Played with a couple of Charon-related poems today. Big O pleading with Charon (& then from C’s POV). The one I found myself finishing was Dialogue poem as he connives a way to cross the Styx.
This excerpt is the last lines of the poem.
The Ferryman
You will not take my coin?
You cannot cross, coin or no. This is not a place for mortals.
Herakles crossed.
Herakles is a brute. He beat me up. I know you’re not like that.
No, I’m not. I start to sing.
I’m even more brutal.
Day 10 – TIL about cicadaian mating calls
buggy love buzz
over-aroused (if a trifle confused) female cicadas sometimes mistake roaring power tools for mating calls, occasionally even swarming sweaty men machoistically mowing lawns
— oh well, there’s one thing i’ll be safe from at least
A simple poem for Day 1 of the Festival of Grief; the second day of my annual wallowversary not till next weekend. Trying to combine my usual subject matter for this day with The Big O. It works okay. My Poetic Factoid has the potential to include words from other languages but I don’t really have the motivation to make it bigger today.
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underground again spent the day underground again as i do every day since losing you shouting across the river till my voice is hoarse but no one ever comes its against the rules been broken for me once already they cant be broken again no matter how great the agony how much i plead for mercy from the gods for once no creature listens to me the losing is worse than never having had you at all torture to have been so close to sunlight only to see you swirling dissolving disappearing down the sewer i will never sing again
Day 9 – TIL about taking photographs of Victorians
birdiewatching
where we say “cheese” as a prompt to make us grin
Victorians said “prunes” despite preferring to keep things in
Today’s volume of poetry was one of Bukowski’s I’d recently bought second hand but never read. Diving into him was like jumping into a lovely warm jacuzzi (where the water had just been freshly added & mine was the only body to have been immersed so it was all quite clean & hygienic thank you very much) — soothing, comfortable, relaxing, delightful, & I wondered why I don’t remember to read/reread my fave poets more often.
With that in mind, I set out to write a Big O poem in B style. I gave myself the added task of just stream of consciousing & not editing it (that can come later).
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wedding day goat song
why’d the god-damned fool girl go & step in a snake nest for anyway it’s the stupidest damn thing i’ve ever heard & i’ve been hearing stupid damn things all my damn life
& now the wedding guests are gone home & my amphora is empty but i’m still full so i step outside to take a piss come back in pick up the amphora realise it’s empty still empty swear at the fucking gods for their sick son-of-a-bitch senses of humour
look about for my lyre till i remember i smashed it after i found her dead (my second best lyre obviously i’m not quite so stupid as to smash Hecate)
decide i’m no where near drunk enough so set out to visit Calais & see if i can drown myself in his ample cellar
Day 6 – TIL the Scots can deal with forgetfulness
title tartling tartan-style
so the Scots have a word for that brief panicked pause experienced while you temporarily un-remember someone’s name as you rummage through the haggis-baggage of your overworked, irrelevant fact-clutching, bewilderbeasted brain
all well & good
tartle is not that terrible
after all — the name’s known you’re simply having trouble accessing the correct datapoint in the outdated software system of your cerebral substance
but do these paragons of polite protocol these pontificating Pict-progeny have a word to personify that bowel-clenching juncture when you realise you’ve already forgotten the name of the person introduced to you mere microseconds ago
Today’s prompt was to write a poem that plays with the idea of a list. The example poem was a list that isn’t – it never gets beyond the first entry. I somehow mangled this with a challenge from a couple of days earlier write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate.
Just for today (given I don’t think it fits tonally with the other poems I’ve written) I’m including the whole thing.
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The Tartatus List
trying to prepare for my assault on Hades torches to scare away the damned darkness ; my life-restoring lute ; an obol for the ferryman ; three bones for the guard dog in case Herakles’ trick doesn’t work a second time
— but it’s impossible to focus given all i hear is my mother’s voice carping on at me to pack my cape cos she’s certain it will be COLD! down. there… & she knows what i’m like … when the weather turns chilly
Day 7 – TIL something strange about a lollipop
sweet stuck on a stick
Chupa Chups are Spanish (the name means something close to Sucky Sucks) & were designed so they didn’t melt in Iberian summer heat. They originally cost a single peseta each.
But none of these are the poetic factoid that blew me away. Their logo of brand name inside brightly coloured daisy was designed by — Salvador freaking Dalí
Aside: he also once sent Harpo Marx a supremely surreal Xmas gift — a harp with barbed-wire strings
Today’s prompt was to find a poem in a language you don’t know. I used the same one as the prompt, because, what the hey; a Finnish poem by Olli Heikkonen. Think about the sound and shape of the words, and the degree to which they remind you of words in your own language. Use those correspondences as the basis for a new poem. The end result doesn’t yet make a 100% sense, but it’s fascinating how easy it was to find images that slotted into my theme.
Finnish Original
Kumarra pihla jaa. Sen alle kasvot ylöspäin veljesi on haudattu. Maan povessa luut mustuvat, yrtit versovat nikamiin. Kumarra pihlajaa, sen ihonkaltaista kuorta, oksan hankaan ripustettua helminauhaa. Kumarra latvan liekkiä. Juuret lävistävät veljesi rinnan. Juuret lävistävät veljesi otsan. Pihlaja on ääniä täynnä, jotka keväällä puhkeavat lehdiksi.
