Tag Archives: NAPOWRIMO

Day 9 – The closest I could get to Fish…

I hadn’t planned to solely use poetry collections for my Judging a Book by Its Cover phase of poetic generation, but it seems to be working okay (& I still have 4 or 5 possibles to draw from) so while it’s working, I’ll go with it.

Today is Sharon Olds’ The Unswept Room.  It is chosen for no other reason than I had an urge to write something about fish (don’t ask why/I don’t know). This was the closest I could find. It seemed to work cos the pome itself came very quickly.

tsunami

shell, coral, fishbones
— these three clues
from the sea
all that remains
of what we were
of our love that was ;
the beach house floor
where we lived
for so many years
has been swept clean ;
a tidal wave of anger
leaving only these
three enigmatic clues
which must mean
something

if only i can work out what
then perhaps, like the tide
you will return

unswept CROP

NOTE: the work of art which forms the cover are ‘details from floor mosaic The Unswept Floor’, Museo Gregoriano Profano, Vatican

Day 8 – Daughter of the Poets

Second day of Judging a Book by its Cover … & today’s text is Wooroloo by Frieda Hughes. My friend & fellow poet, Jules Leigh Koch, lent it to me following my reading at Lee Marvin on Tuesday night.

Those who’ve read Day 5’s post Crows everywhere you turn, will know I elected to perform what amounted to a “concept album” of poems; with every one referencing in some way, a crow or crows; including a couple inspired by a chilling experience at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, where the voice of Ted Hughes reading poems recorded in Adelaide 40 years earlier were played through the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens. It made for a very a haunting session dedicated to Hughes, with guests Jonathon Bate (biography of Hughes) & Max Porter (Grief is the Thing With Feathers).

I didn’t know that Ted & Sylvia’s daughter had tried her hand at poetry. Nor that for a time she was married to an Australian and lived on a West Australian farm. Sadly, the collection did little for me, with only a couple of poems I found engaging. However, if the cover is anything to go by, she is a pretty talented artist.

conflagration

the sky is a golden fleece
— a beach furnace fuelled
by driftwood embers
— the front face of fire
leaping into the air
— flames catapulting over
themselves to escape
— everything it is destroying

wooroloo.jpg

NOTE: this painting is not called ‘Wooroloo’, but ‘Two Sheep’, 1996, by Frieda Hughes. Sadly for the sheep, they have been cropped out by moi.

Day 7 – Change of Game

Having completed my first session as Poet-in-Residence, means, at least in my self-imposed rules, I can change the Word Game used to generate poetry. For next week’s session, I will be using Judging a Book by its Cover as the game to write poetry by. Its technical name is Ekphrasis. Wikipedia elucidates thus: a graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art.

& to be honest, I couldn’t be happier: I’m much more comfortable making poems inspired by images than shuffling other people’s titles around.

That said, I began wandering round the library, er, my house picking up books at random & checking out their covers & going: OMG I’ve never gonna find anything good.

That’s when I came across, Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott. Tom was my Creative Writing Professor way back in 1997-98. I’d taken it off the shelf cos I’d been talking with Mike Ladd about the last time we’d seen him … & later I realised, it was at the launch of this book. So, with synchronicity in action …

 

still life

above your bed/ on a pink shelf
which might be marble/ or merely cloth
4 items/ artistically arranged
a sheep’s skull/ minus lower jaw
a jar/ of homemade olives
an upturned/ coffee mug
&/              the last object
which might be/ a gold bar
or equally unlikely/ a block of butter
from the doorway/ i cannot tell

the symbolism/ immediately obvious
since your mind/ was stroked
speech has slurred/ language failed
you no longer delight/ in caffeine’s bite
words scrawl to worms/ & that mouth
on which butter once/ wouldn’t have melted
now utters/ random profanity
as if decompressing/ years of vitriol
the only thing/ which puzzles me
are the olives/

step forward/ reach above your head
unscrew the lid/ pop one in my mouth

————still pondering

g&H CROP

NOTE: the work of art which forms the cover of Tom’s book is called ‘Still life with skull’, 2004, by Don Rankin

Day 6 – 2016 Miles Franklin Longlist

dry-salt-creek-murchison-western-australia-DJ7R9X copy

Whichever way you spin it, today was a good day. As an earlier post stated, it was the first day of my Poets Residency at Adelaide City Library. For three hours I was paid to be a poet, paid to interact with the public and talk poeting, and paid to write poems.

