Once I saw graffiti as vibrant/playful/authentic/raw/revolutionary/proletarian;

Trendy art theory’s rebellious flag.

An aspiring urban retro-funk barbarian,

(back before Hip-hop turned thug and embraced criminality)

I had my tag!

But I came to see, in time,

Ego-driven urban artistic undertakings as, simply… crime.

Defacing public and/or private property,

Whether wall, bridge, truck or train,

with cheesy ghetto graphic style coopted from aerosol-addled youth

(The spraypaint’s often shoplifted, sad truth— )

Is an ugly visual refrain.

Mark these words; tag this allegory:

Dogs also spray to mark out their territory…

Demonic smurfs, cartoon calligraphy, at best plebeian esthetic pleasures,

Cry out for Singaporean measures

Where the caning

beats explaining.

“Word up“

PROMPT #9

try writing a poem of your own that uses rhyme,
but without adhering to specific line lengths.

It sounded good at first but went too far, their mad confusion.
Now deviants wave flags and shriek. We hear only delusion.

Social justice meets mental illness; a blind date in the street;
Mix and recombine to make a flamingly bad confusion.

These violent clowns could burn it all down and STILL they’d be enraged
As smoke clears on the rubble of their sad confusion.

The worst of all assume they had a monopoly on Progress
But the malevolent misfits only ever had confusion…

Perversity hailed as diversity, victimhood applauded;
Nations subverted and brought to a sad conclusion.

To Weimar, San Francisco, Babylon and Tel Aviv
We could certainly, at this point, make unveiled allusion…

PROMPT #8: try writing your own ghazal

Five to fifteen couplets that are independent from each other but are nonetheless linked abstractly in their theme; and more concretely by their form. And what is that form? In English ghazals, the usual constraints are that:

• the lines all have to be of around the same length (though formal meter/syllable-counts are not employed); and

• both lines of the first couplet end on the same word or words, which then form a refrain that is echoed at the end of each succeeding couplet.

Art history matters. New Master’s degrees
Lead to dull innovation in poetry. Please
Try to write us a poem where meaning is plain
And no MFA patriarch needs to explain.

a statue carved by Bernini/a plate of eggs painted by Velázquez   

Jane, dear Jane, you’re a porcelain idol.
The time has arrived for your verse to unbridle
Itself and reveal some slight traces of life;
We know you are smart, but that dull butter-knife
Of your poetry, smearing the references ’round
Is like Sylvia Plath/Gertrude Stein/Ezra Pound…

personal pan pizza with unlimited free toppings

Those weird sudden line breaks confuse us, in fact,
And the rarefied dishes you name-drop get cracked
On the floor of your poetry, leaving us shards,
Risking splinters for muses and mystified bards.

my arm breaks off  like the shell/of a freshly-filled cannoli

You deadpan in monotone, stunningly brave,
But your tortuous verses go straight to the grave.
Academic obscurantists murmur and nod
As they lower the corpse of your work in the sod…

carelessly thrown baby/a designer toilet cistern

You ought to re-frame and then tighten your lines,
So replete with Old Masters and euro-trash wines:

Why would you not, then, aspire to coherence,
Dismissing the need for white male interference?
Your verses cry out for some fatherly guidance
To try and make sense of your history of silence.

Jane Yeh’s Why I Am Not a Sculpture  has a […] sense of playfulness, as she both compares herself to a sculpture and uses a series of rather silly and elaborate similes, along with references to dubious historical “facts.” Today, we challenge you to write a similar kind of self-portrait poem, in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet)