National Poetry Month: another PAD completed

Tags

PAD, poetry

2021 is my 10th completion of Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem A Day (PAD) challenge. That’s 300 poems written. I also do most of Robert’s weekly prompts, most of his November PADs, and I write poems on my own, occasionally. A conservative estimate is maybe 80 poems a year (30+30+20) over ten years or 800 poems.

800 poems in a life is a lot of poems. 800 in a decade may seem excessive. Really though, it’s hardly enough. I do not call myself a poet. I write poetry to learn about writing, about poetry but also prose. To me, poetry is focused wording, focused imagery, condensed lyricism. I consider myself a prose writer, and I want to have lyrical elements in my stories, I want strong imagery, I want to tell stories without telling them, all things poetry does.

Usually I am happy with something like a dozen of my 30 poems during these events. This month I was happy with two. Here is one of them.

All Our Futures

It’s not so much he only cared for himself
          some of the greatest leaders, inventors, and innovators were narcissists
it’s not so much his morality was lacking
          even the holiest can have their bad days
it’s not so much he stole all their money
          they would have just wasted it anyway
it’s not so much he lied through his teeth
          who hasn’t told a fib now and then?
it’s not so bad he cheats at golf
          really, who hasn’t kicked his own ball back in the fairway?
what’s so bad is he stole so many minds
          when truth is denied, the future is lost

The prompt for the day was Villain. It employs the rhetorical device called Anaphora which is the repetition of words at the begging of each phrase or sentence. Anaphora emphasizes each phrase and adds effective rhythm. The poem is a commentary on the present day political divide. Of course it’s aimed at #45, but he is such an easy target. Most of the literary world is against him, most who read widely are against him, so of course people liked this poem. I am not happy with the last line as it’s a retelling of the 4th line. But even if I change it, this is still a rather trite poem. I feel no inclination to expand or polish it. It was fun to write, but it will likely die in my cloud.

Most of my poems this month were rather prosaic. I’ve been reading Billy Collins’ poetry and he has a rather conversational narrative style. If you’ve never read him, please do so. He’s inspired my month of bad poems. I am afraid I fail at emulating his style.

I don’t yet know if I am happy with the following poem, but I had fun writing it. I won’t know if I’m happy with most of my poems until I put them to bed and wake them up some months later. Maybe in late summer I’ll discover a line or phrase, maybe a whole stanza, maybe a whole poem or even a series of poems that demand further work. But that time is not yet here. So just read it and feel my brain churn as I wrote this mess. It is an untitled Ekphrastic poem

There is a woman in it
that much I am sure of
the rest of it is, well
a mess is the easy euphemism.

She might be holding a vase
A rat gaping at cherries — or is that a fish?
Or an English hedgehog —  
and leaping from the white glass.

Only the woman and the vase,
the hedgehog, a rose, something
that looks like an otter’s head
and cherries are white, all else is blue

With bits of green, yellow,
and blobs of red. The tall stalagmite —
or maybe it’s a cactus or a stalk —
has two giant strawberries

Not dangling like normal strawberries
but embedded like stained glass
you can’t even see through, any of it
all of it, abstract and senseless.

That otter sniffing the rose
which is held by the red stumpy
watermelon man with no rind
and drips down on two men

Yellow, watching a backwards elephant
sneeze laundry and kites, and a green
elephant at the bottom sniffing Australia
which is also green so you know it has to be not real, But it’s the giant cargo ship
thrusting out of a map Puget Sound
like an alien from a belly that the girls attention.
You know it has to mean something.

The painting I wrote to is by Chelle Stein and can be found at her blog,

There is one poem I am quite pleased with. I am so happy with it, I already submitted it to the 2021 Canada Writes Poetry Contest. When I don’t win that, I will submit it somewhere for publication. Rattle Maybe. I did not post any of it at the PAD site, and I am not posting any of it here. It needs to remain unpublished. It is my practice to not publish my good poems online. It’s immediate disqualification for most literary considerations. Sorry.

I wrote this fantabulous poem to the prompt Waiting. It was April 17th so about ten days after the completion of The Masters golf tournament. I immediately pictured the pro golfers standing on Augusta’s 12th tee looking up at the tree tops and waiting for the wind to let up long enough to put their ball on the green instead of into Ray’s Creek. Oh the drama! The night before I had watched PBS’s Poetry In America episode on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. I fell in love with this poem, and I had the Villanelle form firmly implanted in my head. I wrote a first stanza, said “Dang, this is strong,” and I quickly opened Rhyme Zone. It then sucked five days out of my life, I quickly sought and found some feedback from the Seaside Scribes writing group I belong to, and I zipped it up tight and sent it off. I think it is a solid poem, a real solid poem, but it’s about golf and it’s about the esoteric struggles a golfer faces on the course with his friends in the wind. A golfer will love it. A poetry judge may just say, “Huh?”

