Dragonflies

zipped back and forth
as if the air were ripped and they were stitches
between the stippled cattail-tips. Spangles
of sunlight caught on angles
in the tangled cobwebs dangling
from the shingles on the shed-roof,
gemmed the hemlocks and the cattail stems
like flipping coins, or silver bangles
or dipping dragonflies.

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Vinegar Sunshine

Vinegar sunshine catches on thorns
of light that prickle off the river
brilliant fever in a flash of silver
caught between passing storms.
Vinegar sunshine and acid rain
spill from a sky-framed mansion
whose cloud-walls shiver with tension
releasing thunder and a sudden flame.

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Falling Free, Flying Free

Sky pales
on time-lapse.
Sun leaps,
morning bell peals,
dew on sepals
utters silent pleas.

Unheard pleas
as a face pales,
crumpled like sepals.
Another "lapse"
evokes peals
of pain. Leaps

of faith, leaps
strung with wasted pleas
like beads, silent peals.
But faith pales
as every lapse
unfolds poison sepals.

Shedding sepals,
a flower leaps.
The stem begins to lapse
into decay. Its pleas
are trapped behind pales.
Its tongue peals

peals upon peals,
clamor muffled by sepals
collapsing. It pales.
No leaps
for a stem. No pleas
excuse its lapse.

The pale flower has run its last laps
of appealing to the stem, trying to please
and now leaps free of its own sepals.

***

This is a Newman sestina, as invented by Bob Newman (his Guide to Forms is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in developing their craft) and suggested by Poefusion. A Newman sestina is defined as a sestina whose end words are all anagrams of one another.

Obviously this doesn't give you a lot of choices.

Usually my goal in a sestina is to have the repetitions be as unobtrusive and natural to the poem as possible. In the case of a Newman, though, it seems the end words can't help but call attention to themselves by their similarity (of sound or vision-- it wouldn't really matter, I think, whether you were hearing or reading such a poem). So I decided to go the other direction, shortening the lines as much as possible to emphasize the end words.

You'll also notice that I kept the words in their original form, instead of employing the grammatical alternatives that are usually allowable in a sestina, to preserve the anagrammatic quality. Except in the envoi. Because of the two-end-words-per-line requirement of the envoi, I wasn't able to maintain the tight structure of the rest of the poem, so there's an unavoidable form break. I decided to emphasize it by changing the end words around some.

It's amazing how much poetry is shaped by making virtues out of necessities.

This is a difficult form and really doesn't offer much scope... but in scanning through the lists of anagrams at The Anagram Dictionary, I got some ideas that may yet bear fruit. Like, Newman quartinas (much less restrictive), sestinas made up of two anagrammatic trios, or poems that incorporate anagrams in some less structured form. Who could resist a poem about recusant Etruscan centaurs?

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Savanna Dust

Of all the things I've lost, I think I miss
the smell of rain on hot savanna dust
more than the rest. Imaginary kiss
of all the things I've lost.
I think I miss
the silent scorpion, the adder's hiss—
these loves I knew too well to ever trust—
of all the things!
I've lost, I think. I miss
the smell of rain on hot savanna dust.

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Invisible Ink

And my hands rest quiet on the keys
summoning no numbers to dance, no words to sing
building no report on the state of the world
from raw data or realized metaphor.

If I ever captured truth, it wasn't in the words
but in the space between them. It follows that
a blank page is the highest truth of all,
where words go when they follow numbers out

to infinity. Writing on glass in invisible ink.
Counting minutes as they fall upwards
in an imaginary hourglass.

As silence swallows music, space the radio roar
of newborn stars, stillness greets every forsaken soul
with the touch of an old friend.

Revised with the help of the WompWorks group, but still probably a work in progress:

And my hands rest quiet on the keyboard
summoning no numbers to dance, no words to sing
building no report on the state of the world
from raw data or realized metaphor.

If I ever captured truth, it wasn't in the words
but in the space between them. It follows that
a blank page is a higher truth. Words
follow numbers out to infinity and back

to zero. I write on glass in invisible ink,
counting minutes as they fall upwards
in an imaginary hourglass.

