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SunWinks! July 27, 2014: Ars Poetica

Dear SunWinkers:

SunWinksLogoThere are two ways of classifying poems: One is by form: haiku, sonnet, villanelle, quatrain, rubaiyat, cubist, concrete, etc. The other is by purpose: elegy, ode, pastoral, epic, love poem, etc. One of the latter is, I suppose, inevitable: sooner or later, a dedicated poet of any accomplishment will feel the impulse to write about the poetic process, what a poem is, or what it should be. Such a poem is referred to as an ars poetica, which is Latin for “the art of poetry.” Possibly the most famous is Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” :

(…)
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

 A poem should not mean
But be.

  Continue reading →

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New Poem: Mikvah (formerly: Epiphany)

For those of you, all three of you, who are following my every post with bated breath, this was my initial attempt to write a modern-style* poem about death in response to my own prompt of Sunday. It wasn’t the poem I was trying to write (I succeeded on the second try). Comments welcome.

*When I say “modern-style,” it sounds a little silly, as though I were saying “new-fangled.” What I mean, precisely, is poetry in English in the period 1940-2000.

Update: I’ve been contemplating this some more and decided to rename it “Mikvah.” Mikvah is the Jewish purification ritual of immersion in water.

Mikvah

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New Poem: Coming To Terms

Gentle Reader:

This is my response to my own prompt of yesterday. It took me two tries, interestingly. The first try turned into a different poem. I’ll post it later in the week.

This is what I meant by approaching the topic obliquely (from the side), metaphorically,  and on a small scale, more or less in the manner of William Carlos Williams and the other poets I cited in the column. This is but one approach; there are many others. Irina has taken a rather more sweeping and literal approach to the prompt and written a beautiful poem.

Coming To Terms

 

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SunWinks! July 20, 2014: Where Is Thy Sting?

Dear SunWinkers!

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.

            Shakespeare, Macbeth

 

SunWinksLogoI find myself being rather emotional these days. Last week, I spent four days in bed with the chest flu. This sort of inactivity and helplessness is very problematical for me as a trigger for depression. After another week, I’m still not my better self in terms of energy and industry.

Add to this… Continue reading →

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Exercise: Twenty Two Words from Eliot

Twenty-Two Words from Eliot

 

Burnt, I circumambulate my maisonette
in protozoic stupor,
mulling hollow images formulated
from the sawdust
of etherised metaphysics.

Outside the window-panes,
sun-kist hyacinths
dance with the arboreal shadows
falling across my tea and marmalade,
but I conjure only
broad-bottomed sea-girls
in ragged trousers.

Empty, I whimper
like a fugitive.
                             Empty
is the cruellest word.

 

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, link to, reblog, but do not copy or alter.

 

The prompt (adapted from The Poet’s Companion [Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux; New York: W.W. Norton, 1997]):

Skim several books of poetry by, perhaps, your favorite poets. Without paying too much attention to the context, jot down words that strike your fancy. Go through the resulting list and pick out about twenty of these. Fashion them into a poem, using these words and as few other words as possible.

In this case, I started with a list of twenty words exclusively from T.S. Eliot poems. (I added “burnt” and “tea” as I went along.)

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SunWinks! July 13, 2014: The H.M.S. Metaphor Goes On Extended Holiday

SunWinks! July 13, 2014: The H.M.S. Metaphor Goes On Extended Holiday

Dearest SunWinkers!

SunWinksLogoWe’ve been talking about metaphor in our language (that’s how it’s built) and our poetry (it wouldn’t be very poetic without it). Metaphors—and successful poetry—make us look at things in new ways by making fresh connections among diverse ideas.

An extended metaphor is a comparison that is carried out through an extended part or the entire length of a work. Some writers say it is synonymous with allegory. I think they are two different things, but I don’t have the energy to belabor the point here.

Here is a tiny sample of poems which use extended metaphors. Browse your favorite anthology to find many more. They shouldn’t be too hard to pick out. In fact, it occurs to me this would be a fabulous exercise!

