NaPoWriMo Day 7: "Sunday in Ajijic"

One prompt only today, because the two head in opposite emotional directions; I don't see how to combine the NaPoWriMo joy prompt and the Poem-a-Day jealousy prompt in a way that will please me.

Today's prompt: "Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of gifts and joy. What would you give yourself, if you could have anything? What would you give someone else?"

Joy is quite hard for me to write about; it has already been on my mind that I need to find ways to do so more. I have felt deeply happy in Ajijic, Mexico, and loved the time I spent in a self-designed writer's retreat there in winter 2018 (see earlier entries on this blog). I struggle to write about it, though -- perhaps because I haven't actually lived there, so it comes across too much as exotic travelogue or sentimentalizing. But that time, and of course writing itself, are deep gifts I have given myself. And I know Ajijic -- and the gift of travel -- will continue to be in my future.

I decided to keep it very simple here (also I have a lot to do today!) and just write a couple of linked haiku, a favorite NaPoWriMo form of Vince Gotera. Not quite perfect; "families" in the second stanza needs to be read as two syllables, though I do say it that way. I may keep going with this at a later time.

As I was writing, I realized the details made it a perfect poem to set on a Sunday, and today is Sunday too. Nieve, which literally means "snow," is common shorthand for nieve de garrafa, an incredibly delicious Mexican frozen treat that is sold by street vendors along the lakeshore.

Sunday in Ajijic

Bells and china ring,

horses clatter cobblestones,

birds squawk out of sight.

Families, lovers

stroll the sunny malecón,

nieve on their tongues.

Mountain above me,

Lake Chapala below me,

fingers on the keys.

NaPoWriMo Day 6: "If After All"

It's the third day in a row of doing a prompt mashup, although if felt like the two prompts for today lent themselves to being combined very naturally.

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to "write a poem of the possible. . . . focused not on what has happened, or what will happen, but on what might happen if the conditions are right. Today, write a poem that emphasizes the power of 'if,' of the woulds and coulds and shoulds of the world."

The Poem-a-Day Challenge prompt:  "For today’s prompt, take the phrase 'After (blank),' replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: 'After Dinner,' 'After You,' 'After Hours,' and/or 'After I Finish Writing This Poem.'"

My imagination of the future tends to be quite pessimistic (not to say terror-filled and apocalyptic), but I think my colleague Vince Gotera has apocalypse covered quite well today, and what I felt moved to write is a poem emerging from the major life transition I am going through. I want the imagery to evoke the border between terror and exhilaration. I obviously ended up tweaking the title just a bit, to get the possible in.

If After All

After I sign away to another

the house I walk through in my dreams

what if my heart should swell and shatter

the cask of ribs that binds it?

And if after I turn in the keys

to the long hallway of my days and years

suppose my scalp should prickle in the sun

and flames start licking upward from my skull?

What if after all, after the winter’s quiet,

a great heron should stride into the water

and test its wingspan, beating out the air,

then slowly raise itself into the sky?

            

--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not quote/copy/cite without permission.

NaPoWriMo Day 5: "Love Fragments after a Line from Kiss"

For the second day in the row I've done a mashup of the two prompts, one of which was already a three-part challenge.

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt is to "write a poem that incorporates at least one of the following: (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from an outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way. If you can use two elements, great – and if you can do all three, wow!"  And yes, I've done all three. The villanelle is unrhymed, but so is the one in the example.

Today's Poem-a-Day Challenge prompt is to "write a stolen poem. And no, don’t steal anyone’s poem! But you can write about doing such a thing. Or stealing hearts, stealing time, stealing minds."  

The idea that came to me was the opposition of stealing love/giving love, which sent me to Google and to Kiss's "I Stole Your Love," and Patty Ryan's "I Gave You All My Love." Let it be said that I am not a Kiss fan in any way -- I don't know that I even know that song -- but their name seems fitting and good for a title.

I started the poem as a game or exercise, not aiming for anything deep but just to pull it off, but it ended up tapping into a core emotional formation I write about or out of a lot.

Love Fragments after a Line from Kiss

I stole your love;

forgive me, my heart was empty, since

I gave you all my love.

*

The windows rattled, shelves were bare,

my useful talents few,

and so I stole your love.

*

A bird traced a path in the empty sky.

The thought of you flew across my mind.

Thus I gave you all my love.

*

Without a word, for years

I lay my flowers at the feet of your image;

which is to say I stole your love.

