One More Art Form
That classic villanelle is hard to master;
alternate lines can drive me up the wall
(but avant-garde absurdity drives faster).
I could just dash off some Haiku disaster,
but that would never hold you in its thrall.
Authentic villanelle is hard to master.
To learn new forms, sometimes all we can muster
is try it out and write; obey our call
and follow, bleating, some poetic pastor
to greener lyric landscapes—or a vaster
universe of verse in which to scrawl.
Authentic villanelle is hard to master.
Breaking the lyric flask of alabaster,
like the Magdalene’s perfume, we give our all,
disciples of true poetry, to our Master.
Keeping pace, the muse now urges: faster
I’m sweating now, and headed for a fall . . .
That classic villanelle is hard to master.
I hope to learn from Bishop—yet run past her.
PROMPT #5: 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.
The Death of Poverty
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Grieve the fallen warriors of diversity.
A trumpet’s mournful sound now casts its pall . . .
Southern rumors: prophets of perversity
Non-profiting from Liberal wherewithal:
Poverty’s pimps. Their bold hypocrisy
Weinsteins loudly, colliding with our news;
Southern Law: poor as our democracy
Purporting to promote progressive views.
His name rang sweet in all progressive ears
But now the cypresses sigh out their song;
For scams must be exposed—though it wring tears
We hear the dirge; night’s shadows looming long.
Weep, oh armchair zealots of the cause
For Morris Dees, a victim of his laws.
PROMPT #4: write your own sad poem,
but one that achieves sadness through simplicity.
Playing with the sonnet form may help you . . .
be straightforward, using plain, small words.
The Geologic Time of Your Life
I.
evolving, thunder-struck
amino eventualities
and bio-potentialities
in the muck
re-group, protoplasmic and joyful
singing in the proverbial soup
of circumstances
and random cosmic chances
a song of differentiation
loose ends / ragged strands / loose lines
of poetry: DNA spiral dances
Precambrian time, period of time extending from about 4.6 billion years ago (the point at which Earth began to form) to the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 541 million years ago. Precambrian time encompasses the Archean and Proterozoic eons, which are formal geologic intervals
II.
the wriggling one-celled poet decides
to become complex
takes its time:
geologic / astral eons
twitching and failing
into the fabled tadpole of adaptation
to a godless universe, diverse
in its variegated futility
this idea has been summarized in the mouthful, ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, which means the development of the individual embryo repeats its alleged evolutionary history. The first thing to say about this dictum, is that ‘law’ it is not!
III.
our fish, now fowl,
proclaims its Archaeopteryx manifesto
standing on Precambrian banks
demanding a return on its investment
in sedimentary overlays:
Ernst Haeckel ! shrieks the avian jokester
The Imaginary Monera: the eating habit and reproductive cycle of an alleged Moneron to which he gave the scientific name, Protomyxa aurantiaca 73 pages of his speculations more important than facts and evidence.
IV.
into the long long corridors
of time’s bad poetry
sleeping off the tadpole nightmare
sprouting flippers, legs, digits, wings
deciding to fly, smashing antediluvian cedars with trilobite tail
upright biped sporting body-hair you shall prevail
descending from trees in African dreams
misanthropologically erect
gracile / robust (that’s us)
Hey turn that shit up ! yells Piltdown Man
from his evolutionary window
He believed that the only major difference between man and the ape was that men could speak and apes could not. He therefore postulated a missing link which he called Pithecanthropus alalus (speechless apeman) a woman with long lank hair suckling a child.
V.
falling for the lies
of the Lord of the Flies
Zinjanthropus asks quizzically
How much more of this
are you prepared to take ?
misbegotten centuries glimmer:
light years of bad poetry
captive eons of incoherent free verse
as we wait
for the Bronze Age Myths
to begin
PROMPT #3: a poem that takes time. It takes its time getting where it’s going, and the action of the poem itself takes place over months.
[…] a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable length of time.
Honestly, this is the type of modernist poetry I dislike.
I wrote it in about 25 minutes, edited and formatted it
with found text & images for about 40 minutes and VOILÀ:
cutting-edge modern dullness. It was still fun though.
TEXT/IMAGE CREDITS: creation.com
wikipedia
britannica.com
