Day 11 / 30 Poems in 30 Days

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Fritillary butterfly. Photo taken by Beatriz Moisset.

Here’s the prompt for today’s poem from POETRYisEVERYTHING:

“A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”
― Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Welcome to Day 11 of the NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) challenge. One third of the challenge and poetry month is behind us now. If you are just getting started I hope you’ll set a goal to write 20 poems in the next 20 days.

FRIDAY APRIL 11TH Prompt

Prompt: Use 4 or more of these words in a poem: 1. euphonious (pleasing to the ear); 2. mise en abyme (French meez-ahn-ah-beem –placed in an abyss ); 3. prurient –( an unwanted arousal or interest in sex (or violence or?) an itch, craving); 4. anodyne (unlikely to offend or upset anyone); 5. antipodes (diametrically opposite sides of the earth as in Australia to U.S.); 6. fritillaries (butterlies that are usually orange with black spots on the upper sides of the wings and silver spooted on the underside of the hind wing; also Scarlet and White wildflowers in the NorthWest).

Your poem should be a minimum of 4 lines and include at least 4 of these words. Have at it!

 

Remember, your poem doesn’t have to be perfect. Here’s mine.

I have been in love with words all my life —
my father reading aloud Emily Dickinson and Rudyard Kipling,
Christina Rossetti and William Wordsworth from our
big book of verse. Sitting in the scabby pew
in church, running my finger under the euphonious syllables
of Old Testament cities, those antipodes of ours,
beautiful names though not always difficult:
Jericho and Babel and Ninevah.
I loved even my cousins’ repertoire
of cuss words that brought on our prurient giggles
at the way they hammered and bludgeoned
through their jokes. Much later, in college,
I fell into the abyss of words, the dark side
of “creative writing” that the scholars scorned.
Naming my daughters — I won’t speak
of the joy diving among the possibilities gave me.
There is no anodyne, no placebo to smooth over this love,
no tautology to explain it —
I am in love with the words, multi-syllabic, short,
vivid and dull, all of them dancing like fritillaries
amid the flowers — phlox and tidytips and fireweed,
columbine, heal-all, shooting star —
whose names themselves are words I have loved.

I have a feeling that this could either be much longer or much  shorter. It’s interesting, in any case, to type it up and share it. I’ll let it (and the other poems this month) sit a while, and then I’ll return to them to see what else they may have to say to me.

Skirt or Skirts?

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I am — honestly — in the last stages of the novel revision, and one of the picky things I worried over today was “skirts or skirt,” as in:

With a flounce of her red skirt (skirts?) beneath her cloak that suggested the young woman she would become in a few short years…

 

My friend Priscilla says this isn’t linguistic — did the Puritans wear skirts (multiple) like Victorians, or just one skirt? Look at pictures, she told me. I finally decided on skirt. I worked about 6 hours today, not all of it on this decision, I promise you — a record for broken-ankle me. I cleaned up 102 pages!

Meanwhile, the prompt for Day 7, over at POETRYisEVERYTHING has to do with Port Townsend and Art Deco lampshades. I imagine that Chris recently visited PT. It seems fair that my poem originates with what I’ve been visiting. And it is in the same spirit — old fashioned.

So here goes.

To Skirt

Here on the skirts of the argument
I shirk the decision, skate
on the fine ice of your scowl,
hide (metaphorically)
in my mother’s skirts,
second-guess, quiver and shake,
all skunk logic, squished,
no escape, still skirting it.

Day 5 of NaPoWriMo

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In one of those interesting synchronicity moments that sometimes happen (when one pays attention), my husband came home yesterday with a story he heard on Radio Lab, about a fake bus stop created in front of the Benrath Senior Center in Dusseldorf, Germany. It really hit me where I live, and I hope some of you will enjoy it, too. (The link will take you to a page, but it has an audio link.)

Today I almost jumped ship from POETRYisEVERYTHING. (I don’t like to write in forms! At least not when it’s someone else’s idea.) But then I realized that my resistance was probably a signal that I should give it a chance. So, thanks, Chris, for the nudge.

PROMPT for April 5th 2014 : Write a Septolet or better yet TWO
Septolets (sep toe lays): An informal Word Septolet and formal Syllable Septolet (that’s two poems, then, both very, very short — go to POETRYisEVERYTHING to see the full instructions). I took the title of the first (and subject) from the bus stop Radio Lab story. On the second septolet I cheated on the syllable count. It felt good.

The Loss of Memory is the Problem, and Also the Solution

Cupboard
Door closed,
The red bowl
Disappears. Mom scolds us:

“One more thing
You girls
Lost.”

 

April Fifth

Damn
Cherry
(the neighbor says).
One week of beauty–

A month of
Blossom
Crap.

 

Day 4: Sort of a Momentous Day

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This morning — around 10:00 — I went to Staples and printed out my novel manuscript. I meant to take it home and give it to my beloved (he’s my final proofreader), but instead I went to Barnes & Noble and started reading. I have been reading all day! It’s good, I think it’s good. But I also finally — FINALLY — figured out my character Hannah and how she contrasts (and doesn’t merely mirror) the main character. So I had lots of little changes. And I’m almost all the way through. I’m so happy!

Luckily (in terms of my poetry goals), early this morning I spent some time with day 4’s NaPoWriMo assignment from POETRY IS EVERYTHING. I haven’t returned to it to try to make it better, and as it is almost 9 p.m. and I’m exhausted, I’m just going to post it, as is.  Shitty first draft.

I hope that you’re writing, too. Even just scribbling. It’s all good.

PROMPT for April 4th 2014: Bus Stop

Think about a bus stop. You might write about the place, or make observations about people at the Bus Stop. Does it have a specific meaning you might want to try and convey? Can you imagine a Bus Stop experience (realistic or not) that would inspire a poem? Write it.

For another prompt or challenge be sure to check out Maureen Thorsen’s NaPoWriMo site where you’ll find prompts, challenges, comments, and information on all things NaPoWriMo.

Riding the Bus

An early bottle (4 a.m.), then an hour
on the dissertation. Mornings
I left the house in the dark
before my babies woke,
drove to the bus stop and stood in line
with the other commuters. Mounted the steps,
found a seat. I liked to sit by a window,
lean my head against it, close
my eyes. I smelled of milk,
of the ammonia of the diaper pail.

At 11:30, my class taught, office hour kept, an hour (more)
of writing, I was on the bus again,
reading tomorrow’s lesson and student papers.
At the bus stop, my husband waited, babies
buckled into the back seat
of the station wagon. He took my car
and left for his teaching job. I drove our daughters home,
unbuckled, unzipped. Diapers changed,
lunch doled out, naptime beckoning.

Housework beckoned, too. Kitchen to clean,
laundry (always diapers). I could have spent
those two hours of slumber
grading papers, or writing—
the unbiddable mountain of pages calling.

It was not unlike waiting in line at the bus stop–
what does one do but what the others do?
Inspired by the closed eyes of my drowsing babies,
the little fists propped against their mouths,
I folded, too. I crawled into my bed,
curled into a ball. I smelled of milk
and ammonia. I slept.