Delving Into Poetry Month: Thirty Days of Planting Words

        April is (or now was) National Poetry Month, a nice designation but nothing near the impact of a national holiday. Emily Dickinson's birthday maybe? Or Walt Whitman's? 
         Still, poets get excited about it in sort of busman's holiday way. Let's write more poems this month, they say. Let's write a poem every day. A National Poetry Month website encourages this workaholic tendency, offering clever and original prompts on each of the month's 30 days. In fact, any number of other websites do a similar thing. 
          Prompts are a new discovery for me, perhaps an invention of the instant communication possibilities of the digital age. If someone says, 'why don't we all write a poem about trees, or birds, or women whose image deserves to be on the twenty dollar bill?' you could say that was a prompt. But things are considerably more elaborate in the industry these days. 
         Here, for example, is the National Poetry Month [http://www.napowrimo.net/] website's prompt for the April 24th:

Today I challenge you to write a “mix-and-match” poem in which you mingle fancy vocabulary with distinctly un-fancy words. First, spend five minutes writing a list of overly poetic words – words that you think just sound too high-flown to really be used by anyone in everyday speech. Examples might be vesper, heliotrope, or excelsior. Now spend five minutes writing words that you might use or hear every day, but which seem too boring or quotidian to be in a poem. Examples might be garbage disposal, doggy bag, bathroom. Now mix and match examples from both of your lists into a single poem. Hopefully you’ll end up with a poem that makes the everyday seem poetic, and which keeps your poetic language grounded. 

          Or kinda wicked paradoxically incongruous.
           Nevertheless I gave the monthly project a try, working not everyday but with a start and stop rhythm. I frequently fell three or four days behind and went doggedly back to the days I missed to try to catch up. And while I never did get to all 30 prompts, I enjoyed the process. Two of the poems I wrote this way turned into 'garden theme' poems and appear in this month's Verse-Virtual.
            They are titled "Visiting Roses: Under the 'Lune' " and "A Family Garden." [www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2016-may.html]

             "Visiting Roses" originated with a prompt to write in a poetic form called a "lune": 

This is a sort of English-language haiku. While the haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable count, the lune is a three-line poem with a 5-3-5 syllable count. There’s also a variant based on word-count, instead of syllable count, where the poem still has three lines, but the first line has five words, the second line has three words, and the third line has five words again. Either kind will do, and you can write a one-lune poem, or write a poem consisting of multiple stanzas of lunes.

             "A Family Garden" came from this prompt:

...write a poem that takes the form of a family portrait. You could write, for example, a stanza for each member of your family. You could also find an actual snapshot of your family and write a poem about it, spending a little bit of time on each person in the picture. You don’t need to observe any particular form or meter.

           A more challenging prompt introduced me to the form of the "tritana."

The tritina is a shorter cousin to the sestina, involving three, three-line stanzas, and a final concluding line. Three “end words” are used to conclude the lines of each stanza, in a set pattern of ABC, CAB, BCA, and all three end words appear together in the final line.
Confused? No problem — here’s an example!


I did read the illustrative tritana, and liked it. The poem that resulted from this formal challenge, titled "The Slow Tritina We Will Dance," has been accepted by another literary journal for an upcoming issue. Never too late, I guess, to learn something new. 

One last offering from my month's work, to illustrate the range of the imaginative and wholly unpredictable universe of the 'prompt.' (There is no end to it.) Here's the prompt for June 17:

I challenge you to find, either on your shelves or online, a specialized dictionary. This could be, for example, a dictionary of nautical terms, or woodworking terms, or geology terms. Anything, really, so long as it’s not a standard dictionary! Now write a poem that incorporates at least ten words from your specialized source.




I found a dictionary of geological terms that attracted me because on the first page appeared "alluvial fan." I loved the double meaning possibility there. Here's the resulting poem, with notes below to explain the unfamiliar terms.
 

School of Hard Rocks

The Alluvian Fan is rooting for mud

While the Spirit of New Mexico prays for dry weather to save his handsome Butte

A Density Current pores through the country with an angry thump:

many votes for Donald Trump.

An increased dip in a dipping trend says Monocline is now your friend,

while tumbling on Scree in a bald Reverse Fault, a stumbling Roughneck calls a halt.

