Where might we find elements of poetry in politics? For starters, no political speech seems complete without at least one metaphor, however well (or not so well) conceived.

Like some strange survival of the wittiest, some metaphors are so apt — or at least brain-snaggingly adaptive — that they seed entire families of related metaphors. 20th century US politics proffers, for example, a New Deal, a Square Deal, and a Fair Deal, followed by a War On Poverty, twin Wars on Cancer and Drugs respectively, and a War On Terror. When people call national efforts to recriminalize abortion in the USA part of a War On Women, they're drawing on decades of war-as-shorthand-for-national-mobilization metaphors, and also drawing attention to the violence 'War' never entirely escapes, metaphorical or otherwise.

What families of political metaphors or phrasings have you noticed? Do you have any thoughts about the ones mentioned so far, or metaphors you wish would catch on instead?

I'm a mockingbird poet. That is to say, I have my own style, but I also have a lot of fun imitating the styles of other poets, or combining elements of several styles into something new.

( Why imitate? )

Today's featured project is a game that takes imitation one step further into remix, i.e. imitating some elements and transforming others of one or more pieces to create a new work. 'One Poem, Two Poem, Old Poem, New Poem':

Let's play an informal game today. Comment on this post with a favorite line or stanza [without telling me the source], and I will write you a minute remix poem or poem fragment in return. If you or someone else replies to that with another favorite line from a different source, I'll elaborate on the initial fill to incorporate the new reference, and so on and so forth.

And here's one of my favorite resulting poems:

FAR AND FEY

they say your heart went fey to faeryland
where none can touch
or wound it wakeful

( and down you went to goblintown... )

'Far and Fey' drew inspiration from five different sources — can you guess any of them off the bat? Try to work out what elements were imitated or transformed from each of the source prompts as the poem evolved, and then read the poem in its entirety again. Has your reading of the poem changed? Did any of the source prompts surprise you?

Bonus: I would be remiss if I failed to mention luzula set 'Far and Fey' to music and recorded it. Listen to luzula's fantastic performance here.

"Before we can be poets, we must practice"

—Mary Oliver, 'A Poetry Handbook'

J.J. here, returning to host this week on poetry as craft, one that can be cultivated and refined through practice. A little about myself, for those who don't know me from the previous times I've hosted: I'm a pupal neuroscientist and poet, neither fully accredited* (yet) or just starting out in either field. As such, I'm drawn to experimentation when it comes to poetry, and to metacognition — thinking about how I think — about writing poetry.

So. What makes a person a poet? Or perhaps I should say — what makes a person a memorable poet in a good way? (lnhammer might argue writing very bad poetry is both memorable and skilled, but those depths are not ones most of us aspire to!) Going by most dictionaries, anyone who creates poems is a poet. Would you agree? Myself, I go one step further: I think anyone who makes a practice of creating poems is a poet. To make a practice of poetry is, as I see it, to regularly realize what would otherwise be theoretical ('I'd like to write poetry more' etc.), and also to practice poetry: to exercise one's ear for the rhythm and sound of language, to sharpen the precision of one's diction, to experiment with form and syntax and the turning of lines, and most of all to integrate time & occasion to read, write, discuss, ferment poetry and poetic play into one's everyday life.

This week, I'll share with you some ways I've tried engineering "time & occasion" for poetry into my own life, and offer a sampling of resulting poems. In the meantime, I open the floor to you: do you make a practice of poetry yourself? Why or why not? Are there exercises along the lines of melannen's Some Exercises in the Craft of Writing that you think would be especially appropriate to writing poetry?


( * )

For myself, the pleasure and the difficulty of collaborative poetry are both rooted in the same place: the loss of control. In the following poem, the first that untonuggan wrote with me for our LizJJ Jam, I think that learning curve is most readily apparent. The haikai format lends itself to alternating authorship by stanza; I wrote the initial seed and all the subsequent 5-7-5 stanzas, while Liz took the 7-7 stanzas. Please take a moment to read the poem itself, and then see below for further commentary.


pacific kitchen

peel your clementines
like compass stars, and your trash
will bloom orange suns

silver and gold diadems
abandoned, tarnish and fade

while plastic wrappers
float on distant seas, tawdry
immortality

amidst glass lures, forgotten
in the ocean's lulling waves

the global local
the distant piscine choking
on our convenience

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( Further commentary behind the cut )

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Some starting places for discussion:

If this poem was written by three writers instead of two, and you were the third writer, what alternative third stanza might you write in place of 'while plastic wrappers...', etc.? Where do you think the new poem might go from there?