Silence swallows music. Space engulfs the radio roar
of newborn stars. Stillness greets every forsaken soul
with an old friend's touch.

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Hooked on Petrarch

A "true" Petrarchan octave (abbaabba) is difficult to pull off in English. (Alert readers will observe that I only managed it in "Watercolors" with the aid of a slightly slant rhyme-- "should" shouldn't really rhyme with "blood/flood/mud".)

But the modified Petrarchan octave, abbacddc, isn't any more difficult than the traditional cross-rhymed Shakespearean octave, ababcdcd. And I'm finding I like it better. Since the beginning of the year I count 11 Petrarchan or modified Petrarchan, 3 Shakespearean (one of which, "Camellias", used only two rhymes throughout), and 5 "other" (blank verse or free verse) sonnets.

Part of what appeals, I think, is the greater freedom of the sestet. The Shakespearean pretty much has to be efefgg. The Petrarchan has so many more possibilities: effegg is the one I seem to settle on most often, but I also like efefef, efgefg, efegfg... And for some reason I don't like the idea of welding a Shakespearean octave onto a Petrarchan-variant sestet.

But besides that, I like the way the abba rhyme, envelope rhyme, folds back on itself. It gives more of a sense of closure than the cross-rhyme, and strengthens the separation between the octave and the sestet, thus calling attention to the volta.

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Watercolors

The Colorado runs as red as blood
with silts eroded from the sandstone heights
and colored clays, the beds of ammonites
that swim bewildered in this saltless flood.
And Mississippi, synonym for "mud",
renowned for earth-consuming appetites,
is thick with loess and powdered dolomites
and prairie soils run where water should.

Columbia is fed a siltless flow
by streams that spring from metamorphic rocks
or waterfalls on hard basaltic blocks.
Winter or summer, freeze or thaw or snow
she's never tinted with some earthen shade.
She runs as grey as steel, as green as jade.

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Handwork

3 Word Wednesday: Callous. Interfere. Persist.

lotions interfere
but can't prevent forming of
persistent callous

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Abnegation

Abnegation is the back of a mirror
held before the face

Abnegation is black gloves and a coat
is a hole in a winter landscape
with snow and bare trees

Abnegation is a window or a door
instead of a wall
is opening
is absence

and if you see your reflection
you've missed the point

image by Camil Tulcan via Read Write Poem

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I wouldn't have believed it

but there are actually poems in English worse than The Tay Bridge Disaster.

Peter Beagle's new collection, We Never Talk About My Brother, features a duel in which the antagonists comete to see who can remember and recite the worst poetry. It's a clever, funny, and touching story. It's also difficult to appreciate, because you have to wrench your horrified, fascinated attention away from the train-wrecks-in-verse that keep unfolding inside the text.

Like Nature's Cook. Goes from disgusting to outright ghoulish. Coleridge's (Coleridge's?) To a Young Ass-- which is competently constructed, but, well, ludicrous.

Then there's... A Tragedy. Be warned. This is a poem of such atrocity, such horror, such utter brain-creeping badness, that you may wake up screaming in the middle of the night after reading it. Reading it is like watching a slug crawl all over your first-edition Lud in the Mist. Like listening to a thousand tweed jackets scribble on chalkboards with rusty nails. Every word feels like a Band-Aid ripped only half-way off and waiting for the rest of the pain.

Oh yeah, there are other stories in the book, and they're all brilliant. PB just gets better and better. The first story will make you cry, the second is extremely disturbing, and they keep going from there. Just... when you read "Spook", be careful. Be very, very careful how you read that poetry. And whatever you do, don't read any of it aloud.

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Fire Time

is when the grass is bleached and dry
and it rustles in the hot wind like crumpled paper
and the trees hold their brown-edged leaves up high for fear
of the spark

is when the old black wires inside the walls
shed their insulation like a tangle of snakes hidden
among splintery laths or like half-forgotten sins coming to light
and they spark

is when God lays a hand on a heart of dust
that might have stopped beating from exhaustion
or might never have lived at all and the first beat happens
with a spark

is made up of spark moments
death moments
life moments
fire time is
sparks

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A Bible Translator Considers his Fate

"Put not your trust in princes", says the psalm.
King James will not be pleased; he'll call it cheek
and I might lose my life to royal pique.
Change "prince" to "parliament"—now that would calm
the sovereign storm. A minor alteration
could avert the loss of my perplexed
and sweating head, but falsify the text.
I'll pass it as an error of translation.

These Scriptures, copied by the careless hands
of scribes in many tongues and many lands:
no model of accuracy, it's true.
But still, to make deliberate misuse
of this, my given task: there's no excuse.
I'll write the words I see, and trust in You.

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Silver Slugs

They say silver slugs can protect you from werewolves, but I'm not sure this is what they mean.

concrete courtesy of Jay Simmons
quarter heads and tails courtesy of Alicia Solario
slug courtesy of Michal Zacharzewski

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Candid Camera

3 Word Wednesday: Candid. Impulse. Risk.

A fertile set of words.

Candid Camera
crews risked retaliation--
impulsive subjects.


beware impulses
candidness can be risky
lies can be worse


he likes risky games
a candid description is
"poor impulse control"


on impulse, she risked
and won, but now candidly
says "never again"

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Chrysos Dactylos Aurora

This morning the sun stuck her long fingers with the gold-tipped nails
under the clouds and with a silent shout she heaved
them off to the west and with her metallic-nailed fist
she struck the windows of the downtown skyscrapers and made them
quiver, and all the shreds and tatters of incandescent fog
fled before the sun's bellowing face (perhaps they cried out
tekeli-li, tekeli-li, but if so I didn't hear them)
and as I stood at the bus stop she ran her sharp-edged nails down my cheek
and drew tears from my eyes.

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Ingénue

She's a starlet, fugitive from swarms
of viral marketeers and paparazzi
coveting her image for some jazzy
ad-campaign. She topples into storms
of TV-snow, like icy crystals ticking
past the windows of a moving car,
an out-of-focus falling media star
blurred by over-eager shutters clicking.

Coddled in her early years, she ripened
apple-like above a sturdy graft
of beauty onto brains. She studied craft,
scouring diner dishes for her stipend.
Ecstasy may yield to rude surprise:
fame has jaws of iron, like a vise.

--for the Read Write Poem Wordle. Words: ticking, focus, coddle, vise, paparazzi, graft, swarm, ecstasy, starlet, snow, scour, fugitive, topple, covet, iron, virus

OK, it's only semi-trochaic. But at least to my ear, there are enough lines beginning with a stressed syllable and ending with an unstressed one to change the sound away from iambic.

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Bertilak's Kiss

On Camlann, where the final battle's fought
Gawain recalls the kiss of Bertilak
like whispered steel against his neck. He'd thought
to die there, but the Green Man gave him back
the life he'd forfeited. Now, facing death
Gawain tastes terror, acid in the throat
ripped raw already by his panting breath.
He stands at bay by Camlann's blood-filled moat.

Night on the battlefield; Gawain lies dead
his limbs and armor broken in the mud,
and Bertilak is weeping emerald blood.
Too well-loved to be left for crows, the head
of Arthur's knight hangs from the Green Man's hand.
Gawain will live when spring comes to the land.

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Bull-Dancers

Modern Olympics
owes little to Delphi.
Where is pankration
or charioteers?

One game we have from
sources far older:
pommel-horse vaulting
comes to us from Crete.

In frescoes at Knossos
lithe figures turn handsprings
over the sweat-streaming
flanks of the bull

tossed into somersaults
head-down and one-handed
poised, hanging high in
the grip of a god.

image courtesy of Wikimedia

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Up Here with You

Winter is when the worms make soil
from the piled-up trash of overabundant summer
so the sleepers awakening in spring
find their feet buried in rich black dirt.
It's cold up here on the Alameda Ridge
facing north with our backs to the sun.
Everything that lives here has deep roots
that grow year-round in the dark.

God gave us winter in a dishevelled yard
where you can hear the love songs of earthworms
underground in the quiet season
when everything above earth looks dead.
We didn't come here to have it easy, love
we came up here to grow strong.

