar at best. But one of the things I learned in one of my most enjoyable classes was it is best to not just write when the mood strikes but to write, write, write in regular practice. We kept a journal and noted something we saw every single day. What that allows you to do is to start bringing new perspectives to the mundane little happenings we are all part of – the poetry in every cup of coffee and forlorn stranger. I’ve often heard the 90/10 “iceberg” rule applied to productive writing. Supposedly the portion of an iceberg visible above the ocean surface represents only 10%  of the entire mass of the thing, with 90% of it seated below the surface. Writing often is structured by 90% of what isn’t said – the work, or discarded writing that has gone into producing the final product.

I’ve always benefited however from trying new things, new styles, new concepts, etc. There are some really thought provoking poetry books and exercises out there that have inspired some of my strongest writing and keep me creatively fresh.

I highly reccomend the book “The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach”. You generally can find a used copy on half.com for $4-5. There are also some great websites with poetry exercises, my favorite so far being the writing exercises listed on the Poetry Resource Page website. Some example exercises:

Function Exercise

Choose one object in your room and make a list of all of the ways you could use it, or all of the things you could do with it. For example, a glass can be used to drink from, to pour from, to collect rain water, to turn upside town and catch a fly under, etc. Turn your list of functions into a lyric poem, using the object as the title.

(by Jack Myers, from The Practice of Poetry, Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, eds.)

God Exercise

Write a poem to God. Make it a tirade, a complaint, a request.

OR

Write a poem as God. Let God explain, refute, deny, defend.

OR

Write a poem in which God is a traffic cop, a new anchor, a porn star, a grocery clerk.

The point I think, it to keep re-working how you approach writing, to step outside the way you “know” how to write and to do it differently. Wonderful things can be found littered about the messes…

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Poetry is a Sickness – A Thrilling, Wonderful Sickness

"Message In A Bottle" - Harmony Becker, published in Mimesis: International Journal of Poetry, Artwork, and Opinion

I’ve had a love affair for quite some time now with poetry, from classic to contemporary, from unstructured to delightfully wild… My mom read a lot of it to me when I was younger, as did her grandfather to her, and it decidingly just…stuck. I have eclectic tastes in poetry ranging from Pablo Neruda to Allen Ginsburg. I love certain authors – Zora Neal Hurston, Saldam Rushdi, Jonathan Safran Foer – because the words and images almost vibrate with energy in their stories and novels. But the common thread between them all is this ability to wrangle the slippery images and sounds that allude most of us, all while speaking to some important expression of experience.

Thought I’d share some of my favorites:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines
– Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Haiku
by Etheridge Knight

1

Eastern guard tower
glints in sunset; convicts rest
like lizards on rocks.

2

The piano man
is stingy, at 3 A.M.
his songs drop like plum.

3

Morning sun slants cell.
Drunks stagger like cripple flies
On jailhouse floor.

4

To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.

5

A bare pecan tree
slips a pencil shadow down
a moonlit snow slope.

6

The falling snow flakes
Cannot blunt the hard aches nor
Match the steel stillness.

7

Under moon shadows
A tall boy flashes knife and
Slices star bright ice.

8

In the August grass
Struck by the last rays of sun
The cracked teacup screams.

9

Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.

“Green Memory” – 1951
-Langston Hughes

A wonderful time – the War:
when money rolled in
and blood rolled out.But blood
was far away
from here –

Money was near.

Epigram
-Langston Hughes

Oh, God of dust and rainbows, help us see
That without dust the rainbow would not be.

The Listeners
– Walter de la Mare

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:–
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

These are just a handful of the poems that have captured by attention. I will likely share others as I track them down or stumble upon them. I’d welcome any comments on poems or poets that awaken something in you.

Resources: