GONNA GET HOME TODAY

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Dear god, I just got today's poems done and already the prompts are up for mañana! NaPoWriMo for tomorrow: Which, henceforth, shall be referred to as "today".

"Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates a call and response. Calls-and-responses are used in many sermons and hymns (and also in sea chanties!), in which the preacher or singer asks a question or makes an exclamation, and the audience responds with a specific, pre-determined response. (Think: Can I get an amen?, to which the response is AMEN!.). You might think of the response as a sort of refrain or chorus that comes up repeatedly, while the call can vary slightly each time it is used. Here’s a sea chanty example:

Haul on the bowline, our bully ship’s a rolling,
Haul on the bowline, the bowline Haul!

Haul on the bowline, Kitty is my darlin’,
Haul on the bowline, the bowline Haul!

Haul on the bowline, Kitty lives in Liverpool,
Haul on the bowline, the bowline Haul! 

The call can be longer than the response, or vice versa. But think of your poem as an interactive exchange between one main speaker and an audience."

I expect it will take me until mañana to figure out what I'm doing with this one!

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And, mañana it is! In fact, it's after 11PM. Today we drove home to the Kootenays from Vancouver. It's just shy of an eight hour drive. I then had to get Income Tax stuff ready to take to the person who does it mañana. And now I'm ready to write my poem for the day! It shall be written right here on screen. There shall be little or no editing. It shall likely not be very good. But here goes. (And I'm done, and I can't figure out why it's spacing funny and I don't care, I'm tired and I'm going to bed!)

Gonna Get Home Today

Start out early, pack up the car,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Golden Ears Bridge looks pretty in the sun,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today

Big ol' Fraser River is a muddy one, for sure,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Grab a cup of coffee at Hope's Blue Moose,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Sleep all the way through the winding Hope-Princeton,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Hardly any traffic, hip hip hooray,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Everything, everywhere, green, green green!

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Cows near Midway got lots of babies,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Coast into Castlegar right around six,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

Yard looks fine, got flowers everywhere,

Driving through the mountains, gonna get home today.

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LIFE SHUFFLES BY

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Day #25 for Na/GloPoWriPo as National Poetry Month draws to a close. Today's prompt suggests we take a line from someone else's poem and riff a poem off that. I'm going to dive into some old blog posts of mine and find a poem and pull a line and ... we have a winner! I'm starting with a line from the long poem that makes up Susan Andrews Grace's book, Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being. 

Life Shuffles By

A snail shell stripped to beauty, 

a rosebud on the cusp of opening, 

a tongue about to speak— 

the ruts and seams of 

life

shuffles by, old and obscure 

prop up the brash and new,

or vice versa, heads shaken,

someone frowns, echoes warn

/inform what lies 

ahead/

                   /are told

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LIKE TWO CATS, WATCHING

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Rattling off today's offering. Write a poem for Earth Day, says the NaPo/GloPoWriMo prompt. It's not quite right. I'll probably tweak it at some point, but meanwhile, time's a-marching here in La Manzanilla. We have a plane to catch. Adios from Mexico!

Like Two Cats, Watching

Today we are packing and leaving this place.
Two cats who adopted us, thinking themselves
     safe here,
     fed here,
     perhaps more than tolerated
watch as drawers empty, bags fill. 

We chide ourselves for not being reasonable
about how we feel,
leaving them to fend, almost for themselves,
and we ponder the way we treat our planet
in the scale of things,
     think ourselves safe here,
     fed here,
     some of us more tolerated than others, 
while all around us, really,
we are none of those things
so we go on, waiting for midnight to strike,
for time's up, time out,
and the planet sighs, shrugs,
observes our vain attempts to fix things, 
prepares to go on without us.

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MY FEET ARE KILLING ME

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Phew! I've been attempting to unravel the prompt over at Found Poetry Review, but it's a really laborious one. I figured I'd come over to NaPoWriMo and see what the prompt was for today, and it's a little less time-consuming:

"Today’s prompt comes to us from Vince Gotera, who suggests a prompt very much in keeping with our poet in translation, a “kenning” poem. Kennings were riddle-like metaphors used in the Norse sagas. Basically, they are ways of calling something not by its actual name, but by a sort of clever, off-kilter description — for example, the sea would be called the “whale road.” Today, I challenge you to think of a single thing or person (a house, your grandmother, etc), and then write a poem that consists of kenning-like descriptions of that thing or person. For example, you might call a cat a mouse-stalker, quiet-walker, bird-warner, purr-former, etc."