I did not so much have fun this month as push through with my head down. I wrote a poem or two every day, I posted most, and I filled 37 pages of my current poetry journal. As I work away at my novel, I feel myself trying to write richer prose, so in that regard it’s a success.

Hey You! [my personal pronoun]

Tags

mainsplain, male, mansplainer, peronsal pronouns, poetry, Politically correct, pronouns, social media, white, white male, Workshop, Writing, Zoom

I attended a writing workshop yesterday. On Zoom. It was hosted by the University of Manitoba which is, according to that search engine and map, 3,178 kilometers from my home and a 33 hour drive. The proposed route leads me across Quebec from Montréal to Timmins ON, a route I would never consider driving in winter let alone summer. So make that a 40 hour drive. But I digress. I attended a pretty good workshop I probably never could have attended before the pandemic.

I’ve come to love Zoom. I am on calls every week, and it’s my only contact outside my home and Pete’s Fruitique in the City Market where buddy calls me Buddy: “Hey Buddy, is that everything?” I find myself wanting to tell him my name: “I am not your buddy.” Like a woman saying, “I’m not a deer!” And then last week a young lady was in the checkout line ahead of me and buddy said to her, “Hey Buddy, is that everything?”

Over Zoom, I’ve come virtually face-to-face with people in Ontario, Mexico, Portugal, Egypt, New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, Victoria BC, Toronto, Nairobi — I bet nobody else has had a Kenyan Cow bomb their Zoom meetings! — and now Winnipeg (and wherever these participants lived.) *One of them actually lives in my city. I didn’t know them and made friends with them on Facebook during the call. They could literally be my neighbour, met 3,178 km away.

Anyway, the Zoom writing workshop was on poetry and was led by a graduate student who I believe identifies as gay. His bio contained several LGBQ keywords, and… whatever. He seemed qualified to lead it, so I joined. Honestly, I don’t care about people’s sexual leanings. What you do is your business, and what I do is mine. It’s something we don’t need to talk about.

The session had about a dozen participants: the young, gay-identifying leader who had a trim beard, more than a single screen of participants I would describe as female, a couple of pictures with no picture at all but with female names, and me, the now senior-citizen-white-male. I like to know people. I am a people watcher. I am a people voyeur. I want to know everything about everyone. So I typed the full names (some used only their first name to keep stalkers like me off their tail) into Facebook search to see what came up. The first thing I noticed when I began reading the participants’ names were pronouns in parenthesis after their names, such as “Janet Smith (she/her).”

Cute, I thought, but why? I could find suitable pronouns to match their names/pictures, couldn’t I? I acknowledged that my visual cues might be incorrect, that one of these John-identified-females might actually identify as… whatever. Like sexual leanings, your personal sexual identification doesn’t concern me. Then, as my mind tends to do, I played out conversations that might take place where I might use these pronouns. “She said this, but I disagree.” I shook my head. These were conversations I would not undertake.

The leader gave his — his was his chosen personal pronoun, or I would have written their — housekeeping rules. Good leader! I rarely give any rules in my meetings. In fact, I tell participants in my prompt-writing there are no rules. Anyway, he said please pick your personal pronouns. I watched the remaining screen names expand to include “(she/her/they/etc.)”. I wasn’t sure what he was asking. Pick my own pronouns? The Paul Simon song, “You Can Call Me Al,” played through my head. I did not change my name.

This was a new experience for me. I assume the participants who had their pronouns already designated were familiar with this exercise. Extrapolations ran through my head. Is this some new practice being adopted in social media? I haven’t seen bracketed pronouns in any of my social media circles: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Zoom. Should I look closer? Is this a trend? If I ever get business cards printed, should I add my pronouns to my name and title? John Hanson, Writer. (Male binary he/him/his) My brief research since then indicates this is more of an academia and workplace practice. I am not involved in either.

The leader scanned his screen, probably saw that I had no personal pronouns designated, then went into a spiel about how to change your name in Zoom. And he/him looked right at me on the screen! I bet he/him thought I was the socially ignorant white senior male just getting his feet wet in social media — we will ignore the fact that I began using email around 1987, was a BBS junkie in the early nineties before finally getting on the internet in 1994, and have coded many complex websites and applications in my previous career. I sighed deeply and appended “(hey you!)” to my name. No, I don’t give a shit what you call me. I am the white, senior-citizen mansplainer stuck in his tropes. I have a dozen participants to refer to, to pick pronouns for, but I have trouble finding words to say about subject matter at the best of times. I have no time in a discussion to scan all the names to be politically correct. “I think the volta is this line, and I think… just a sec… her… no, she was wrong.” I have come to use “they” when referring to anyone: they/them/theirs. If they/them/their bothers you, I can’t wait to read your blog.

During the two hours and fifteen minutes, only one reference was made to another participant by a participant, and they used the person’s name. The leader referred to several of us but always used our names or the pronoun you. “What did you think of that?”

Nobody said, “Hey you!” to me.

Black History Month 2021

Tags

Adichie, Black Author, Black History Month, books, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half a Yellow Sun, reading

I try to read a black-authored book during February., and it bothers me. It bothers me because I have to even protest such nonsense. The nonsense: why we cannot treat everyone the same. But I do. It’s not so much to add my voice to any protest but to reaffirm in myself that racism is a problem and if you’re not part of the solution … I suppose this is my meager contribution to solutions. I have countered many many idiots who claimed I need to watch better news or buy a gun or whatever nonsense they were spewing with my advice, “try reading a book.” I am convinced if we all became regular and varied readers, we’d all by much better off.

In the past few years for BHM I have read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr’s Colored People, W.A. Spray’s The Blacks of New Brunswick, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and the short story collection Children of the Night edited by Gloria Naylor. I read all but Dhalgren for the purpose of reading black authors. Last year it was the end of February and I said damn, I should really read a black author. Then I stuck my head back into that beast of a book and never minded who wrote it. That’s a good thing, right? When you don’t even notice who the author is? It wasn’t till I got to a part he talked about a gang with blacks and whites in it and nobody cared that I realized he was black and I laughed at myself.

Black authors I’ve read outside of BHM. I think this is an important point to make. I read books for many reasons, and except for BHM, I do not read or pan books based on the author’s demographics, values, politics, religion, or anything else. I read Ender’s Game knowing full well the author was a bigot. I read Ayn Rand knowing full well that she was a nutcase. I am sorry to say I have to search for black authors I’ve read outside of BHM: Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs, Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal, Adwoa Badoe’s Between Sisters, Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is A Broken Heart, and of course Toni Morrison: Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula. I plan on reading more Morrison this year.

For 2021 I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. This has been high on my TBR list anyway, and I think I can honestly say I am not reading this because she is black. I am reading it because she’s been highly recommended by a literary friend and it’s long past the time I gave her a go. I have also watched a number of her YouTube videos where I have learned things about racism that I did not know. For example, I no longer ask people of color where their ancestral home is. I only did that because of their skin color and accent, but I never did that for new white friends. I know Adichie is a very intelligent and gifted writer and I am really looking forward to this read, especially after reading the first page: … how the bungalows here were painted the color of the sky and sat side by side like polite, well-dressed men … Yeah, this author can write!

The Writing Walls are Crumbling.

Tags

Biden, bipartisan, debate, discussion, left wing, moving forward, right wing, Trump, walls

I have had a very hard time blogging over the past four years. It wasn’t just Donny and his insane cabal but his many followers. I have unfriended many people during this reign, and I have blocked many of them. And I did try to listen. I tried to understand the divide, not just in America but in Canada and around the world . I have teased and ridiculed not only Donny but these followers. I knew converting the mindless was not possible, but they were never my target. I targeted the middle-of-the road centrists, the non-partisan voters who see truth above party politics. Unfortunately, these people tend to be more laissez-faire and vote less than the indoctrinated [on both sides]. Biden winning the vote feels like a victory but a tainted one. We are not in a good place.

Now that we have a change on the horizon, can I dump the farcical memes and get back to arguing with logic? I hope I can. I hope we all can. I would much rather see far-righters and far-lefties write out what they believe and openly discuss their arguments. I would hope we can all sit down quietly, read others’ stances on issues, and work to some consensus. It is this back and forth playing with ideas that moves us forward. It is how I move my writings forward. I don’t write knock-out stories in one go. It takes many tries of pushing that theme or pushing this character or pushing that conflict. All of my best writing has come from pushing into areas I never ended up in. The same is true, I believe, for moving forward in social and political discourse. Life is story, and those of us who write a lot of story can attest that what we think is best almost always is not.