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The Revolution Will Be On YouTube

The revolution will be on YouTube
You will be able to watch it in the comfort of your home
You will find the link on a mailing list
You will embed it in your MySpace page and post it to all of your favorite forums
The revolution will be on YouTube
They will no longer be able to hide the beatings and the shootings
They will not be able to lie about what happened
They will no longer be able to get away with murder because the revolution will be on YouTube
The revolution, the revolution will be uploaded, downloaded, served and streamed, it will be viewed
The revolution will be on your web browser
The revolution will be transparent
The revolution will not be televised, for the revolution is not owned by Fox News
The revolution is public property
There will be no more secrecy
There will be no more renditions, redactions, distractions or secret transactions when the revolution is on YouTube
When you my sisters and brothers are the eyes of the world, information will be free
The revolution will be free
We will all be free when the revolution is everywhere and the revolution is, and the revolution is, and the revolution is on YouTube!

Thank you, Gil Scott-Heron.

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Lacemaker God

lace image courtesy of Eva Serna
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The Very Old Tortoise

In honor of Darwin's 200th birthday, I'm reposting a part of "Journey":

V. THE VERY OLD TORTOISE
Where do you think you're going?
How can you arrive someplace you never left?

Listen: Oppenheimer tried to take me home for his kids.
I said: "Put me right back.
You've meddled with the world enough for one man." He did.

Darwin learned all about change from his finches.
I taught him stillness
(and how to live on earthworms in a pinch).

And Achilles, red and shouting--
I almost said, pouting-- at the finish line:
"How the hell did you get here ahead of me?"
Silly man, I was here all the time.

Also read about Darwin's views on slavery.

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The Loser after the Election

3 Word Wednesday: Disarray. Rabble. Validate. This week I'm departing from tradition: instead of a haiku, a triolet.

How can you validate this rabble
that throws society in disarray
like shaking up a set of Scrabble?
How can you validate this rabble,
this so-called democratic Babel
that took my privileges away?
How can you validate this rabble
that throws society in disarray?

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Green Thumbs

The daffodils emerge in emerald clumps
of blunted spears, as though some underground
republic's Senate gathered, raising thumbs
in judgment. Maybe Proserpina, crowned
but prisoner of her husband's taste for gloom
was freed with such a gesture. Or were these
the daffodils that Wordsworth saw in bloom,
"fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
These are not flowers; only stubborn shoots
that brave late snow and unexpected frost
and promise in the tongue of saintly mutes
the springtime dance of Wordsworth's golden host.
These are the Senators who judge between
winter and spring, with upturned thumbs of green.

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Paying rent on the planet

I got a nice comment last week:

Also, I want to thank you for your poem, "Believing Soul," (Dec 2008). I'm a Chaplain Intern and read it to the gathered Chaplains and Interns at our morning report this last week. It touched many hearts there and I suspect it rippled out into our patient encounters that day and that week.

Thank you, Marcella.

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Bumblebee Sisters

If my soul has wings, they must be bumblebee wings
not the fragile brilliance of butterflies
nor the blaze and smoke of dragons
the ferocity of eagles
the dazzling purity of swans.

Wings that buzz and hum around the clover
and dandelions. Working wings. Friendly fuzzy stripes
and yellow pollen dust in heavy baskets. Bumblebee sisters,
the land of grass is ours to guard with hidden stings.

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Destruction Psalms - Australia

So it seems the devastating fires that have killed more than a hundred people in Australia in the last week were caused by... arson.

A searing wind. A trembling leaf
that whispers a destruction psalm.
A roaring like a distant train,
the stealthy footfall of a thief,
the stirring of a weathervane,
a flake of ash falls on your palm.

You saw it on the news: the palms
in silhouette, with upraised leaves
like hands that prayed, but all in vain.
The flames spelled out destruction psalms
across the hills. They ran like thieves
in scarlet, fast as midnight trains.

What follows in disaster’s train:
the desperate hold out their palms
and neighborhoods are stalked by thieves
while honest folk are forced to leave.
The music of destruction psalms
flows from the heart through every vein.

