NaPoWriMo Day 9: "Things that are Worthy in Being Long without Love"

This was an easy mashup!

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt: to write a list of "things" following the example of Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book.

Today's PAD Challenge prompt: to write a love poem, or an anti-love poem.

This is the roughest of drafts as I am fitting it in between a day of teaching and going to my colleague's book release reading. But I had not read Sei Shonagon before and am fascinated -- I think I will be experimenting more with her list form. I have already written a list poem that has had a lot of positive response and was in my MFA application manuscript, "The Empties."

On a side note, Shonagon wrote in the 990s and I am entranced to find out that in over a thousand years not much has changed with regard to a certain form of male behavior. In the section on "Hateful Things":  "A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything."

Things that are Worthy in Being Long without Love

After Sei Shonagon

The bed is creased on one side, the other a cool, high plain.

A cat snores when it sleeps so its face presses against the blanket.

Each day you consider and lift from the cupboard the one bowl whose curve you most
long to feel in your hand.

But food eaten from the container is most delicious.

You do not watch any loved one grow closer to death, and you, you will live forever,
preserved in such solitude.

You need not pretend to care for your loved one’s friends and relations, and their
tiresome stories in which you do not appear.

At night, the lamp glows in the corner; in the daytime, the sunlight angles on the floor.

No one will wake you at night, sick and querulous. No one will blame you for how you
didn’t listen and your eye went to your phone. No one will say nothing at all and still you
find you have left yourself to become more or what they are.

To choose what you will do each day reminds you of the infinity and terror of freedom.

Love itself remains perfection, everything you always dreamed of.

You listen to yourself explain why you are without love. You come to hear how these
explanations are merely stories. You come to understand that love is only a story too.
You realize you, too, can be a writer.

You imagine, as the dharma urges, that you might relinquish attachment.

You know that you are made of fire.

The moon looks at you. You look at the moon. 

(I came up with the line about the moon before I came upon this perfect image of Sei Shonagon!)

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

NaPoWriMo Day 8: "Take My Advice"

Today's poem is another mashup, although a pretty loose one.

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt:  "I’d like to challenge you to think about the argot of a particular job or profession, and see how you can incorporate it into a metaphor that governs or drives your poem."

Today's PAD Challenge prompt: "Write a lucky number poem."

I was coming up blank for professional argot I knew and felt entitled to use or interested in making the basis for a poem. A poem about academic lingo seemed pretty awful, but then I thought of a particular bit of slang that I characteristically use in professional contexts, and always take pleasure in.

The resulting poem feels like the weirdest thing I've ever written. I don't take it very seriously, but I had fun writing it and it was feels like a good exercise at letting myself get loose. I'm pretty damn proud of that colon image, anyway.

For the record, my lucky number is 72, for no meaningful reason at all. I chose it as a favorite number when I was a child and it stuck.

Take My Advice

And sex up the title.

That’s what I tell students

and colleagues too.

I’ve been in the game a while,

I know these things;
trust me on this one.

First you need one at all, of course.

The undergrads send essays

off into the world like orphans

without so much as a name.

Or perhaps with merely

a phrase that darts by

like an unidentified fish,

or the name of what they’ve written on,

a monster wrapped in another’s skin.

Or with a drab description,

say, “Scene Analysis Essay,”

sadly trudging from the workhouse

to the assembly line

with a host of others

wearing washed-out uniforms.

My colleagues write titles,

but they're sallow sometimes,

workaday and gray

as the faces of people

who have sat for decades

in committee meetings,

drinking bad coffee and fake creamer

under fluorescent lights,

crafting elaborate plans

that will get scrapped the next year.

Sex it up, verily I say unto you.

Let your essay be a bird

in brilliant mating plumage.

Let it lock eyes with the reader

luring them with its confident smirk.

Let it declare itself

and boldly ask, How you doin’?

Let your title shimmy

onto the dance floor

or whirl around the pole

shaking the headlamps

of its tasseled colon.
Let it thrust its hip.

Let it belly up

to the table of argument

like a gambler, mouth wet

with anticipation,

stroking the rabbit’s foot

hidden in its pants,

sure that today, today, today

its lucky number will strike.

            

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.