I could not write much about life these past four years because so many have adopted views of life I do not agree with. And no, it is not just the righties. I am anti-government. When governments in my Canada want to implement new programs, I cringe, because I know my government’s debts will rise with no compensating benefit. Too many pay no service at all to our enormous debts.

What do I want to Write About?

The list is long, and I don’t claim to be qualified to write about much of it. But the following is a quick list.

• Socialism
  • what is it?
  • where should social policies fit in a capitalistic society?
  • what do Liberals really want?
  • what are Conservatives afraid of?
• Competition
  • I am for competition, when it makes sense
  • when does competition not make sense?
  • how do we manage non-competitive units so everyone is happy?
• Executive Accountability
  • this is currently a critical problem in not only America but in Canada and around the world
• Taxation
  • does the low-taxation-of-billionaires model make sense?
  • what is the logical management perspective on achieving good government?
  • of course, taxation of expatriates and management of tax fraud.
• Reading and Writing
  • I work at my writing every day. I have many ideas on making writing more interesting and relevant
  • reading is a forgotten skill. We have millions of experts who do not read anything more than Facebook posts or their favorite news headlines
  • how to correctly punctuate lists 😉
• Racial Injustice
  • unfortunately, the list is endless!
• My many other interests: books, fountain pens, inks, poetry, nutrition, diabetes, and more.

There is so much to write about and such little time to do it. I’ve been sitting on my hands for so long, I don’t really know if I can do this. Is Humpty Trumpty falling off the wall enough to get me back into this? But of course I have to write. The only way we’re going to move forward as a civilization is through discourse and debate. I remember when the Berlin Wall started to come down. It was the day my firstborn entered the world. I was so hopeful. The world really did seem to offer a brighter future. But of course we’ve erected replacement walls, and unfortunately we always will. I think the purpose of my writing and many other blogs has to be the dismantling of walls. These ideological walls need to crumble.

Learning New Words

I pay attention to words, but I haven’t always. While my literary friends were tossing around vocabulary in high school, I was tossing around baseballs, footballs, and hockey pucks. My time would have been better invested in reading and writing, but what do kids know?

We learn many words in our day to day lives. Media mostly but also interacting with people. Or we used to, back when people used larger vocabularies. I cannot remember the last time I learned a new word from a person, or from television, or radio. I now learn my words from reading and studying.

Yes, I study words. It is not easy learning something you know nothing about. Yeah, we’ll just plunge into this forest and find our way through. Nope. To study words, chance does play a part. Read Mordecai Richler or John Cheever, and I can almost guarantee you’ll learn a new word.  Cheever throws words that don’t seem to belong, at least he did in his first story, Goodbye, My Brother: That beach is a vast and preternaturally clean and simple landscape. I have seen preternaturally before, but I couldn’t define it. I was not sure what the sentence meant. So, as a lover of words, I looked it up.
Preternaturally

Definition of preternatural
1 : existing outside of nature
2 : exceeding what is natural or regular : extraordinary
wits trained to preternatural acuteness by the debates—G. L. Dickinson
3 : inexplicable by ordinary means; especially : psychic
preternatural phenomena

I take Cheever’s intention to be exceeding what is natural, as in no ordinary beach is as vast and clean, no driftwood, no people, no garbage, now beach paraphernalia. The trouble with harvesting words from other sources like reading and television is you will never build your vocabulary unless you read vast amounts. I am lucky if I learn a new word in a story, and those stupid Facebook tests all say I know some 40,000 words. Sounds like a lot, but is it? Estimates are as high as 300,000 distinct English words. Sources say that fiction readers know more words than non-fiction readers – yeah! – but it is still too slow.

My primary means of study in at Vocabulary.com.  Great, you might think. Just run through the tests and learn. That’s the theory. Inculcate yourself with various forms of questions, make your mind sort through meanings and possibilities, even force yourself to investigate further. I always have a dictionary handy, and I often search for new words in media. If I can read them in a real story, I have a much better chance of remembering them. At my age, my brain’s first order of business is forgetting, not remembering. Half the words I’ve learned — I have about 1.5 million points there — have drifted away.