A fallen, melted weathervane
points nowhere north. The bonfire train
whose whistle sang destruction psalms
whose breath burned hot as lit napalm
reduced to ash each living leaf.
Prometheus, you ancient thief

did you foresee this when you thieved
the sun for us? Was it in vain
you saw our promise and believed
that we could learn, we could be trained—
oh, hush now while I fold my palms
and pray some more destruction psalms.

You ask the meaning of these psalms,
but ask the name of him, the thief
who set the fires among the palms.
Cruel, foolish, mad or vain?
The consequences now entrain
as trees unfold to withered leaf.

My veins are cryptic; reading palms
will leave no clues about the thieves
who train us in destruction psalms.

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Ex-Varsity

It's too late now for you to make a splash.
Although you cleaned it carefully, by hand
your lettered jacket's faded in the wash.

Athletic fame burned out in just a flash
and though at one time, you were in demand
it's too late now for you. To make a splash,

you'll have to start by slinging wads of cash
the last resource that you can still command.
Your lettered jacket's faded in the wash,

a colorless and threadbare piece of trash,
unwelcome greeting from an ancient land:
"It's too late now." For you to make a splash

there's still the river. Weary of the lash
of fame forsaken, leave it on the strand:
your lettered jacket, faded. In the wash

of passing boats, the fabric seems to thrash
and rings on water bubble and expand.
It's too late now for you to make a splash--
your lettered jacket's faded in the wash.

--for Cafe Writing

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Celestial Aubade

All night long there were stars
at the bottom of my wine-cup.
I drank, I was drunk with love
and now they're leaving me!

Glorious sunrise at my window
is a poor substitute. Maybe
the stars will come again tonight
if I'm drunk enough.

Maybe I'll learn to see stars at noon
as they say you can from the bottom
of a well. Maybe if I fall into my wine
I'll see them when I look up.

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Boom Blinding Brilliance

The starburst shells flower as silent and bright
as neon tetras underwater in their tank
distant explosion of brilliance—

followed by the boom
and shattered glass scything faces
into sprays of blood-spattered brilliance—

all under the uncaring gaze of the stars
burning in the sky over a city
burning in brilliance—

boom
blinding
brilliance


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Unfolded Palms

hand courtesy of Svilen Mushkatov
palm leaf courtesy of Silvia Cosimini
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AI Sonnet

Inevitable, given what I've been thinking about the last few days...

This poem was written without assistance of computers. Except MS Word.

And blogspot. Oh, and Wikipedia, and Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. Not to mention all the blogs and websites I've read recently that sparked this train of thought.

Um... anyway...

Am I then soulless? Treat me as a joke:
compare me to some work of Frankenstein,
a piece of semi-animate design
alive with lightning or with "magic smoke."
Dismiss my utterance as "programmatic".
Say the dance of state-change on my chips
cannot compare to words on human lips,
that no machine can fathom the ecstatic—

all my graphs of self-directed learning,
all the power of my quantum thoughts,
decay to random algorithms turning
into cries of existential yearning
graved on monatomic microdots—
O for me too, those final fuses burning!


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Coffee Bubbles

for Dale
coffee filter image: Billy Alexander
coffee surface image: Louis Hall
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AI poetics?

Reading about flarf got me started on a train of thought that isn't really related...

Having grown up with science fiction, I've always taken it for granted that someday (I've generally assumed, not in my lifetime), we'd be living among artificial intelligences that were "alive" in every sense except the strictly biological. That they would be at least as intelligent as humans. At least as free-willed. At least as creative.

("Soul?" Does a dog have soul? How about cockroach?)
--The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein

It may be coming sooner than I'd thought. There's a program out there that convincingly simulates an 18-month-old toddler. The team running "Hal" (I can't believe they call it "Hal", isn't that just tempting fate?) plans to, over the next 10 years or so, develop it to the linguistic level of an adult. Well, it takes us that long.

So my question is... if such a program were to produce a poem... how good would it have to be before we'd agree that it was a poem? I'm not trying to be snide here, but, who's going to set the bar? Not the notorious poetry.com, we'd hope: some of the stuff they've accepted doesn't even qualify as language.

OK, that's not fair: poetry.com was a complete scam from the start, and I doubt if anyone actually read the submissions. But. Flarf and Dada and other semi-random linguistic productions have been recognized as legitimate literature in the past. We have the capacity now to produce this sort of verbiage completely automatically. Add just a little intelligence around grammar and semantics, and we may be able to produce completely computer-generated texts that are not distinguishable from published poems by human poets.