“Literal” Transmogrification into English
Come here phial jar. Sense all cease wot loss of pain we shall see on hide at you. Man possess lute must you wait, your heart verse of what nick mine. Come here phial jar, then I hone kill taster aorta, oxen hanker Riposte statue helm in a you are. Come here little one like care. Enduring love is the what we shall see running. Enduring love is the what we all jetson. phial jar on any tiny, jot car coverall per karat lee discus. Dixie
Extract from Finnish Jar
Come near, fill my jar. Sense my loss, ceaseless pain. We shall see what hides you. As man possesses lute So must you wait, your heart a verse that nicks mine.
Read a (mostly mediocre) haiku collection today. Since I really enjoyed the reverse poem creation from a couple of days ago, I applied that technique on several haiku in the collection that kind of felt resonant to my themes. I wasn’t precious about the supposed 5-7-5 structure (some of my regular haiku writing friends say if you’re counting syllables you’re not writing haiku) … all I was interested in was generating content not “pure haiku”.I’ve posted 2 of the 4 verses.
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beneath the white mist an endless sigh of worms thunder made by earth.
arrowheads of wind bounce wildly between caverns rumble away to night.
Day 5 – TIL about pluralising streets
Bottom-of-the-Sack St
the plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac
a bit out of whack & perhaps off track
none the less that (i thought)
[prematurely perhaps] ended that
but in the spirit of adequate research i undertook a swift google search
& let me say my mind did lurch when i promptly also learnt
the plural of cul-de-sac is also cul-de-sacs
mind blown to the max so what’s lies & what facts?
i’m stressed & cannot relax till i know the correct syntax
One of the NaPoWriMo sites Day 3 prompts was to take a short poem and rewrite it in opposites. Which I did. Then extended it a bit to make it work better for my purposes.
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Excerpt from dirge
must i always & ever slouch with shuffle-steps & off-key heart back into the never-quite night
it matters not how ardently i avouch how much i love the light the rising path i can never again start
Poetic Factoid #03 — scary sea dogs
as a species our fear of sharks biting us from below as we lounge in their swim rooms is nearly universal
despite this our galeophobia is irrational
given it’s 10 times more probable for a New Yorker to be bitten by another person than anyone in the world by a shark
My housemate & I attended Vintage Vibes tonight. It was a somewhat serendipitous choice because we got to see the legend up close & steaming … & was relevant to songs of under earth. Despite the chilly air, Dave Le’aupepe was still able to generate some much needed mythic heat.
Funfact Day 2 – is based on the idea that Yoda was partly modelled on a photo of Albert Einstein. My Poetic Factoid revolves round the device of me Yodafiying three Einstein quotes.
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Excerpt from O onstage in 2023
he is sex : uncurling : on stage : foreplaying : with all of us : on & off the beat : always chanting about : always ranting about : love
Poetic Factoid #02 — Yoda Einstein
to the person who has the answers, don’t listen; who has the questions, to that person, listen
slowed down waves of sound & light we are a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos
souls dressed up in garments biochemical & sacred, we are instruments through which our souls their music play, our bodies are
This time tomorrow I’ll be 3 hours into my 6th 24 Hour Poetry Marathon (it begins 9am ET in the USA & about 500 people from all over the world participate).
A Poetry Marathon is exactly what it says on the box. Once an hour for 24 hours I’ll be attempting to churn out a poem (possibly using assigned prompts; maybe just using my own ideas) while attempting to stay focused, stay awake, stay sane, & occasionally, if a poem is completed relatively swiftly, grab a few moments kip here & there…
My goal is to finish (or at least progress) a Young Adult verse novel I’ve been playing with on & off for too many years. About 40 poems in the sequence have been created so far. There are multiple gaps in the narrative. My goal is to plug some of those gaps and hopefully incite a sense of momentum & motivation to spur me on to completing a first draft of a complete manuscript.
In previous years I’ve posted my 24 hour poems on this page (one of the requirements of the competition is a poem must be published every hour; ie you can’t write 4 in an hour, then sod off for 3 hours to play hockey). This year I won’t be publishing them here. This is because one day I would like said verse novel to be published. Having a large swathe of poems already online; albeit on a relatively innocuous little poetry page; could potentially be detrimental to said publication’s chances. So no go. I’ll still be posting on the group’s blog — but given that is closed to the public it doesn’t have the same issues.
That said, I still intend to post hourly snippets of poems, just 2-4 lines perhaps, the best bits as it were, taste tests, teasers, treats from each new poem. But in the interest of sanity, I intend to simplify things & post every teaser on one page, simply updating the same page every hour. Who knows, they might form their own meta-poem by the end of the day. (Or they might be a dog’s breakfast. We don’t yet know. But we will be 10pm Sunday. So hope you pop back occasionally & check it out.)
Thank god this month is over. Today was another exhausting (yet rewarding) experience. Another short film made. Well — shot, at least; editing still to come.
I’ve been planning this poem for a couple of weeks now, so it was quick & easy to record as variations of it have been roiling though my mind ever since I conceived of it as a fairly neat way to wrap up & round out this month.
gareth roi poet boi 