Preternaturally won’t. I can almost guarantee that. There’s no better way to learn a word than to write about it. The same with inculcate. You can look that one up yourself, but recently learned it.I wrote a poem this morning called Learning New Words. I wanted to use this word, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I did write its meaning in my notebook, but I failed to write the word. Another sign of a slipping mind. But now that I’ve used it in a poem and a blog, I’ll not likely ever lose it. Enjoy!

Learning New Words

You cannot learn a new word by rote.
If all you had to do was inculcate,
an auto-play dictionary is all you’d need.
Your vocabulary would grow at incredible speed.

You need to live a word to understand it,
or you’ll end up a master of sublimate.
New words are fresh paint too easy to abrade.
You need to work them, feel them, tie them in a braid.

 

The fateful moment Walter Pidgeon and Louis B. Mayer both realized they were from the same far-flung town in Canada

Where I live.

The Film Colony ♛

A sweet moment between Walter Pidgeon and child actor Charles Severn on the set of Mrs. Miniver (1942).

Happy heavenly birthday to Walter Pidgeon who was born 120 years ago in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. The same city my great-great grandparents, Sarah and Jacob Mayer, settled in after leaving Ukraine in the late 1880s, and where they raised their children, Yetta, Ida, Louis, Ruben, and Gershon.

It is amazing to me how one far-flung Canadian community would create these two towering talents. Walter would go on to appear in well over one hundred films and Louis B. Mayer would, of course, head Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Both held industry leadership positions too and were recognised by their peers. Pidgeon was on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild for 33 years and served five as president. In 1974, the Guild gave him their…

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The Ray Bradbury Challenge

 

So we decided to try this challenge. Write a short story a week for 52 weeks.

It’s hard.

It’s very hard.

I don’t know how it can be done.

Sure, I can write a short story in a day, but we all know it won’t be finished. I have written several this year within a week. None of them were complete. Pick them upa  week or two later, a month later, and three months later and you discover how unfinished they are. I honestly don’t know how Ray did it.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say people of Ray’s ilk, writers in the 1920s, 1930s, and up to the 1960s were not inundated by television, computers, smartphones, the internet, and the global village. Their life was books, books, and more books. They read and wrote and read and wrote. Their skills at as writers 18 were light years beyond ours at the same age.

I work at my writing. I claim to understand most grammar. Yet, as I edit a piece for the fiftieth time, I still find issues. If was spelled of and I never saw it. Generalizations. Inconsistencies. Neoplasms. Weak verbs. Echoed starting sentences. Loss of agency. You name it, I do it.

I don’t know if this year’s efforts will yield publication credits, but I sure have grown. Not only am I writing short stories [all the time] but I am reading them too. My current collection is Joyce Carol Oates’ Telling Stories, an anthology for writers. The two biggest activities writers can do to improve their skills is write and read. That’s what 2018 is for me — the year of the short story.

And I have grown. It’s hard to explain how. A sense of agency in a story might be the biggest thing. And I don’t recall anyone or any book ever teaching it. This year I discovered the concept in Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story and then later at a writing workshop. Maybe I just missed it before; maybe it has been worded differently; but it’s now something I try to feel in every story I read and write.

The second thing is this nebulous concept of imagery. I have written a story called Grandpa’s Hat. It’s about my grandfather cheating on my grandmother. Complete fiction, no real names. “The end isn’t logical; the middle doesn’t lead up to your ending.” Interesting; because in my mind it did. Oh, those mid-west, small town values I included but barely showed. Oh, those things I see but nobody else did. Oh … I see now. I can’t explain any better than that, but now when I read it I feel the ending and say, “Oh my!”

So I am busy writing. I am getting there. I can feel it. I am writing stories — I wrote a new one this morning — at the rate of about one every ten days. I have returned to 750words.com and find myself writing down a new story idea about once every three days. And I have a collection started. I have a theme and many of my stories are falling in line. Need maybe six more, depending on a decision. This is a collection I never would have dreamed of writing two years ago. Thanks to keeping one’s eyes and min open. Thanks to social media. Thanks to Ray Bradbury.

Going to try to write more blog posts, but it’s hard. I’m scared of what I might write about the political scene.

 

 

 

National Poetry Month, PAD #7.

Tags

egg salad sandwiches, faith, god, jesus, religious nuts, Salin in the spirit

This is my seventh year of writing a poem a day (PAD) during National Poetry Month, April. I wrote a poem every day; though I think a couple times I didn’t post until the next day. I participate at Writers Digest Poetic Asides blog run by Robert Lee Brewer, the poetry editor for the magazine.