*

Letting go of you at last,

no you was left but in the universe,

so I could still give you all my love.

*

On that day you pass the line of the horizon

may a wave wash by with the sound of my name --

the one who stole your love,

who gave you all my love.

           

--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not quote/copy/cite without permission.

NaPoWriMo Day 4: "Kindred Spirits"

Vince Gotera should be proud: I followed his example and did a prompt mashup today. The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem that achieves sadness through simplicity, possibly using the sonnet form; the Poem-A-Day Challenge prompt was to do a poem about a painter.

I have loved the Hudson River School artists since I was a teenager, spending weekends in the Hudson Valley. My personal favorite has been Asher B. Durand; I like his name (why aren't more boys named Asher?), I am awed by the meticulous realistic detail in his nature renderings, and once when I was still very young I spotted a landscape print engraved by him an an antique fair. It's hanging in my study now, about five feet from my computer.

My poem is about Durand a little indirectly, by way of a focus on his well-known painting "Kindred Spirits" (1849). It portrays the painter Thomas Cole, who was a mentor and friend to Durand and who died young in 1848, and the poet William Cullen Bryant. Durand and his patron gave it to Bryant as thanks for his eulogy for Cole. The phrase "illimitable air" is taken from Bryant's 1818 poem "To a Waterfowl." I had to assemble background about the painting pretty hastily so the poem feels far from resolved, but it is an unrhymed sonnet.

Kindred Spirits

Those were the days, the wilderness in your backyard.

Those were the days, viewing nature in a frock coat,

the days before men hid tenderness for one another.

Those were the days we spoke of the sublime.

Consider Asher B. Durand, finding nature after years

bent over the engraving plate, crafting art from art.

The cleft in the rock, the waterfall, the mountain range;

painting a new world leaf by leaf, each stone and curl of bark.

Now Thomas Cole, five years younger, is gone.

Asher poses them, the friends, his friends, at ease together,

as one gestures and one listens on a lip of cliff.

He adds a shattered tree trunk in the foreground, a bird

in the illimitable air, clouds towering in sun and mist.

Steady-handed, he makes over the world like God.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not quote or cite without permission.

                   

NaPoWriMo Day 3: "The Newts"

I am doing the prompt from today's April Poem-A-Day Challenge, as the NaPoWriMo one -- a meandering poem that takes time and in which time passes -- felt like it would take me too long to write well, and I need to be grading.  I like the idea so will save it for another time.

The PAD prompt is to "write an animal poem. The poem could be about an animal. Or it could just mention an animal in passing. Or include an animal in your title and fail to mention the animal once in your poem. Your poem, your rules."

What I wrote is about an animal (well, animals), but ultimately it's about the self, in several different ways. I would have liked to write this in form, quatrains maybe, but time-wise will need to leave that for future revision.

The Newts

Fish, frogs, gerbils, the chipmunk

my uncle won in a giveaway,

the canary, Yellow Keppel,

and my cat Popsy of course.

The list of childhood pets, except

what I am ashamed to mention

even now: the newts.

Why did we even get them?

I can barely imagine them,

little, narrow, dark and shiny,

lacking any discernible personality,

in a shallow tank, pale gravel and water,

kept on my bedroom windowsill

(which now seems a clearly bad idea).

But then somehow I forgot them.

Days later, a week, or was it weeks,

I pulled the curtain back and there they were;

like strips of leather, parings from a shoe-heel,

long and fully dried and dead.

I don’t remember what I thought.

But all my life I have had dreams of it:

the startling horror of something I forgot,

the slow approach, the dread, the lifting,

the peering at what was out of view

turned mummy of itself, irretrievable,

the standing face to face with all of what I am.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not quote or cite without permission.

NaPoWriMo Day 2: "My Mother's Back"

April 2, 2019

The NaPoWriMo prompt for today which I used begins with the example of an unsettled, dream-like poem that asks questions and ends in a question. The prompt asks us to "write a poem that similarly resists closure by ending on a question, inviting the reader to continue the process of reading (and, in some ways, writing) the poem even after the poem ends."

In my initial vision of the poem I was going to write, I envisioned starting with descriptions and statements and moving into a series of questions. But as I wrote, the directly stated parts felt flat or overly narrative and naive, so I ended up just keeping and expanding the questions into a poem that is composed of nothing else. I could play with the lines and images for a lot longer than I've done, I'm sure. To speak of what my family rarely mentioned and I rarely let myself see is exhausting, so I'll stop with it as is for now.

