POETREE

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?


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