Robert usually gives a one-word prompt every morning. Often they will be posted at 6AM or earlier; though some days he obviously sleeps in until noon. As poetry editor, he certainly has the right. He at least has my permission. Robert likes us to name our titles after the prompt: pick a bug, title your poem with its name, and write the poem. I of course ignore such direction. For me a prompt is a trigger. I let it trigger a memory, an image, or a vague sensation, and once a word, a phrase, or an entire line takes hold, I write. It usually takes me about ten minutes to write my poems.

This was not a productive year. This is my year of the short story; which is largely why I haven’t posted in a while.. Also it’s because of #45, for I am afraid of what I might write. But back to important things: poetry. I wrote maybe 33 poems, and I did write every day. The thing is, my wife and I bought a new home in late March. We hadn’t planned to, but a house we had our eyes on dropped significantly in price. We said what the hell and bought it. We closed within two weeks, before our rent was up, and we took most of April to move. Our furniture arrived April 20. The house is a mess, and it may be years before we’re settled. It’s 29 years old and needs work. The electricians have been in and will be again. Plumbers replace all the copper tomorrow. New dishwasher, washer, and dryer have been ordered. A new Fridge might be ordered. We painted the entire place. We floored the basement (was cement). We ripped the basement steps carpet up and the steps still reek. The NB Power inspector comes this week to see if we qualify for rebates on improvements — the air exchanger is shot, the ducts need cleaning, and we want a heat pump. Not much time available for reading and writing. Not like I want.

here is a poem I wrote from two prompts. The first was the senses (one or all six) and the second prompt was write a response poem (to an earlier poem if possible). This poem is about a non-believer (in God/Jesus) who tries this nonsense and ends up staring at the ceiling lights while convulsing; the response is the pastor’s version (who we are led to believe in part one has no faith himself) who paints the person as a hopeless case as only the faithful can be slain (and evidence suggests that being slain is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy). But God has other plans, and both are humbled. Enjoy!

Slain
*if you don’t know what Slain in the Spirit is, watch this. 

You can feel it inside you
The command of God to fall and flail

You can smell his cologne wafting
Strong enough to knock you over

You can taste the after-service sandwiches
Eggs whipped to a frenzy, held together with mayo

You can see the fear in his eyes
For he knows neither of you believe

You feel his push and you laugh
Was he expecting miracles?

You stare at convulsing lights
In that fashion that says you missed something

A Gentle Touch

You stroll up here full of doubt
Want to see what it’s all about

No expectations to fall or speak
Slinking through life with no left cheek

All you really want is to turn and leave
To mingle with the women on this summer eve

Your eyes are empty distant shells
Your fingers caress your Samsung cell

I touch you gently for your fear is real
You fall and flail, and I bow and kneel

 

 

The SAD month of MAY

April was poetry month, and now May is short story month. That’s a short story a day, every day, for 31 days. I’ve done seven NaNoWriMos and eight NaPoWriMos or equivalents. I don’t want to try to name this month. NaSsWriMo?

I sat at my desk on Monday, May 1, 2017, having written 54 poems and a blog post about it, wondering what to write next. Do I pull out 2012 and commit three or four months to fixing it? Do I continue salvaging parts of 2016 to make a short story collection? Maybe I should pull out 2010 or 2014 and have a second go at those unfinished novels. 2016 called the hardest and I’d all but settled on it. That would mean skimming the 50,000 words looking for nuggets. I have pulled the first three scenes as stories already, but where to next? Always the question.

So I did what any good writer would do: I opened Facebook. Almost immediately I found a post by my friend Andrea about a contest in May to write a short story a day. We talked about this in the past on our Sunday morning write-ins, I’ve participated in 15 other x-a-day events, so I didn’t need to think about the implications very much. I went to the Story-A-Day site, signed up, took the first prompt, and wrote a 1489 word story.

Bang. #1 done. It felt great.

\The story had nothing to do with anything I’ve written before, but it was based on reality. For that reason alone, I will not share it. Especially where fiction is weaved in, and some of that fiction is not nice. Sorry I had to kill you off, X.

May 2’s prompt fit almost perfectly a scene/story for 2016 I had been pondering. I sat and wrote. I took a break at 500 words to think, ponder, and write nasty political tweets — Even though I gave up my U.S. Citizenship, I still fight for Americans living abroad. And I’ve been quite acerbic lately towards the liberal shills out there supporting #FATCA and calling people like me tax cheaters.