Today I am spoiled for choice (I wrote several title poems today). Today is also the day of my first truly solid poem.

I chose, as the clever among you may have worked out, to use the 2016 Miles Franklin Longlist titles as the basis for my Title Poem today. The longlist was announced yesterday and the titles are all glorious. I defy anyone not to write a good poem using them. However, to be fair, I was the most lax/playful/non-rule-bound today of any Word Game so far this NaPoWriMo. & so …

 

Australian pastoral

the hands that work the earth
know the natural way of things

of the never coming rain
of the hope we farm

this burnt black rock
so far from the white city

the river’s a ghost, the creek salt
where fish no longer leap

these dirty hands know
the world will go on, without us

…

..
So yeah! Pleased with that. That is pretty much an archetypal roi jones kinda poem.

Tomorrow will be a new game for a new week.

Here for those interested, is the full list. Look forward to reading them…

Tony Birch for Ghost River (UQP)
Stephen Daisley for Coming Rain (Text)
Peggy Frew for Hope Farm (Scribe)
Myfanwy Jones for Leap (Allen & Unwin)
Mireille Juchau for The World Without Us (Bloomsbury)
Stephen Orr for The Hands: an Australian pastoral (Wakefield Press)
A.S. Patric for Black Rock White City (Transit Lounge)
Lucy Treloar for Salt Creek (Pan Macmillan)
Charlotte Wood for The Natural Way of Things (Allen & Unwin)

& a link to a Sydney Morning Herald article about the announcement.

dry-salt-creek CROP flip.jpg

~ interlude ~

Just a quick update. I’m about to head into the Adelaide City Library for my first day of my Poet in Residency Bookish: books as a poetic playground presented by Spoken Word SA. The workshop session is all planned & I’m pretty stoked about it. Reminds me of what I’m actually good at.

Today we’ll be playing a range of Title Poems (hence the past 5 days of pomes) & it’s where I’ll be writing today’s NaPoWriMo entry.

12-3pm. Adelaide City Library Level 3, Rundle Place, Rundle Mall (Enter via Francis St – off Rundle Mall or via Da Costa Arcade)

Better scoot or I’ll be late…

 

 

 

 

Day 5 – Crows everywhere you turn

Today’s Title Poem challenge ties in with what I’m about to do in a little over 90 minutes.

After 8pm tonight, I will be performing a handful of poems at Lee Marvin Readings (LEE MARVIN is ON THE RAZZLE) all connected by a common denominator. That denominator is the same as I’m using as inspiration for this poem, & it is definitely the poem that works best as an independent unit, rather than a word game assemblage.

Source of titles is Ted Hughes’ crow: from the life & songs of the crow. I removed ‘crow’ from any title in which it appeared … & here is the result.

 

crow’s snake hymn

that moment
you hear fate knock on the door
fleeing from eternity
fragment of an ancient tablet
a sickened revenge fable

that moment vanity alights
that moment ego frowns
that moment nerve fails
that moment colour communes blacker than ever

how water begins to play
improvises in laughter
goes hunting
and mama
and the birds
and stone
and the sea
on the beach

that moment
lovesong undersong owl’s song

that moment
you glimpse theology is
a bedtime story
a childish prank
a grin a disaster a kill
a horrible religious error

truth kills everybody

 

36 titles used out of a possible 68. Only 4 italicised words & one tense change. I could have added other titles, but it really felt ‘complete’ at this point & any more would have bloated it. Pretty pleased. Now to get ready for the reading.

 

Day 4 -CRIME DOESN’T PAY

Not sure what’s up with my sleeping patterns at the moment, but my body seems to think key hours of slumber are 8pm-2am. It’s been my standard for the past 3 or 4 nights. Which means I write one of these, put it aside to come back to & then fall asleep before posting it. Sigh. Hopefully things will clear up soon.

Today’s effort was going to be epicreads.com’s “19 Most Anticipated YA Books to Read in April” but I realised the titles, while lovely, were similar in tone to how Day 1 & Day 2’s poems turned out. So I went to one of my desktop folders “Book Lists” (which no doubt will be referred to again later) & pulled up The Irish Times’ “Best crime fiction of 2015” list instead.