My Feet Are Killing Me


There you lie, gap-toothed land lumberer,
submerged in swamp-stench,
waiting for a dead dog
(or even a live one; you wouldn't mind)
or fish entrails from the Co-op
to be thrown your way.
Scale-swathed dinosaur of the day,
you toss that head of yours from side to side,
willing me, wanting me to—what?
Take your picture? Provide you with a leg? 
Not going to do it, not today. 
Instead, I stare into your hook-eye
and am transported back eons
to when you first evolved,
efficient killer, cannibalistic assassin,
who would name a shoe for you?

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HOW TO PACK

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"Many years ago, “didactic” poetry was very common – in other words, poetry that explicitly sought to instruct the reader in some kind of skill or knowledge, whether moral, philosophical, or practical. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write the latter kind of “how to” poem – a didactic poem that focuses on a practical skill. "

Working on today's Na/GloPoWriMo nudge allows me to take a break from packing. 

Oh. Wait.

How to Pack

Read every piece of paper on your desk. 

Agonize over what to do with it.

Throw most of it out.

Wring your hands.

Collect all the books you brought,

meant to read and didn't. 

Take them to the bookstore. 

Buy them back next year. 

Wring your hands.

Make copious lists:

     stuff you brought and didn't use;

     stuff you left last year and didn't use but might;

     stuff you're leaving behind this time;

     stuff you ought to bring next year.

Wring your hands.

Debate whether you should bring back 

tequila; 

pesos; 

all the amate paper 

you bought this year

even though you still have 

tons of it at home.

     

Wring your hands.

Decide firmly against bringing back:

parasites;

kennel cough;

     those sweet cats you've been feeding

     that survived this long without you.

Wring your hands.

And, finally: 

ignore nips; 

nip back when necessary;

embrace the collar;

learn to love to run. 

Amate paper in all its glory

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PUT ON A SWEATER, YOUR MOTHER'S COLD

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NaPoWriMo Day 18: 

"Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates “the sound of home.” Think back to your childhood, and the figures of speech and particular ways of talking that the people around you used, and which you may not hear anymore...Coax your ear and your voice backwards, and write a poem that speaks the language of home, and not the language of adulthood, office, or work."

This one's both tough and not. Tough, because I'm posting (hell, I'm writing!) these online and now we're talking family, and tough because I'm distracted by packing and sorting out the bits of paper that I've managed to accumulate since we got here in early January and for some reason I'm blanking on the "ways of talking" thing. So I shall put my thinking cap on and go putter for a bit and see what happens.

Thinking cap...there's one. Hmmmm. And, uh oh. I appear to be channelling my mother for this one. And, I'm spending pretty much an entire year's allotment of exclamation marks. Six! (oops—seven)

Put On a Sweater, Your Mother's Cold

Don't come home after school;  
there was a bear in the yard!

Get off the phone, right now; 
somebody else might want to use the line. 

You can go, but be careful on the highway.
Don't swim for an hour after you've eaten. 

What happened to that piece of cake? 
You're wearing those curlers to bed?

Do you need to go to the bathroom?
Were you smoking? I can smell it on you!

You're not leaving the table till you finish that.
Think of the children starving in Africa! 

I don't care if it was President Kennedy's funeral,
you skipped school and you're grounded! 

That dress is too short! 
Is that lipstick you're wearing? 

Did you hear me?
Because I said so!

She's almost 96 and yes, she still asks if we need to go to the bathroom!

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Na/GloPoWriMo #17— EXULANSIS

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NaPoWriMo would like us, on this 17th day of April, "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."

No dictionary on the shelves around here (except my Spanish/English one), so off I went to Wifi-World to see what I could find there. I thought about woodworking terms, but as I'm married to a woodturner I've already mined a few of those. I thought about words relating to music, but again was not inspired. Nothing grabbed me until I discovered a blog called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, an absolutely delightful collection of neologisms written by one John Koenig who realized there are many emotions and situations that have no specific words in the English language and decided to do something about it. A  truncated list of his definitions of the words I used in my poem are below. Next time you have a few minutes you don't know what to do with, check this guy's blog out. Great fun!