I could not fit today’s prompt into any existing project, which is no concern, but I could fit it into a potential 2017 NaNoWriMo story. I’ve been pondering writing Science Fiction instead of my social conscious urban literary stuff.  I only invested 313 words in it, but I think it is full of theme, conflict, and potential. The conflict is implied: we’re all becoming the same, and what does that mean for humanity. Could be my backbone theme for my seen-book series *grin* It is a very thin piece, trite, but I actually love it. I will try to write more around this piece and other ideas this month and through the busy summer ahead of me. NaSsWriMo might just make NaNoWriMo very productive.

Enjoy

Prompt: People called him The Doll Maker. Nobody ever wondered aloud why every doll had the same face.

“Did you guys see Doctor Davis’ new robots?”

The lunch table paid no attention to him. Jared set down his tray and pulled in his chair.

“He can choose any face he wants with a few clicks but he picks the same face, the same physical features for every one of them. You guys don’t find that odd?”

“Jarrod,” Emily says. “You had a busy morning? You’re late.” She stuffs a roll of California Gold into her mouth.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“Sorry,” she says as she crunches on the crusty, green roll of processed unknowns the government has certified as optimally nutritious for young scientists. She chases it with a glass of fortified water the color of the noon sky as displayed in the wall monitors. “We were just discussing Doc Davis’ new robots. Did you know he ordered them to all look identical? Why would he do that?”

Jarrod picked the gray New Jersey Jets roll up from his gray plate. “It makes no sense. You’d think he was building an army or something.”

Emily inspects her mint-green plate for crumbs but finds none. “I know. It’s so creepy. We’re not going to be able to tell which is which.”

“They’re all fucking robots,” William chimes in with his usual cheer. “Who cares what they look like? You ask for a Solar Coffee, they get you a Solar Coffee. It’s not like you’d have sex with one of them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Emily says.

“They’re all male,” Jarrod says.

“So?” says William.

“They’re all so…unremarkable,” Emily says and smiles.

“He could have selected at least some variety,” Jarrod says.

“They’re robots,” William says.

“What does he have planned?” they all say simultaneously. They stop but don’t laugh.

William picks up his blue Florida Fish Roll from his light-blue plate and looks at it. “Why are they all the same?”

 

2017 Poem A Day (PAD)

Tags

Alden Nowlan, Alliteration, Down River, Haiku, Hamza al-Khateeb, metaphor, PAD, rhyming, Sonnet, Voice

This post is about my experiences at the Writer’s Digest blog Poetic Asides; where each April Robert Lee Brewer runs a poem a day (PAD) event. In 2016 I posted every day with my poem and thoughts. It was too much, and I didn’t want to invest that effort this time. It becomes pretty dull after only a few days of mediocre poetry. Sorry bloggers, but reading our unedited, off-the-cuff poetry is too often a painful exercise.

This season I want to write about what I have learned, with examples. I don’t know how many of the 54 poems I wrote this month I will post, but it will not be double digits.

April is National Poetry Month, and for me, it has become a month to focus on poetry. Not entirely. I met with an editor this month about my novel. In my mind it is finished and ready to go, but what does ready to go mean? I am not sending it off in queries, yet, as the forces are telling me to self-publish, and do it NOW! Including my wife who has finally read my work. More on that later.

I read one complete book of poetry this month and about 30 pages of another. I picked up a copy of Alden Nowlan’s Early Poems for $8. A steal as other shops are charging $30-$40 for this 1983, posthumous publication by UNB’s Fiddlehead Press.

Nowlan writes earthy poems of simple life-events and often adds a dramatic twist. His rhyming can be forced, and he willingly strays into the dirty areas of life. You will not find a light, airy, emotional Alden Nowlan poem. I sympathize with the style and it has influenced my poetry this month. Here is one example of his work.

Down River by Alden Nowlan

In cities the embittered ones are cunning;
anguish sharpens their wits, I’ve seen the eye
glint in whoresons and beggars, its approach
quick and malicious as a common fly.

But here persistent misery endures;
growing thick-headed like a cow, it chews
thistles in mute protest against the rain
of innocence it cannot lose or use.

This poem I wrote is about a man in a funeral procession carrying a casket, upset at others, his tailor who screwed up his pants is sitting in the back of the church and the guy in front of him wearing jeans, yet he cannot see the irony of himself wearing boots. Most definitely Nowlan-influenced.