Put down your cup of early joe and help me wind yon Pahoehoe

It coils around the Tourmalines that color grew in deeper mines

And persevered through many fights

with blind, albino Troglobites

The Caldera yawns at Yellowstone 

While for its loss a Cation moans

In deeper days in heavy dirt

A crystal nodule strives for Chert

Attorneys for the Deeps in opposition

Await a geological Deposition

To rule at last, without dispute

That Fossil Fuels aren't worth a Hoot 

[NOTES from a glossary of geological terms:

http://geology.com/geology-dictionary.shtml

Alluvial Fan:A fan-shaped wedge of sediment that typically accumulates on land where a stream emerges from a steep canyon onto a flat area.

Density Current:
A gravity-driven flow of a dense fluid down a slope through a fluid of lower density

Monocline: An area of increased dip in otherwise gently dipping strata.

Scree: A mass of small loose stones that form or cover a slope on a mountain.

Pahoehoe: A Hawaiian term for a lava flow that has a surface flow structure that looks like coiled rope or cord.

Tourmalines: a crystalline boron silicate mineral compounded with elements such as aluminium, iron, magnesium, sodium, lithium, or potassium

Troglobites:Small creatures that have adapted to a permanent life in a cave.

Caldera: A large, bowl-shaped crater associated with a volcanic vent

Cation: An atom with a positive charge that has been produced by the loss of one or more electrons.

Chert: The precipitation of chemical sediments from mineral rich waters. 

Deposition:

A word used in reference to sediments or sedimentary rocks that are composed of particles that were transported and deposited by wind, water or ice.

Hoot: Slang sense of "smallest amount or particle"]

DAY TEN She challenges us to write a “book spine” poem. This involves taking a look at your bookshelves, and writing down titles in order (or rearranging the titles) to create a poem. Some fun images of book spine poems can be found here. If you want to take things a step further, Lillian suggests gathering a list of titles from your shelves (every third or fifth book, perhaps, if you have a lot) and using the titles, as close to the originals as possible, to create a poem that is seeded throughout with your own lines, interjections, and thoughts. Happy writing!

Far Side

The Far Side of the World

We travel when the wind is fair

One Palestine Complete

Turn the pages back on time's mistakes

After King Philip's War, Mayflower,

The Invasion of Europe by the Europeans

Time's Last Chance and Other Riddles

Laws of Number, Excluded Middles,

The World Without Us,

Shame of the Cities,

Clever Men and Clever Ditties

Eye of the Storm by Namesake Knox

Wings Over Cape Cod and Ancient Rocks

The Journal of Albion Moonlight

and All Such Stuff from Other Days

Lord of Chaos rules The Ways

Festive Time and Haunted Hours

A Field Guide to Wild Trees and Flowers

New England Mysteries All Must Fear

The Tempest, The Inferno, and King Lear

Tragedy in Dedham, Marcel Proust Along

Swann's Way, Falkner's Hamlet, Old Will's Play

Florida and Samarkand, Places we will find to stand

and dip our toes in soothing sand

But don't forget Blue Fruit for Sal, or Toad for Owl,

Something to Beguile the Hour,

The Day We Ran Away, Adventure Calls,

Defiance Hurled, Taking Daddy's Little Girl

to The Far Side of the World  

 

School of Hard Rocks

The Alluvian Fan is rooting for mud

While the Spirit of New Mexico prays for dry weather to save his handsome Butte

A Density Current pores through the country with an angry thump:

many votes for Donald Trump.

An increased dip in a dipping trend says Monocline is now your friend,

while tumbling on Scree in a bald Reverse Fault, a stumbling Roughneck calls a halt.

Put down your cup of early joe and help me wind yon Pahoehoe

It coils around the Tourmalines that color grew in deeper mines

And persevered through many fights

with blind, albino Troglobites

The Caldera yawns at Yellowstone 

While for its loss a Cation moans

In deeper days in heavy dirt

A crystal nodule strives for Chert

Attorneys for the Deeps in opposition

Await a geological Deposition

To rule at last, without dispute

That Fossil Fuels aren't worth a Hoot 

 

The Garden of Verse: And Lots of Verse on Gardens in May's Verse-Virtual

The theme for the May edition of Verse-Virtual was gardening (or gardens, or flowers), though the online poetry journal is always open to poems on any subject.
"I wasn't too sure about the appeal of the FLOWERS theme for May (because it's so simple and perhaps overused)," editor Firestone Feinberg writes. "[But] the flower poems in this issue are amazing. What a display of pure creativity and profound inspiration."  
                After a first sampling of May's garden of verses here are some of the poems that stay with me. I'll plant them in my memory and hope they root.

Dick Allen delivers an entire flower garden in his three poems. "Homefront" offers us the chilling picture of sunflower heads cut off by a storm and discovered by children hanging on wire cages. 