Exulansis

There we were, standing at the edge of our lives looking in again,

a keyframe if ever there was one, klexos swirling around us

in imperceptible loops and I’d have brought it up with the MC
had I not been loath to invite anecdoche into the room.

Your semaphorism effectively pointed out my occhiolism

but we’ve been friends too long to let that to get in our way.

Instead, we note with altschmerz 

the silience of newly hatched photographers

who have yet to succumb to vemödalen 

although both of us know they will

for zenosyne has a way of avoiding the young and catching the old.

We could present a keta to the rest of the group,

but my pâro suggests this would likely lead us to a fitzcarraldo,

a trumspringa that can only end with one or other of us

lodged deep in daguerreologue.

exulansis:  the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable     

                  to relate to it, which allows it to drift away until the memory feels out of place

keyframe:  a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange 

                  new era of your life

klexos:  the art of dwelling on the past

anecdoche:  a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening

semaphorism:  a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject 

                        but don’t go any further

occhiolism:  the awareness of the smallness of your perspective

altschmerz:  weariness with the same old issues you’ve always had

silence:  the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably

vemödalen:  the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos 

                     already exist

zenosyne:  the sense that time keeps going faster

kept:  an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past

pro:  the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong

fitzcarraldo:  an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain… which then grows into a wild and
impractical vision

trumspringa:  the temptation to step off your career track and become a shepherd in the mountains

daguerreologue:  an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself

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QUIET GOOD DEEDS THAT KEEP THE WORLD TURNING

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NaPoWriMo's challenge today is "...to fill out, in no more than five minutes, the following “Almanac Questionnaire,” which solicits concrete details about a specific place (real or imagined). Then write a poem incorporating or based on one or more of your answers."

Almanac Questionnaire

Weather:

Flora:

Architecture:

Customs:

Mammals/reptiles/fish:

Childhood dream:

Found on the Street:

Export:

Graffiti:

Lover:

Conspiracy:

Dress:

Hometown memory:

Notable person:

Outside your window, you find:

Today’s news headline:

Scrap from a letter:

Animal from a myth:

Story read to children at night:

You walk three minutes down an alley and you find:

You walk to the border and hear:

What you fear:

Picture on your city’s postcard:

During the free-writing part of today's ultimate meeting of La Manzanilla writers for this season I went ahead and made notes about all those things. And now, for a poem. I was going to do what the prompt says, focus on one or two elements from the list and go from there, but I kind of like the randomness of this.

Quiet Good Deeds That Keep the World Turning

Always perfect for the day it is. 

Flora sounds like a Bobbsey Twin cousin,

Gaudi Gaudi Gaudi Gaudi Frank Lloyd Wright.

Immigration and borders and prejudice and welcome,

jaguarundi spotted in the hills 

where I walk sometimes, alone,

yellow striped serpent somewhere in the garden behind me,

fish coming back to the bay, the birds, a plate nearby,

and still, I write.

Lamb in the attic. Summon a wolf 

when I closed my eyes and jumped up and down.

Street full of ghosts.

A. Export A. Nobody smokes like they used to, except here. 

Banksy would be fun at a housewarming.

Hello, lover, where'd you spend the night,

I'd like to spend more time here than ever.

Dress for success. The alternate wedding dress

that at least looked good on Alan, my bridesmaid man.

Code. Dress code. Pant suits all right, 

as long as they were coordinated,

so sayeth the Lord of the Airline in 1968. 

Running into a friend, going for coffee at the bus depot.

Notable? Let's start with the quiet 

good deeds that keep the world turning.

Outside my window drifts another world— 

light, darkness, beauty, horror.

In today's news, earthquakes in Japan, but don't worry,

the nuclear reactors are safe.

Cuneiform. Diacritical marks. 

All sorts of scraps for a letter sent, unsent, kept, tossed.

Oh Sasquatch, do you still wander the hills 

near the home of my heart? 

Are you real?

This fish, I said to Mr. C. 

I want him. I like him. And he likes me.

I will call him Otto. Goodnight, Moon.

A minute down an alley to find a way 

into the city's underbelly. 

Stop. Go back. You're not welcome here.

I fear unexpected death. 

My own, and anyone else's.

Big orange bridge.

Big Orange Bridge, affectionately known as BOB, July 1, 2015, Nelson, BC

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