Untitled

It is so disappointing when people don’t show respect,
forty dollar dress pants too long, and the haberdasher knew Tom;
he sits at the back of the church, head bowed, embarrassed
as I step on the cuffs with the heels of my boots
afraid I’ll fall while hauling this casket
the weight of Tom’s miserable life on my shoulder,
and the guy in front of me who pretended to cry
while buddy spoke of friendship and sadness and told lies
is only wearing jeans.

Nowlan uses simple rhyming but more complex and subtle alliteration: In, cities, embittered, wits, glint in, its, quick, malicious, persistent, misery, thick, it, thistles in mute, innocence, it, cannot. Fantastic when you look for it and read it a few times. And as I sit in this down-river city with the painting of Nowlan on a brick wall along Canterbury St., look at the persistent fog and drizzle outside my office window, and walk among the thick-headed denizens, oh, do I feel this Nowlan poem beating!

I attribute the following to Nowlan Influence, especially the simple rhyming scheme.

Platinum 3776 Century SF

The sound of this fine gold nib
an this smooth, heavy paper
is the sound of a clean sheet of ice
being etched by a smooth figure skater

It traces ornate twirls as it glides
through the jungle of imagined words
jumps and spins as it writes attacking
the loudest clashing of swords

The following is in many ways concrete and earthy but the conceit is abstract: sitting in a coffee shop wondering if you fit in.

The Sound of Youth

I try to sit in silence
sip my coffee
read my book
the pages won’t lay flat
but keep closing
my eyes wander the rows
tables full of chatter
incessant social banter
not looking at faces
straining to decipher
the deafening sound of youth

I also worked through In The Palm of your Hand by the late Steve Kowit out of San Diego. I read this with some trepidation as Steve called a friend of mine illiterate after she submitted poetry using Canadian spelling. American exceptionalism? Myopia? I can’t comment, but she was not pleased. Anyway, while this book has issues with generalization, examples you have to track down in back pages, and editing snafus, this is actually a stunning read. I highly recommend it.

I am also working through the book Studying Poetry by Matterson and Jones. This is another stunning book. It is advanced and assumes you understand the basics of poetry. These authors dig deeper and discuss how poetry actually works. This month, some of this text has led me into exploring alliteration and forms of metaphor deeper, such as in the following poems.

Haiku 17417

Clothes hang from the line
strung-out lives, histories dancing
in the cold, spring wind

And this poem combines Nowlan subject matter and twist with alliteration.

Untitled

Their 54 Plymouth, festooned
with Green Giant corn cans
and full Cracker Jack boxes
rambled down county road one
scaring the deer and raccoons.

I tried not to, but I also strayed into politics again. I have often made statements such as, “America will never be able to change its ways; it can’t even adopt the metric system.” And when Robert gave a prompt of ‘metric’, I knew what I had to write.

Untitled

When hicks talk in klicks
you can bet they’ll accuse
the country of Bolshevik
influence and interference
calling the president a lunatic
and march on Capital Hill
with night sticks and booze.

The following poem hurt to write. When you write a poem, the emotional impact is many times that when you read it. I spent half a day reading about Syria; because I didn’t understand it. I stumble across this article in Al Jazeera and decide I needed to write a poem about it. It put me in the darkest mood I have ever been in. Ever! After dinner my wife and son went out and I was home alone. I couldn’t take it, so I went to my favorite pub and played trivia a night early with friends. Oh the beer went down fast!

Hamza al-Khateeb

You loved it when the rains came
filled a simple irrigation ditch
a makeshift swimming hole; you weren’t to blame
for giving your family’s money to a boy without a stitch

The Arab spring promised freedom
a loner, you joined the protest
an easy target, young and without wisdom
al’aman, security; we all assume it protects

They whipped you with steel cable
shocked your knees, elbows, hands, and face
left your tortured body on a table
a bullet in your belly, they cut off your penis

Hamza al-Khateeb, what have you seen?
you were an innocent boy; you were only thirteen

Yeah, a tough one.

Of course I also had some fun this month. Some of my poetry was light and airy and even made me smile 😉

This aphoristic poem in response to ‘in <blank> of love’

Laws of Love

There are no laws of love
no rules or conditions.
There is no bad love
to avoid
and there is no good love
to prefer,
no rolling of the dice
no depending on tossed rice.
The only love that matters
is the love you live to make.

And another metric poem.

Untitled

I waited for you
until the parking meter
ate all of my coins

It was a very good month for me. I wrote 54 poems in 30 days, learned a lot, and I explored much. I took another baby step towards learning my poetic voice and becoming a confident poet, if there even is such an animal.