Now comes the Blues

napowrimo – today comes the 12-bar blues poem.  I love blues – have thought often about how the music genre could slip into a poetry genre.  This is a crude try, forgive me:

Reality Blues

Not gonna watch Reality TV no more

Not gonna watch Reality TV no more

It’s way too scary for me

Not gonna watch Survival TV no more

Not gonna watch Survival TV no more

It’s way too real for me

Not gonna watch survival games no more

Not gonna watch reality games no more

those hunger games got me scared

   for us  for us   

Day Three

We were asked to write an epithalamium, a poem to the bride on her wedding day.  I can't do that, try as I may. It always starts out something like "Hail sacrificial virgin as you tread the aisle to your altar..."  My parents had a better marriage, and their experience inspired this poem - which is not an epithalamium, nor does it mock one, as much.


Our Scary Family Album 

Here’s my mother 
just graduated, looking 
into the lens suspiciously,
her starched nurse’s cap 
impossibly perched. 

This is my father astride 
his Harley, booted right foot 
asserting the dirt road,
goggles posed in his wild hair,
his grin naughty. 
A gorgeous man before he had us. 

NaPoWriMo - Day 2

The prompt today is to use in some manner either a song popular on the year of one's birth, or the first popular song sung as a child.

Childhood Memories are Not True, They Say (How Can That Be So?)

I see myself as a gleeful girlie

polite and gentle, hair all curly

in dresses pink and frilly,    

singing a-tisket a-tasket

a green and yellow basket

I bought a basket for my mommie

on the way I dropped it

I dropped it, I dropped it

as I happily play dainty games

careful of my shiny Mary Janes.

Well, maybe I wasn't truckin' on down 

the avenue in quite that fashion,

perhaps less polite, more passion!

Mouthy, bossy, a smarty pants

ever in thorny thickets of banter,

a frisky snippet, head in a book,

knees skinned, a disheveled look.

Poor mommie, I dropped more than her basket,

I changed her tisket and her tasket.

(Wish I could tell her I know

But, it’s too late now.)

  

The return of NaPoWriMo

Can't imagine a better reason to reactivate my poetry blog.  I'll be using the NaPoWriMo prompts posted at the national website http://napowrimo.net  I 'm going to try, once again, to post a  new poem every day for the month of April - National Poetry Month, of course!  The first prompt is a carpe diem poem after the fashion of Andrew Marvell, or not.


Pluck the Day

Carpe diem they tell us, but I’d rather pluck

each day as a single rose, a surprise

growing on my doorstep, and be amazed

at its impossible layering -  soft, predictable,

mysterious. And its pain.  That thorn

is always present in wierd places. 

It hurts.  You bleed.  Did you know there is no

redemption? Suppose you can never have
what you cherish most?
If you pretend
there is no thorn and joyfully pluck each day,

you can live without ever being forgiven,
exist without being loved.
You cannot survive without beauty.
Pluck.

What Shall Be Done About Books?

I love books.  I have 13 bookcases in my small apartment, crammed full.  More books piled on the floor, here and there.  I love books. Can't bear to part from those I especially love.  I also have books on my iPad, in iBooks and Kindle. Point is - more of us who love to read are going toward ebooks.  We lack storage space to shelve the books we love, the new ones we discover. Instead, we download them all, title by title, into our mobile devices.  


What is the future, then, of books?  Will they become museum relics?  Will  libraries become museums; will print publishers of books go bankrupt?  Does this matter to us?  If books are important to us, we need to do what we can, now, to preserve their significance. 

Does Spelling Still Need to be Taught?

OK - I set up this next blog to discuss a few Nobel Literature Laureates of Poetry, but something else has come up.  Flexibility serves the better cause.  The following is a post addressed to a ListServe of Creative Writing Teachers I've been a constant respectful reader of, but infrequent contributor to, for at least twenty years.  


Yesterday, a member posted this message:  


Someone told me the other day that a teacher said there no longer is a need to teach spelling because students are using computers to write and word processing programs correct the spelling errors.
Has anyone heard this?

This is my response:


 I've not read that, but can see where it might be assumed.  I'm
dyslexic, or was, and I've been an English teacher for - er, fifty years. Tough career choice but I loved teaching, reading, writing.  That's another story. Until computers and Spellcheck I spent a great deal of my time checking my spelling with a dictionary because I switched letters, spelled "creatively." After Spellcheck, my life improved far more than I imagined
it could.  By continually using Spellcheck, my sense of letter order, of spelling reasoning, improved to such an extent that now, although I always employ Spellcheck by habit - there are never any errors.  A matter of no small pride for me.  The point is - maybe, with Spellcheck, there is no longer a need to teach spelling per se, because students' habitual use of
Spellcheck teaches them to spell better than lessons ever could.
------------------------------------------------------
That is my experience, my thinking.  What are your thoughts about teaching spelling?  

Contemplating the Nobel Prize for Literature in Poetry

From its inception in 1901 until today the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded exclusively to works of poetry only twenty times.  That's surprisingly victorious for poetry when you consider all forms of narrative writing - fiction, drama - all prose writing as opposed to poetry - by such writers as  Hemingway, Steinbeck, Winston Churchill, William Golding (if my math serves me, ninety prose writers of the highest esteem and reknown).


So, who were our twenty poets awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?  And why were they particularly chosen?  Contemporary working poets might want to dwell upon this list and its rationale.  My quotes are taken verbatim from The Nobel Prize Internet Archive: http:// nobelprizes.com/literature/ 


2011 - Thomas Transtromer "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."


1996 - Wislawa Szymborska  "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."


1995 - Seamus Heaney "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."


1992 - Derek Walcott - "poetic ouevre of great luminosity, historical vision"


1984 - Jaroslav Seifert  -"poetry of rich inventiveness", liberating images of "indomitable spirit and versatility of man."


1979 - Odysseus Elytis - man's struggle for freedom


1977 - Vicente Aleixandre - man's condition in the cosmos and the renewal of Spanish poetry between wars


1975 - Eugenio Montale - "interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions."


1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo - lyric poetry, "classical fire", expresses the "tragic experience of life in our own times."


1958 - Boris Leonidovich Pasternak - lyric poetry in the Russian epic tradition (his country declined the prize)


1956 Juan Ramon Jimenez - lyric poetry of "high spirit and artistic purity."


1948 - Thomas Stearns Eliot - "outstanding pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."


1945 - Gabriela Mistral - lyric poetry "inspired by powerful emotions" making her name a symbol "of the entire Latin American world."


1944 - Johannes Vilhelm Jensen - poetic imagination, bold freshly creative style


1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt  - poetry


1923 - William Butler Yeats - "inspired poetry, artistic form, gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."


1917 - Karl Adolph Gjellerup - "varied and rich poetry, inspired lofty ideals"


1904 - Federic Mistral - "fresh originality" reflects the "natural scenery and native spirit of his people."


1903 - Bjornstjerne Martinus Bjornson  - "noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, fresh and pure of spirit."


That's it - our 20 Nobel Awards for Poetry on planet Earth..  How many are still read widely today?  Enough, probably.  Is there any message here?  


I am re-activating this blog.  I plan to continue reviewing poetry, and discussing other topics.  I appreciate any comments, of course.


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