"They frightened us  ... as if they were children who become
adults too soon, the darkness at their roots/
sensed by other children..."

What an insight! Something eerie but true here. Children's powers of perception differ from their elders', especially when it comes to sensing the macabre. When we grow up we 'know better.' We know the grotesque sensation is not 'real,' and we're unlikely to share it. I think I must have slept through childhood; other people have such interesting things to say about it.

Lively descriptions in an amusing poem about the poet's settled dislike mark "African Violets." Personally I like them fine, but I'm impressed by the language of the indictment here: "over-propagating,  squirming in their pots,
their Disney mouse-ear petals fluttering..."

Allen also gets the essence of "Black-eyed Susans," an ubiquitous and ambitious native plant that, just as the poet says, arrives uninvited "traipsing
over meadows and fields,
trailing the borders of our neighbors’ gardens,
cartwheeled
into the green apron of every summer,
their dark domed eyes
all wide open,
unapprised
(as they waver under our mailbox,
scatter their different heights across our yard)..."

A beautifully vivid and apt evocation of something I see every summer.

I was delighted to encounter a poet familiar with "plumeria," a flower word I've been meaning to run down for a couple of years. Donna Hilbert depicts it (in words and an excellent photo) "by the front door" blooming "velvet yellow among/ green leaves."

I'm also much affected by her poem ("Flowers") implicitly comparing plants to women as embodiments "of a certain age." Certain flowers, the poet writes, "have a languorous grace
leaning over the lip of the vase
as if standing straight were too much
trouble.  (Think hookers in a humid city.)"

William Greenway's poem "Heart" gets to the heart of the matter with memorable language. After a visit to the doctor, he pictures (recollects? imagines?) his father's desperate response to an attack, and then turns to his own sense of vulnerability:

"You see yourself as glass
for the first time, transparent,
shaken and fizzing, and start
watching for potholes.
Or maybe you just learn to live
with a cart with square wheels
thudding in your breast
trying to carry whatever it is
there,
before it's too late."

Some very apt and moving images here.

Laura Kaminski offers a bouquet of three poems written in response to three poems published previously in Verse-Virtual. Since one of them is a poem I wrote, I'm a biased reader. But I can't help sharing my pleasure when (in "Rough Beast") the poet compares our attempts to guard our emotions to "Cerberus-class security." Cerberus (that mythically attentive watchdog), the poem continues, was "charged with

keeping those already in the chasms
of the underworld from leaving the Hades,
shades of our own making, dark caverns
of stagnation."

This potent way of describing Hades reminds me of Milton's Satan discovering "myself am hell."

Another Greek myth makes an appearance in Jim Keller's poem. After you read the title "Zeus as Oncologist" (which is pretty funny already) the kick you get from the first two lines

"So how do you feel today Prometheus?
Is the pain any better?"

makes me believe that laughter is indeed the best medicine. It turns out that Prometheus has to deal with what our ghoulishly cheerful oncologist calls "your type of cancer," Aetos Kaukasios. After a search, I learned these words mean the giant eagle that is eating Prometheus's liver. What a guy, that Zeus.

Back to flowers, wildflowers in particular. Joan Mazza's "May Wildflowers in Virginia" shows us that a lot of knowledge can be a good thing. The poem includes a fine photo of lady slippers with (as the poem says, quite accurately) "their pink scrota.” Names have their magic. Here are a few:

"We peer into common elder, scarlet clover,
dead nettle, white and pink dogwood,
count twenty-six species,
lose track of time,

surrounded by wild purple azaleas."

Robert Wexelblatt shares two poems about a Mrs. Oleander, the name of a flowering shrub I will never grow outdoors in New England. The poems are about cultivating relationships, or perhaps a "cultivated" attitude toward them. In the first Mrs. Oleander enjoys Martinu's music (a learned taste for a modern composer) and relies on "something fragrant on the stove" to maintain the appearance of love with a compliant, perhaps not very observant husband. In the second ("Adieu"), a lover ultimately rejects a relationship with Mrs.O. based on appearance and canniness, but not really love, concluding, "you are what you love not what you pay."

Victoria Melekian has written a poem I can relate to ("The Sentinel Node") about watching the dye that identifies which node has to be examined to see if a cancer has spread. I can't help wondering (since this is the 'garden' issue), will it blossom, flower, branch? (Has anybody written a poem called "The Garden of the Self"?)  I won't ruin the ending but I will quote one beautiful image:

"The white dot on the screen looks like
the first star in a blue-black dusk."

