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Friday, April 29, 2022

Poetry Friday: Taylor Mali is...

April's challenge for Poetry Month was to write "in the style of" Taylor Mali. If you're only vaguely familiar with this poet (as I was) here's a great link to several of his spoken word poems. They are sweeping, circular explorations, sturdy with extended metaphor, and pointedly opinionated. During our ZOOM session, I tried to explain why Mali's long, re-iterative poems hit a nerve for me, and why such poems are a joy to dive into, but even so, I had to agree that WRITING in that style was going to be a big ask.

So I went back and re-engaged with that list of his poems. One, called Labeling Keys, sang to me. His father's secret language for coding which key belonged to which lock is a beautiful way to talk about poetry---and it reminded my that any form can be a a way to unlock what you want to say. So, despite my love of his expansive poetry, my "in the style of Taylor Mali" poem is concise.

Haiku concise. Yeah. That was a surprise.

I did try to imitate his flair for unusual metaphor, his humor, his repetition, and his penchant for mild swearing. If you feel like it, drop me a "Taylor Mali is...." haiku in the comments.

Getting There

Taylor Mali is

the road unpaved; throwing bones;

the long confession

Taylor Mali is

what you wish you’d said right then—

tart as blackberries

Taylor Mali is

the backbeat; what’s up your sleeve;

your heart exploding

Taylor Mali is

waking up past your bus stop;

a backpack of bees

Taylor Mali is

an unfolding map of words;

not your damn haiku

My Poetry Sisters' "in the style of" Taylor Mali poems are here:

Kelly

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Jone Rush MacCulloch.

Friday, March 25, 2022

Poetry Friday: It's Greek Japanese to Me (Ekphrastic Dodoitsu)

Creating together--it's our 2022 poetry theme. For March, we're exploring the Japanese form of dodoitsu, which is a four line poem that's syllable-based, using a 7-7-7-5 pattern. Thematically, the form often talks of love or work, using a comic twist to leaven its commentary.

To make this challenge more communal, we each donated to a pool of off-beat photos, and wrote in response to as many of them as we wished. (That's the ekphrastic part-- a Greek word describing "a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.")

I wrote two dodoitsu, one mentioning work, and both about love.

(thanks to Mary Lee Hahn for the image)

(thanks to Liz Garton Scanlon for the image)

More wonderfully wry and vivid dodoitsu here:

Kelly

Poetry Friday is hosted today by The Poem Farm.

Friday, February 25, 2022

Poetry Friday: Exquisite Corpse

Me, circa 1st grade,
looking quizzical

Hey, friends--this isn't a pop quiz, because I'm giving you the answer, but have you noticed that the Poetry Sisters have a sort-of theme for 2022? Let me explain:

Last month, we dipped into the sounds around us and borrowed overheard words to create our poems. This month, we're doing "exquisite corpse" poetry---which has nothing to do with a morgue and everything to do with sharing words as a community. In essence, we divvied up the task of writing a poem by each contributing one line. The twist was that we only saw the line before our own until we all viewed the whole thing on the day of our ZOOM meeting.

That was nervy of us. Would it hang together in any fashion? Would it veer into vagueness or get bogged down in unconnected detail? Would it even be a poem?

Well, y'all---it worked. It was a poem--a somewhat unbalanced, but beautiful poem. We took time to marvel at it, and to talk about how each line inspired the next, and then....we pulled it apart. No holds barred. We each took the draft we'd created together and made something new from it, on the spot. From individual to community back to individual again.

Have you guessed the theme now? I've used the words "community" and "together." Not to mention "borrowed" and "sharing." Okay, and "individual," too, because being part of a community doesn't mean losing yourself as an independent person. Yup. I think you get it: in 2022, we're concentrating on forms that allow us to create in communal ways.

Sure, the Poetry Sisters have focused on supporting each other and posting together (since April 2008!) but when we also lift the expectation that we must create drafts completely on our own, in our separate poet cubicles, well...the result is...

exquisite.

I hope you'll explore all the ways my Poetry Sisters took the following communal draft and created a poem that spoke to each of us. First, the draft, loosely based on the "exquisite corpse" ideas in this post, and then my take on it:

Community Draft

This month, odd one out, running short on days and sleep,
This month, past meets pride, roots ripped from native soil still somehow grow.
The once-bright future dims. Shadows grow
but there, near canyon rim, in broken light
the yearling hawk shrieked in futile fury
and the steel-edged clouds looked away
trees bow and bend on a blustery day
that rattles old oak leaves down the street.

-----The Poetry Sisters

For my take, as I began to work with this poem, I was careful to leave lines intact, and to delicately prune here and there. It felt, after all, not like a corpse, but a body of work, vibrating with life. But the more I played, the more I saw ways this poem could evolve. Change wouldn't destroy it. Neither would curiosity. So...I grew bolder. I moved words around. Then, whole lines. I started looking at each word as a deep well of possibilities, and soon, I was even letting a verb be a noun (wild, huh?) The more I worked, the more empowering and exciting it felt to have these vivid and lovely words supplied to me, a gift that I could use in any way I chose. Thank you, Laura, Mary Lee, Tanita, Andi, Tricia, Liz, and Kelly.

Still--as free as I felt, I did have a focus: that hawk. To me, he was the "odd one out" in all the best ways, and I wanted to write about him.