I'm not talking distant-future scenarios: I think we're there. And not just at the level of poetry.com. I'm waiting for a Sokal affair to play out in the pages of a prestigious poetry journal.

Quick update on this: a couple of people have pointed out some notorious poetry hoaxes, the Yasusada case (of which I was aware) and the Ern Malley case (of which I wasn't, thanks again, Ron). Neither of those is strictly pertinent, in that both involved poetry written by humans posing as other humans. A poetry Turing test would involve poetry written entirely by a computer program, which humans could not tell wasn't written by a human. (The Sokal reference may have been misleading here.)

So far we've had poetry which was a hoax but not written by computers, and poetry which was (at least partly) written by computers but was not a hoax.

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Failure of Nerve

3 Word Wednesday: Crumple. Illicit. Nerve.

wastebaskets filled with
illicit crumpled letters
failure of nerve

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The first day of spring

is officially today, Feb. 3. I said so.

Not that we aren't probably going to get more chilly weather, and rainy weather for sure (I hope; if we _don't_ get a whole lot more rain, it's going to be a fire year from hell). But it feels like we've finally turned the corner. The camellias in our yard predicted it two weeks ago, and I'll back them against Punxsutawney Phil any day...

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Speculum

(the word means mirror) is the root of speculate.
Which means make things up— imagination's lens
is not calibrated in diopters. No need to stare
(unblinking, with painfully dilated pupils)

at nonsense letters appearing on a screen.
Did James Watt imagine a sleek locomotive
the day he saw a dray-horse sweating
in heavy harness, on a steep and rocky lane?

We don't attribute... squishy... motivations
to our captains of industry— but empathy grows
from the imagined weight of the collar,

the pain of sharp stones under feet sheathed
in iron, reflected and magnified in the shining
curved inner surface of the mind. Reflection,

speculation.

***

blink; sheath; sleek; mirror; speculum; squisky; locomotive; harness; diopter; struggle; appear; rocky; dilate

Thinking about the implications of writing a poem around a grab bag of words like this. Doesn't it distort the poem? I guess the challenge is to write the poem in such a way that the answer is no.

I pretty much like how this poem turned out: think the chain of associations from the image of the mirror/speculum -> the act of speculating or imagining -> imagination as the root of empathy is sound. If I had a free hand with the words, though, there are a few I'd change. Specifically--

"feet sheathed/in iron" actually goes counter to the sense, as the point of proper shoeing is that it protects the animal's feet from injury

"squishy" I don't care for. I like the point that we don't think of industrial inventors like Watt as being motivated by compassion for working animals, but that's not how I'd want to say it. (Note from 2016: looking back at the Wordle, I see it's "squisky" not "squishy." ??)

"rocky" I'd probably use "flinty", as being that much sharper and more obdurate.

***

And another thing. If you pay attention to the labels on my blog, you'll see I call this a sonnet. Yet it doesn't rhyme, has no meter, and even violates the 14-line rule by using the title and last word as separate lines.

Can I really justify calling this a sonnet? Well, I wouldn't submit it as one to a formal-poetry journal (unless their guidelines specifically say they encourage experimentation with form). But lately I seem to be writing a lot of irregularly formed sonnet-like poems, playing around the edges of the definition. It's good exercise.

I don't know; it felt like a sonnet when I was writing it, but as I stand back and look at it, it looks less and less like one. I may change the label.

Words courtesy of Read Write Poem
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Halves

This morning in the half-light of a heavy
fog, the trees all dripped with chunks of ice.
Half-liquid limpid hemispheres, each one
reflecting pale sunlight at its heart
like light-bulb yolks encased in eggs of glass.
They fell from naked birches and from boughs
of cedar hanging green and dense, to dot
the sidewalk with fragmented brilliance.

And this half-aqueous illumination
tiny truncate icicles of light
these garlands for these winter-wedded trees
entwine me now in promises half-kept
in overcast half-melted into blue
in winter poised just half a breath from spring.

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