April 30th. Last day of the month, which means this daily poetry thing has once more come to an end. I didn't manage to post anything the last two days. Getting home home at almost the end of April meant a scurry to get Income Tax stuff together, and I'm happy to say that happened and as of yesterday it's all done, signed, and filed! Yesterday I took my mom to see my son/her grandson play music at one of the seniors' places in Nelson. Once again, the job jar is full to the brim.
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| Jesse Lee, showing his grandmother, Daisy, how his Chadwick folding bass comes apart. |
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| He's a lot faster at packing it up than he was when he first got it! |
I did get into trying yesterday's Found Poetry Review prompt that had us setting words to music, as it were. I produced the word bank, but had trouble figuring out how to properly put them on the staff. It was to be called Dirty Diaper Days. Aren't you sorry I didn't finish it? Love the idea, though.
Today's FPR prompt is from Douglas Luman. It has to do with culling words that are associated with a familiar (to the writer) phone number. I used the first 7-digit one we got after the party line went extinct, over 50 years ago, I guess. Hadn't thought of it in years. Funny how the brain stores things. (It just occurred to me I could have accessed three more letters had I used the area code that was part of the number at that time, when British Columbia only had one, 604. Now we're in 250 land, and that's the one I used.)
So, to get today's poem I first figured out which letters I could use and started jotting down words that can be made from them. Then I reread the prompt, realized there was more to it and went to Project Gutenberg, found an introduction to a book about Leonardo DaVinci, pasted said text into a nifty little website for playing with words in an Oulipian (Oulipoean?) way called Applied Poetics, and applied the phone number to that, which gave me more words I hadn't thought of. Out of all that came the following. I think just three of the words I used (jape; wrens; jacks) weren't in the Applied Poetics list, but I've never been particularly good at following instructions to the letter so here's my poem.
Jacks
of all…
Dear reader, we are sore losers.
We ask for power, express words backwards,
crowd seasons, mend messes.
Sons of masks and wrens,
we open flasks for sorel and roses,
a red jewel, a brown roof; fancy!
No orders so reckless,
no references, no books—
we cry fowl for modern laws.
A sense of work affords or closes
necessary cases of well planned spaces.
Name’s a jape; been sold for nada, zero.
Now, a big round of applause to everyone who read, who wrote, and who laid down these incredibly thought-provoking prompts over the past month. I've participated in NPM many times, but this is the first time I've attempted doing found poems and I have to admit, I'm kind of hooked! So thanks, all. Here's to poetry, wherever we may find it!
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