words

SunWinks! November 2, 2014: Word Up

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

A few years ago, my daughter brought a boy home and the three of us played Scrabble. Hannah had been boasting on me, and as usual, I pulled no punches. The young gentleman asked me, “How do I get to be as good a Scrabble player as you?” My reply: “Stay in school.” I don’t think it was the magic bullet he was hoping for.

I was just watching a feature story on a college football postgame show. I didn’t catch the name of the student-athlete, but the story was about how when he came to college on a football scholarship, he could barely read at the junior high level. So he resolved to do something about it. Do you know what he did? Continue reading →

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New Poem: The Barber

Dark Alley by michaeljtr

This is a response to my prompt of tomorrow, October 26, 2014 (I actually wrote it a few weeks ago) on the topic of The Shadow Self.

Additionally, if I had titled this “Introspection,” then it would be a response to the October 19 prompt. But that gives away the metaphor, so that’s why I didn’t. But you might want to look at this from the standpoint of that earlier prompt.

Poem: The Barber

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SunWinks! August 31, 2014: Cubism Isn’t Just For Squares

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Cubism is an artistic movement of the 1910’s and ‘20s exemplified by Picasso. The idea of cubism is to deconstruct the objective components of a subject and reassemble them in striking ways. So Picasso pulls out eyes and nose and breasts and contours and assembles them on the canvas as though he had turned around and thrown them over his shoulder like a bridal bouquet. The effect is to open the mind and force us to look at the inner structure of things without being seduced by phenomena like symmetry and photorealism.

So it is with cubist poetry, which breaks its subject matter down into discrete pieces and juxtaposes them in unusual ways, creating a nonlinear effect on the mind that would otherwise be inaccessible underneath layers of the familiar flow of meaning and language. Continue reading →

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New Poem: Virtual Tumor

I’m normally very protective of my poetry, but I’m posting this one as text and protecting it with a Creative Commons License* in hopes you will share this with your communities so it can reach someone who needs to read it.

*You may copy and distribute it any way you like as long as you attribute it to me and don’t alter it.

photo: kitty

Serefina reads over my shoulder

Virtual Tumor

 

My cat has a tumor under her eye.

It looks just like a ripe cranberry.

She’s seventeen years old,

eighty-five in human years.

Given her age,

even a biopsy would be risky.

So there’s not much to do but watch it grow.

 

My brother had Kaposi’s sarcomas

all over his face.

We went to the pizza parlor and the deli once.

He was totally unself-conscious

as were the food workers who

greeted him like an old friend.

 

My wife has a lump in her breast.

You can’t see it.

You can’t even feel it.

You wouldn’t know she had cancer to look at her.

She embraces it

as a source of blessings,

and it has been already,

only just embarking on her

twenty weeks of chemo.

She’ll be just fine,

but even so, she teaches me

how to embrace life.

 

My tumor is even less visible.

It’s a virtual tumor,

hidden in code amid ganglions of nerves.

It’s the voice in my head that

urges me to destroy myself,

the voice that says things like

What’s the use?

I can’t take one more day.

I need a fix.

I just want to die

or (on a good day)

I just want to sleep.

 

Back to my kitty:

she seems to be comfortable enough.

She still purrs

and eats

but she seems to sense her days are numbered,

and she responds by coming to me for love

and petting and skritching

every chance she gets,

like she wants to get the most out of life

while she can.

I used to let my daughters give her the attention.

Now my girls are grown up

and kitty and I are close as father and daughter.

We are treasuring each day we have left together.

 

I didn’t get enough time with Bob, but

unless something goes terribly wrong,

Carol and I will have another twenty years,

and we will treasure every day of that, too.

 

Because when it comes right down to it,

life is all about the skritch.

That’s what Carol and Serefina are teaching me.

 

And that voice in my head that wants me to die?

I don’t hear it much these days.

 

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. Please reblog, share, copy, distribute at will with appropriate attribution, but do not alter.

Creative Commons License
Virtual Tumor by Doug Westberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

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SunWinks! August 24, 2014: Keeping It Short

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers!

William Stafford got up at four in the morning and wrote a poem every day. Robert Bly admired this and spent a year writing a poem a day, which he subsequently published as Morning Poems.

 I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think you can write “The Waste Land” or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” every day. I was writing almost a poem a day a couple months ago, not in response to a challenge, just feeling fecund. Most are a page to a page-and-a-half long.

You get a feel for a certain length. The beginning is about half a page. The development is about half a page. And the ending is about half a page. You write the beginning, and after about 6-10 lines, it’s time to start thinking about getting into the development. It’s very much like the difference between sitting down to write a minuet or a sonata. Continue reading →

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Sunwinks! August 17, 2014: Listing to Port

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers!

I would sure love to see some of you so-called non-poets, especially my fellow editors, take a crack at a list poem before we leave the topic. If you can make out a grocery list, you can write a list poem. It’s fun! You’ll be the envy of your friends! You can add “Poet” to your business card!

Review the examples in last week’s column. You can see the possibilities are endless, and there’s no way to “get it wrong.” Bottom line: if you say it’s a poem, it’s a poem. If there’s a list involved, it’s a list poem!

  • The list doesn’t have to be the whole poem
  • The list items don’t have to be single words
  • The list items don’t have to be all in the same form
  • And if that weren’t enough,
  • The list items can be interrupted with parenthetical phrases

So I expect to see lots of list poems next week. There’s just no excuse!

Continue reading →

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