Does this feel like a cohesive poem, or a collection of disparate images? Are there particular key words or concepts that link two or more stanzas together?

Have you ever participated in writing haikai or other collaborative poetry yourself? How is it different from writing poetry on your own?

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( Leave kudos behind the cut )

I originally planned to write about thresholds and cycles that one might wish to break, but this poem, my first in the new year, took on a bit of a life of its own. Concrit most welcome.


ad libitum

first the baritone of breathing
the baseline beating
the magnum spin of light
day-night, day-night

next the liquid counterpoint
goes up to heaven and down again
as rain, as sleet and snow
and silent swirl of fog

while chain the carbons breathed by leaves
and ooze the currents down below
and hurtle this whole dancing enterprise
through space around the sun

so we are never really still, you and I,
but adjusting always
never so silent that we are not living song

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( Behind the cut, some questions for discussion )

The shortest form of English poetry I know comes from the Japanese: the 5-7-5 syllable lines comprising a ‘haiku’. The modern Japanese haiku in turn comes from an older form of Japanese poetry, the haikai no renga, which I will discuss later this week.

( Some thoughts on the implications of 'haiku' being a linguistic transplant )

The upshot of transplanting the original format from Japanese is that the haiku in English doesn’t map neatly onto the usual rhyme and rhythm schemes of native English or Romance language poetry formats. It is visually distinct and instantly recognizable to a general audience without facilitating sing-song sloppiness or verbose obscurity. By its nature, it challenges the poet to be both succinct and precise, and as a result can pack a significant punch behind its deceptively simple three lines.

genealogy
of helping hands reminds us
action’s contagious

(Source: 'Poem For Your Thoughts?': Special US Voter Registration Edition fill for nagasvoice’s prompt ‘pay it forward’)

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In my opinion, the haiku’s short format makes it ideal for micro-poetry events such as my occasional How Are You? (in Haiku) days. Whether or not you have thoughts to share concerning the main content of this post, I encourage you to write a haiku in the comments responding to the following prompt:

Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku. I will leave anonymous comments screened unless otherwise asked; feel free to use this to leave private comments if that's what you're most comfortable with.

poetree sprouted from a visual seed, itself a snapshot of a pun made art.


Mysterious paper 'poetree' sculpture - photo by chrisdonia

What is a 'poetree'? It sounds like poetry, and looks like an elision of poet's tree. And in the case of the image above, it is a small, extraordinarily detailed paper sculpture of a tree lovingly crafted from strips of printed paper and mounted on a book. The anonymous artist who left it as a surprise gift at the Scottish Poetry Library a year and a half ago also left this message referencing the library's Twitter handle:

It started with your name @ByLeavesWeLive and became a tree… We know that a library is so much more than a building full of books… a book is so much more than pages full of words… This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas…

( Read more... )

Hello all! I’m J.J., the founder of poetree and one of our two current admins. Today I’m going to give a brief overview of POETREE’s history, and then open up the conversation in regards to a topic of importance to both this community and any online community seeking to increase participation.

In a post earlier this week, Plunge magazine founder ailelie mentioned the importance of defining any idea, or really any organization, in three to five words. Six months in, I define POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’. The community was originally envisioned as a supplement to the higher volume poetry, another Dreamwidth community that specializes in published poetry not the poster’s own, but quickly began to morph into something more interesting than that: a place where poets amateur and professional and poetry enthusiasts could share and discuss poems and poetry culture. Rather than being just another poetry mailing list, POETREE could take advantage of its host platform to facilitate conversation and and build up an archive of resources available free to anyone interested.

That dream is very much a work in progress, and the journey to realizing it has been alternatively humbling and exhilarating. For the first six months, I focused primarily on recruiting people to write content, and assumed that the audience for that content would materialize over time. The community has certainly grown a great deal -- we’re now at triple the number of members and subscribers that we had in December -- but the amount of discussion going on in the comments has been much more variable. This in turn makes it more difficult for the Hosts to gauge how many people are reading their posts, and (I worry) makes it less rewarding than it might otherwise be for people to Host in the first place.

This is not a guilt manifesto, but rather a place to begin. Earlier I defined POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’; it’s worth asking ourselves, what makes us a community? Is participation a requirement for being part of the community? Where does that leave the lurkers, those who might be reading avidly but by preference or default tend not to comment on posts or have time to Host? ( Read more... )

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What do you think? If you left the occasional ‘kudos’ comment, what format would it take? Do you have ideas beyond those already mentioned? What would you like to see in the comments?