Thus we have a dark love poem …

 

Camille

are you watching me
in the world gone by
from the way of sorrows

this is everything i never told you

you were the girl
on the train
in the spider’s web
my gun street girl

even after the fire of silver
bullets   those we left behind
even the dead with our
blessing   shut eyes
& sang their snowy
song of shadows

but black-eyed weeks
walking the tight
rope defence
our assassin’s acts   our
killing   weighs down
your drowned boy

I managed to get 19+out of 24 titles in (I challenge anyone to work pleasantville, acts of the assassins, the snow kimono, black-eyed susans & tennison seamlessly into a pome.)

NOTE: Here’s the article if you’re interested in who wrote what.

Day 3 – from Other Poets’ Poems

NOTE: so the lesson learnt from late last night is: remember to press the publish button, not the preview one. 

Today’s title poem comes from a different source than the first two. Friendly Street Poets had a session at the Payneham library & I went to listen to/support friends (I didn’t read given I’ll be yabbering on enough this month). While I was there

While I was there I recorded as many of the titles of the poems read out as I could (some poets don’t speak very audibly & some poets in the audience vague out from time to time). Then when I got home (after a quick diversion to a public house to discuss important issues like how many hands a clock has & our views on cats on the continent of Australia) I typed up the list of titles (those I could decipher given my scrawl) & from that subset drew my list of phrases.

Out of 71 possible titles I used 44, I probably could have got more in but I felt I was already ‘losing control’ of the draft as it was. It definitely would be better shorter, but that’s not the exercise this month.

Thanks & apologies in advance to any poets who are horrified that I have appropriated parts of their masterpieces for this Frankenpoem. If you are really upset, just remember — it’d be a better poem, if you gave me better titles hahaha…

 

scraping the (sleepless) nights

toward evening’s
moment of departure
you in your rocking chair

love your collection of axioms
poetry is dead
time is a hound
it’s best to be sure
love is a no through road
there’s no wonder in an open door
red in the morning
death by stoning’s too good, etc

your leftover questions
why are people so cruel
who can know the mind of the sea

your opinions
on the philosophy of cut flowers
on the 6.04pm platform 8 to osborne
on poetry as an alternative to oxygen masks

your admission
when aunty was dying
that night she said
she was living in a draft
of a new life

i ache to find
the ink trail lost
between words

the crux of trust
the genesis of hope

otherwise it’s just
the losing of wisdom

but you pack
your twilight years
up in neat little boxes
snuggle down
into your multi
coloured dream coat
your face turned
toward the garden
& the cold autumn wind

 

 

 

 

Day 2 – from the TO READ PILE (fiction room, leftover titles from yesterday)

This poem is a Title Poem taken from titles unused from yesterday.

Arrrggghhhh!  Just seeing the titles, makes me wanna read about a dozen of these books right now!

 

beautiful chaos

take the underground road
the narrow road to the deep north
to the magic mountain
where the pagan lord

gives instructions for breathing
demonstrates magic tricks
& time machines
are repaired while-U-wait

Day 1 – from the TO READ PILE (fiction room)

Today’s poem was generated by the game Title Poem. It’s pretty easy, you simply use the titles of books as the basis for your poem. Boom!

I’ve played this game before as part of NaPoWrMo 2014 I think … then I was ruthless, only allowing myself exact titles. It made for slightly stilted verse, but which was great inspiration for rewriting in the months afterwards. This time, I’m cutting a little slack & allowing myself to add words here & there, or maybe change or drop a ‘the’ from titles to allow the poem a chance to have slightly more sense/meaning.

That said, though, they are still strange dreamlike things (I’ve written two so far, one each day, I just didn’t get around to posting yesterday), which go places I wouldn’t normally —but given I only have a limited palette to draw upon, am sort of ‘forced’ to. Kinda like when rhymers choose a word just because it fits the pattern, rather than cos it’s the right word. Hopefully though, these won’t be quite so clunky as that.

In my fiction room, I have a chair to read in. Next to this, is a small bookcase topped with towering piles of books; books I’m kinda interested in reading next, if the mood takes me (it is one of about 4 such stacks around my house). For this exercise all titles are taken from that stack.

[NOTE: Roman font are words from the titles; italics are my additions.]

 

stolen

this house of sky
fades, a perfect

bluethroat morning
by silver blade cut

from the chains
of heaven

we great apes keep hush
about our scarlet necropolis

feign resilience
to the troubles

as the bone clocks
play the angel’s game

a quantum thief
steals my vintage summer

and although i am
a married man

i wish someone were waiting
for me somewhere

perhaps down by the ocean
at the end of the lane