Tag Archives: form poem

Junk Drawer

 

 

 

This is the prompt:

  • First, find a song with which you are familiar – it could be a favorite song of yours, or one that just evokes memories of your past. Listen to the song and take notes as you do, without overthinking it or worrying about your notes making sense.
  • Next, rifle through the objects in your junk drawer – or wherever you keep loose odds and ends that don’t have a place otherwise. (Mine contains picture-hanging wire, stamps, rubber bands, and two unfinished wooden spoons I started whittling four years ago after taking a spoon-making class). On a separate page from your song-notes page, write about the objects in the drawer, for as long as you care to.
  • Now, bring your two pages of notes together and write a poem that weaves together your ideas and observations from both pages

    Click on the arrow on the album to hear the song.

For NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 10

Wise Habit (Lai)

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Wise Habit

Try this exercise
to see through disguise.
Take note:
To locate the lies,
examine the eyes.
I quote:
Life’s ultimate prize
is to become wise
by rote.

This is a strange poetic form know as Lai which looks to be a very simple form composed of a five syllabled couplets followed by a two syllable lines. The number of lines in each stanza is fixed at nine and the couplets must rhyme with each other, as the two syllable lines must also rhyme. In English this line is probably the most difficult part of the poem.

The Lai is a very old French form and tradition states that the short line must not be indented, it must be left dressed to the poem. This is known as Arbre Fourchu (Forked Tree); there is a pattern meant to be set up as a tree.

The number of lines in each stanza is fixed at nine. The number of stanzas is not fixed and each stanza has its own rhyme pattern. The stanza’s rhyme
pattern is… a. a. b. a. a. b. a. a. b.

 

Rude Visitor

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This year the rains came early, starting the day after the men came to begin stripping and resurfacing my roofs. The day after they were supposed to remove the skylight, hurricane-force winds and torrential rains made me glad for once, that they had been no-shows. A month later, the repairs are over and we’ve settled into the daily or nightly showers. I am snug in my house and the mountains behind me are covered with a vivid green. Soon water will be shooting in rivers down the arroyos and cobblestone roads that lead down to the lake from my house and every teja will serve as its own channel for individual rios streaming down from my roof into waterfalls that will arc down to the terrace tiles below.

The rainy season
breaks its usual habit.
A rude early guest.

For dVerse Poets.

Loving Thy Enemy

Three years ago yesterday, I wrote an abecedarian poem for NaPoWriMo that contained today’s pompt word of “froth.”  What are the chances?  There must be some poetic synchronicity at work here.  If you don’t know what an abecedarian poem is, it is one where each word in the poem begins with a letter of the alphabet in order from a to z.  I did one poem in this manner, then wrote another  where I stated with z and went backwards through the alphabet to a, and then forward again, a to z. Give me any kind of game and I can’t resist it.  Especially word games.

 

Loving Thy Enemy

Age
becomes
creative.

Don’t ever fictionalize
great heroic intimacies.

Just keep looking
major nemeses over,
proudly quieting
rash stabbing thoughts.

Under violent words,
xenophobic
yearnings
zing.

****

Raw Savage Thoughts

Zealous young
xenophobic wanderers
veer under
the sun’s rays,
quitting promenades
over nomadic mesas.

Let’s keep jumping
into harsh green fields,
eternally delving closer
before age accents
belligerent crankiness.

Delicious effervescence
froths gushingly homeward
in jugulars,
keeping lymphatic matters
normal or palpitating,

quickening
raw savage thoughts.
Understanding vulcanizes
woman’s X-rated,
yearnful zest.

 

The prompt today is froth.

Creatures under Rain

 

 

 

Creatures under Rain

All day long, the rain came down
to soak the mountain, drench the town.
Each dog stayed in to curl into
his protective curlicue.
I took their lead and kept inside
as the world around me cried and cried.

Though I won’t say that I’m feeling down,
I do not choose to paint the town
and marks on paper have turned into
other than a curlicue.
I painted what I felt inside
with words that folded in and cried.

Their pigments bled and rivered down
joining currents from the town,
and tears from other creatures, too,
joined this watery curlicue.
This whirlpool that we’d kept inside
joined us together as we cried.

The sun comes up and moon goes down
over country, lake and town.
Illumination cycles, too,
through nature’s dizzying curlicue.
When we share these truths we’ve found inside,
others hear what we’ve decried.

The whole world may be feeling down
dreading contact with the town.
The words we free may catch them, too,
in their discursive curlicue,
loosening pain they’ve kept inside—
dispelling tears they might have cried.

 

I was intrigued by the self-set challenge of composing a five stanza poem where each stanza made use of the same six rhyming words in the same order. I think it isn’t terribly noticeable except for the unusual world “curlicue” that eventually tips the reader off as to what is happening.  Still, it was an engaging challenge to make it work six times.What should I name this form? Six-Step? Any other ideas? The prompt today is creature.

The Long Road–Four Landays (NaPoWriMo day 19)

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The Long Road–Four Landays

Spent all her life looking for the man,
while the man spent his life looking at all the women.

Why doesn’t life give us what we want?
Most likely because we have never known what we want.

At the point where life starts to wear out,
ironically, life starts to be enough for us.

At the beginning of a long trip,
we hardly ever know where we are really going.

The NaPoWriMo Prompt today was to write a landay. A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/four-stars/