Robbi Nestor introduces us to flower royalty in her precise portrayal of "The Queen of the Desert," who rules her kingdom for one perfectly blooming night. This is clearly, the poet writes:

"an effort to employ olfactory wiles
in service of the seed, attracting
avid Sphynx moths and bats,
metallic scarabs like bouncers
in their glittering regalia.
A scent strong as a snare,
tangible as the bug-eyed peepers’
insistent shrilling in the sodden leaves."

After reading lines like these -- and so many others blooming on the pages of May's Verse-Virtual -- can we doubt that the world of the garden is really a place to grow metaphors, harvest images, and feed the senses to grow the imagination?

Here's the link to the May issue of Verse-Virtual. 
http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html
In April the journal received more than 20,000 page views.

The Garden of History: Celebrating the Roots of the Eight-hour Day

         Today is Primo Maggio (the first day of May), celebrated as Labor Day in much of the world, though not in the United States, to remember the achievements of the trade union 
movement in bettering the lives of working people. According to the Italian version of Wikipedia (through a dodgy translation), "the holiday marks the workers' struggles, especially those aimed at the conquest of a precise right: the daily working hours shall be eight hours."


          Most of us have worked a 40-hour week, or something close to it, at one time or another. If we work in offices or professions with 'regular' hours -- banks, insurance, law offices, finances, dentists, retail, the "9 to 5" world of secretarial or clerical or sales jobs -- the 40-hour standard plays a role in the calculation of our working week. With built-in allowances for lunch, some employers describe their work week as 35 or 37.5 hours. 
           Those of us born during the Cold War era will probably associate May 1st as the day when TV news showed us pictures of large, darkly threatening parades in the Soviet Union marked by a display of military might, lots of tanks and trucks pulling artillery pieces and jets flying overhead. And perhaps similar displays for press-ganged crowds lining the streets in East Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and the other capitals in the Soviet bloc.
           Like most everything that happened during the Cold War, the state-sponsored military parade was a perversion of a significant idea. Around most of the world May Day commemorates the struggle of workers -- a class of employees distinct from owners, bosses, management, or stockholders -- to achieve an eight-hour day. A struggle that began in the USA.
           "Few Americans seem to realize that May Day came about to memorialize an American event -- the execution of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887," anarchist historian Robert D'Attilio wrote in a book review 20 years ago.            The eight-hour day was what workers in Chicago's Haymarket Square were rallying for in 1886 when a bomb went off and riot broke out, killing and wounding both workers and police.
            The history of May Day (or "primo maggio") begins there.              It's important to keep in mind that in the decades following the Civil War, when industrial expansion took off in America, the standard working week was the 60-hour, 6-day week. Given that activities on Sunday were restricted by rules requiring businesses to be closed on the Sabbath, the lives of industrial works were largely restricted to labor, sleep, and the tavern. Seeking a nationwide 8-hour day, thousands of workers throughout the United States went on strike on May 1, 1886, and big rallies were held to back the demand for the "Eight-hour day with no cut in pay." Nationwide up to half a million workers went on strike, and about 10,000 turned out in Chicago for a demonstration. 
          A confrontation between workers and strike-breakers at the gates of the McCormick factory in Chicago turned deadly when police fired on and killed two workers. Labor leaders called for a rally in response the following day in Haymarket Square. When police decided to break up a peaceful meeting, someone threw a bomb in their direction, killing one officer and wounding 6 others.  Then police began firing in panicky confusion into the fleeing crowd, killing four demonstrators and wounding scores of others. 
In a dark and crowded setting police officers also mistakenly fired at one another. Accounts of final casualty figures differ; but a rough consensus is that seven policemen and at least four workers were killed; some 60 policemen were wounded and estimates of wounded civilians run even higher.
          The official response concentrated solely on the bomb-throwing, for which anarchists were blamed without evidence. The rally's speakers were also arrested and charged with causing a riot. In the end 8 strike leaders, 5 of them German immigrants,were put on trial for murder, without evidence that any of them had thrown the bomb. Seven were sentenced to death, one to prison.
           Internationally, the event played out much as the Sacco-Vanzetti case would 40 years later. Demonstrations were held to mark the May 1st execution of the "Haymarket martyrs," and may countries recognized May First as an official labor holiday.  
          In the United States, our government chose create the Labor Day holiday in September because American politicians wished to distance it from a cause celebrated by labor and other left-wing groups. 
           But we should remember that when workers in other countries (and, occasionally, here) celebrate May First, they are commemorating a struggle for the 8-hour day that began in America and the American labor leaders who paid for that cause with their lives.