Early on, the thought of Robert Hass's arresting poem "My Mother's Nipples" began tugging at my mind, especially its bizarrely playful use of rhymed partly-French lines. Once I got the rhyme of mystère and mère in my head they were stuck there. So for now I've left the line that came to me as an epigraph and tribute.

My Mother’s Back

C’est un mystère, le dos de ma mère.

How old was she when it began to rise and twist?

When she chose school over the rigid brace

And slung a hump over her shoulder for the duration?

Was her back a tree growing into a stiff wind?

Was it weighted by centuries of Jewish fear?

Was it handed down from a seamstress in Bialystok

Or from a rabbi hunched over his books?

Was it the curled rage of generations of brainy girls

Or the gray arch of a smashed tombstone?

Was it hard and loud as a high heel?

Was her back the breaching of a white whale,

A snowy mound, signifying the ultimate?

Was it a monstrous regiment of women?

Was it a wild mare rearing?

Was it full of stories that were never told?

Did it cry silently at night, yearning to be held?

Was it the skyline of New York from the Jersey side?

Was it a look back at the rocky Palisades?

Did it refuse to be comforted by my father’s hands?

Did it buzz with urgency? Was it swelled with feelings

She never seemed to have? A carrying case

Of everything about her life I couldn’t ask?

Was it a box of unsold candy from her father’s cart?

Was it whatever she cold-shouldered to go on?

Was it a fortress? Was it a temple?

Was it the speckled dark side of the moon?

Was it what she passed to me to carry out of view,

The heaviness, the ache, the drag of longing?

Was it the pack I have to hoist at last?

Was it a secret calling, the journey waiting,

Was it the unwritten poem, is it in these words?

                        

--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not quote or cite without permission.

NaPoWriMo Day 1: "How to Write in Meter" 4/1/2019

So, the blog is back, at least for the time being, after being on hiatus since last July. Once I started writing poetry it's what I wanted to blog about, and I wanted to share poems, but then I realized that those are considered "published" and I had to take them down if I was going to send them out to journals, and it all seemed rather depressing. Which it still does, from that angle. But I sort of miss doing it all the same. I may pick up more after I retire (!!!) in May.

However, crazy as it is in a busy month, I've decided to try NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Writing Month, and I need a place to post poems in some kind of gathering. So obviously this is the place. I will take down the posts later if and when I send any of these out.

Writing a poem a day feels very intimidating to me, although I am greatly inspired by Vince Gotera, who is a master at it, and his collection of NaPoWriMo poems, The Coolest Month, is officially out today. But I think it will be good for me, to build my chops, to get out of the sense that everything I write has to be great/deep/potentially publishable or I'm not good. And it will help me stockpile some ideas and drafts for the MFA I'm beginning this summer.

If anyone wants to get involved, the two sites doing (different) daily prompts for April are the official site at NaPoWriMo.net and Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides blog.

Today's NaNoWriMo prompt:  Write a poem that provides the reader with instructions on how to do something.

My poem is pretty meta, as it's about writing poetry. But it wasn't so much that I was trying to be clever, rather that it's the subject that immediately jumped into my mind. I just taught a class in writing in meter on Saturday as part of the monthly poetry series I'm teaching, so the gist of these instructions was something I actually said (minus the imagery of course -- certainly minus the sex part!). And I love meter and it's something I get excited to introduce to others.

The meter is basically iambic here with natural variations, but there's a trochaic line and an anapestic line, both inserted on purpose and related to the subjects described -- trochees always feel to me like a stamping dance, and anapests like a horse cantering.

The line lengths aren't uniform in terms of number of feet -- I'm letting myself go with that, though it bothers me, as I can only even begin to fit this in to my months if I don't obsessively revise.  Letting poems be imperfect (for now) is one of the reasons I think doing this will be good for me.

How to Write in Meter

The secret is, I told the workshop students,

don’t think about it. Analyzing is a later move;

your brain won’t get you there; you have to feel it

in your breath, your body. Heart that beats, lub-dup,

the pulse that throbs, that other pulse of coming.

That time you strode the city, full of your intent.

Cajun dancing with that wild man at the festival --

how you’d fall for him and finally fuck him too

after so many years, for all you disapproved.

You must recall a horse you loved in childhood,

how you cantered across the wet fields, with that scent

of crushed wild onion blooming in the air.