Continue reading →

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SunWinks! July 6, 2014: H.M.S. Metaphor Sails Again

SunWinks! July 6, 2014: The H.M.S. Metaphor Sails Again

Dear SunWinkers!

A tasty confection the metaphor,
As sweet to an ode as a petit four,
A friend to the scribe,
Which, aptly applied,
Your poem will be so much the better for.

Last week, we introduced the idea that our language is built through metaphor. There were so many great stories to choose from, and all from just the one book: Loose Cannons, Red Herrings, and Other Lost Metaphors by Robert Claiborne [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988]. (I have half a dozen others.) So this week, I’m just going to throw out a few more word stories and let you either work on last week’s prompt, or a completely different prompt which I’ve supplied below.

Annie Oakley

Phoebe Anne Oakley Mozee, a.k.a. Annie Oakley, gave shooting exhibitions in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 1800s. One of her most famous tricks was to throw a playing card into the air and shoot a hole in it. In that era, “comps,” complimentary tickets for theater or sporting events, had holes punched in them to prevent them being resold. Ban Johnson, founding president of the American League, took to calling such comps “Annie Oakleys,” and the name stuck. Later on, the nickname came to refer to other freebies, such as a walk in baseball. Alas, the nickname is virtually forgotten today.

Have you ever thought about where the name “cockpit” came from? As you might guess, it’s just what it looks like, a reference to the small sunken pits in which cockfights were held. A metaphorical cockpit is any small space in which intense fighting takes place, hence its application to the pilot’s compartment of a fighter plane. Continue reading →

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Humor: Our Living Language

Our Living Language

 You may have heard the expression “get a wild hair up your butt.” In current usage, it usually refers to a person who is particularly exercised over some problem. Why on earth, you probably thought to yourself, would a hair up one’s rectum cause maniacal behavior? After all, how aggravating can one little hair be? And while we’re about it, how did it get there?

The illogic of this has caused some modern writers to write “get a wild hare up one’s butt”—presumably because having a wild rodent lodged in one’s anus would indeed cause rather animated behavior. But this, of course, is ridiculous. The largest rodent ever lodged in a human rectum is a small hamster, as reported in the August, 1997, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by a physician at Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

Bugs BunnyThe reality is quite an interesting story, and illustrates how our language develops over time. The first thing that needs to be said is that “up your butt” is a typical crude accretion added for emphasis in recent times and has nothing to do with the origin of the phrase, which in no way involves a medical condition such as might be presented to a proctologist. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! June 15, 2014: Go Take a Haiku

Dear SunWinkers!

Happy Father’s Day! I just want to say that it’s been an unalloyed privilege to live with my four children for the 28 years from when I married Nevada’s mother to when Hannah moved out. They are four of the sharpest, brightest, most beautiful and interesting human beings I’ve ever met. Yes, they could be infuriating. Yes, the challenges were overwhelming at times. But I treasure every single second because all of that made those children the people of whom I am so deeply proud and admiring today.

 

I’m on a new kick right now, taking pictures and writing haiku to go with them. Did you notice? This is not my first haiku kick. Actually, I think it’s my second. During my first poetry phase (c. 1998-2001), I wrote one haiku, and that was a spoof. My first haiku kick was less than a year ago—you can see them in my new book, Papa Doug’s Light Book of Little Verse.

Kick #2 started a week ago on a bike ride. I was greeted with an extraordinary sky as I was coming out of Value Village thrift store. I was greeted with another stunning vista halfway home. Thanks to my smartphone camera, these became SkyKu 1 and SkyKu 2. I love taking pictures because it’s such an undepressed thing to do. You have to have a sense of inquisitiveness and wonder, and to want to capture the image for future enjoyment and reflection. For me, it’s not just a pleasure, it’s a bellwether.

Going back to a picture, especially one I took myself, and writing a haiku, exploring the mystery and wonder of what I was looking at, is an additional pleasure. In fact, I have little interest in writing haiku about a picture I did not take. The point of haiku is to reflect on one’s own experience, on one’s own tiny movement of the soul produced from one’s identification with the natural.

Continue reading →

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