Day 15: The Cross-Out

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from travel.usatoday.com, “Is a Freighter Cruise for You?”

As I didn’t do a great job of writing my ghazal (mine is not syllabic, for instance), I thought I’d direct you to Chris Jarmick’s prompt for today’s poem. I’ve always wanted to try a cross-out. I’m not satisfied with the result, but I am inspired to try more of them. And maybe it’s the sort of thing one has to practice? Anyway, here’s the prompt. My poem appears at the end of this post. 

Tuesday April 15th Prompt

Prompt 15 – Create a Cross-Out aka Erasure FOUND Poem

The cross out or rub out/erasure poem is a type of FOUND poem using existing material. You will be crossing out words you don’t want in your poem from another source. Here’s what I’d like you to try to do.

Take a newspaper, magazine article or piece of text (I’d suggest of several thousand words in length) or an internet version of such. Do not change the order of any of the words when you create your poem. In other words you could look at the previous sentence (Do not change….) and create; DO CHANGE THE WORDS but you should not make this sentence: CREATE THE ORDER OF WORDS (because you’ve changed the order of the words as they originally appear).

In each line your new poem should include two words or three words that have been kept together exactly as they appeared in the original article but do not use more than THREE WORDS in a row as they originally appeared. In my example ‘the words’ appeared in the original text and in the new line of the poem. You may not change the words in any way to ‘make them fit’. Don’t make something plural or past tense. You use what is there and create something different with it. You do not have to keep the same idea or theme as the original (but you can keep it the same if you really want to). The text is simply a bunch of words that you are re-using to create your poem.

Your poem should be at least 6 lines long. And it should be somewhat poetic. (you can add some additional rules if you would like: Have a consistent pattern regarding the number of syllables in your lines – every line is 10 or 12 syllables. Or line 1 is 10 syllables, lines two is 12, line 3 is 10, line 4 is 12 etc. You can rhyme the first and second or first and third lines and the last lines in similar fashion.

Remember you are creating something poetic with your cross-out/erasure found poem.)

I picked up the Feb. 3, 2014 edition of The New Yorker, and used Patricia Marx’s “A Tale of a Tub” (pages 26-28; it’s about a freighter cruise, hence, the picture). Have I created something poetic? I don’t know. Logical? Definitely not. (Playful, yes.)

One Sort of Voyage

Hankering lovely, hurly-burly world
no handful over submarines, everything in short —

prison, electric subsisted, a hundred limes, a shark-

neglected plum varnished into the shape
of a peacock. Precipitately

streaming, jutting, failing what seemed like
guitars (perched, panoramic,

camouflaged, accompanied, flushed),
you did not ever have to stay —

allegedly sweet, last-minute
(Bonne chance!) flesh in a cow’s mouth —

dusk, a box of ginger snaps,
my reverse trip, approximately my disaster.

*

Finally, here’s a link to Chocolate Is a Verb, a blog featuring a variant of this sort of exercise — almost every day!

Day 13: Emily Dickinson

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The Formidable Emily

Today’s poem — or attempt at a poem — is an homage to Emily Dickinson.  Emily as mother…of my fourteen year old?

Here’s her original:

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true —
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe —

The Eyes glaze once — and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

And mine:

She likes a look of Agony,
It’s the truest look she knows —
The boys that text
My girl, no likelihood to throw —

Her eyes roll up — I guess that’s No —
Cooperation not her fight
And the purple highlights in her hair
So gorgeous in a snit.

*

Smiley face here.  (Remember, it doesn’t have to be good.)

An Inappropriate Poem

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Sharon Olds

“If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.” -Gail Sher

My assignment today is to write an inappropriate poem. Keep it PG, Chris said, and, Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.

Here’s my attempt.

Told to write an inappropriate poem, I begin thinking about sex,
and then I think, no, 
and so I have to wonder what else might be
inappropriate enough to satisfy my instructor, who,
after all, is invisible, some guy on the Internet
throwing out suggestions all month long. And I think of comparisons
to how he throws out these suggestions,
maybe to 14-year-old boys
and masturbation, and then I blush,
and I try to keep on the track of what else might be inappropriate.
Anger, maybe, of which I have an especially large store,
or maybe those awful your-mother jokes
that my teenagers and their friends like to tell.

And then self-pity shows up and I remember how sorry
I was feeling for myself
just this morning, how, just as my self-pity crested, a wave of self-pity
because I have a broken ankle, because I have to use
these damn crutches, I opened the newspaper and found a story
about a young mother caught in a landslide,
her ankles broken, her arm broken,
trapped, and even so clutching her baby to her chest
and screaming herself hoarse, for hours,
until they were rescued.
I would like to say that my response was a simple awe
at her, and prayers for her, or even a quick check on my own children,
but instead —  I wallowed in even more self-pity, sorry for myself
for being such a pathetic excuse for a human being,

and right now I am wishing I had just buckled down to it,
and written a really rip-roaring, inappropriate poem about sex.

*

Pretty pathetic beside Sharon Olds and her “Ode to a Douchebag.” (Click on the link to hear her read a truly inappropriate, and hilarious poem.)

The Ekphrastic Poem

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not my batik, by the way, but an image from shutterstock.com

POETRYisEVERTHING‘s prompt for day 9 is to write an Ekphrastic poem, a poem based on a painting or another art form. As Chris explains, the ekphrastic poem can be a response to a painting, or it can give a painting a voice. To read more, you might check out a handout that I found at readwritethink.org.

I make no claims for this. Long day. Long nap in the afternoon.

Keeping the Lights on Late

The batik of the blue city with its orange lights,
its dark moon in a cracked white sky

has hung on the wall of every house I’ve lived in
for 30 years. My older daughters, when toddlers, tore it

from its frame one afternoon while I made their lunch.
Now it’s high up, unassailable,

in the two-story entry. On top of its highest tower,
a lightning rod draws the eye. There are no people ambling

the grid of the streets. But the windows are lit–
writers awake all night, scribbling.