Poetry Friday: A Rum of a List

December's challenge is a list poem, using at least three of these words:

paper, stars, messages, promises, dirt, flour, rum, hope

Good words, those (thanks, Liz!) However, I got side-tracked by rum. I don't even like rum that much. But it's a fun word with a fun history, and yeah...I guess it went to my head.

SarapulSar38/ Getty Images

Rum, clouded
with ginger beer and lime:
Dark and Stormy.

Rum, sluiced
with sugar and nutmeg (or cinnamon):
Bumbo, hope of pirates.

Rum, dirtied
with water ’til Black Tot Day:
Grog, a naval ration.

Rum, crushed
with biscuits, cocoa, pecans:
High-proof bites on wax paper.

Rum, promised
to raisins, to butter, to no-flour
puddings: On message…but…

Rum, besotted
by two-mocha cake:
Starred Recipe, below.



Double-chocolate Rum Cake


1 (18.5 oz.) Package Chocolate Cake Mix
1 (3.5 oz) Package Chocolate Instant Pudding Mix
4 Eggs
1 Cup Black Rum
3/4 Cup Water
1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil
1 (12 oz.) Package Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips, divided
1 Cup Raspberry Preserves (Seedless saves time, or strain, as below.)
2 Tbsp. Shortening
1 oz. White Chocolate


1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 12-cup bundt pan, 10 inch tube pan or a 10 inch springform pan. Combine cake mix, pudding mix, eggs, 1/2 cup rum, water and oil in a large mixing bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat on low speed until moistened. Beat at medium speed for 2 minutes. Stir in 1 cup of the chocolate chips. Pour batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean. Cool in pan for 15 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool on a rack.

 2. In a small saucepan, heat preserves and remaining 1/2 cup rum. Strain through a sieve to remove seeds. Place cake on a serving plate. Prick surface of cake with fork. Brush raspberry glaze evenly over cake, allowing cake to absorb glaze. Repeat until all the glaze has been absorbed.

3. In a glass bowl, combine remaining chocolate chips and shortening. Microwave on medium-high heat until melted, about 1 minute. Stir until smooth. Spoon chocolate icing over cake. Let stand 10 minutes. Melt white chocolate and drizzle on top of chocolate icing. Let stand 10 more minutes.


Also, I'll be checking out these 10 Unusual Ways to Cook with Rum.


See what my fellow poets made of their lists:

Liz
Laura
Tanita
Tricia
Kelly
Andi

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Elizabeth Steinglass.

Poetry Friday: A Raven, the Shade of Shadow

Photo Credit: Wallpaper Abyss

A raven,
the shade of shadow,
robs the roofline of its clean edges,
each caustic call a spike in morning's throat. 

                                       ---Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)




I usually introduce the challenge before the poem, but this month, it was so short, I thought I'd switch it up. The challenge (from Laura) was to compose a short poem (six lines or less) describing an animal of your choice using all three of these words: spike, roof, shadow.  What would YOU describe with these words?


My Poetry Sisters' poems are here:

Liz
Tanita
Laura
Kelly
Andi
Tricia

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference.

Poetry Friday: Before You (a cento)

The Tattered Cover, Denver, CO

Ever take something that wasn't yours? Did it haunt you?

What about a memory?  Can you borrow another person's eyes and see what they've seen? (Isn't that what fiction does?)

 And how about all the words you've consumed in the course of a reading life....you don't ever give them back, of course, but how many can you reuse in a row without giving the original author credit?

None of these questions are really addressed by this month's challenge, in which the Poetry Sisters "borrow" lines from other poets to make new poems, an art form known as the cento. Still, in creating one, the poet has to decide what the limits of appropriation are...as well as how to make something fresh out of "used" material.

To top it off, there really aren't a lot of rules.

To help with that last point, I threw down two additional guidelines for our centos, mostly to unify them. 

1)  We would each chose a different word from this common stanza to begin:

“This dream of water—what does it harbor?
I see Argentina and Paraguay
under a curfew of glass, their colors
breaking, like oil. The night in Uruguay”
---- "I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror" by Agha Shahid Ali

And then...

2)  Using our chosen word, we would each search the database at Poets.org for other poems which also had lines containing that word. The lines we found would be the building blocks of our new poems. (All lines are credited to the original poets at the end of our centos.)

I chose the word "see" from Ali's stanza and found it to be the perfect doorway to other poems and poets.  Turns out poets "see" a lot.  Or they think they do.  I could work with that.


Before you

My childhood home I see again, and sadden with the view;
Is this a dream?—I see my grandpa milking,
I see the quilted mountains

I see my mother over the hot oil in the fryers
Are those my brothers, down there, those I see evacuating?
Because I see a part and not the whole,

I see us everywhere. On occasions of fancyness,
I see the lilacs crackling like static
I see it as music, I hear it as light;

I see how our lives have unfolded:
I see her hitchhiking the stars’ tar road—
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth:
I see Argentina and Paraguay
I can see the flaws in the glass

I see the whole morning before you.

            ----A Cento, compiled by Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

Line Credits:

1) My Childhood Home I See Again by Abraham Lincoln
2) One A.M. by David Young
3) Balance, onslaught by Khadijah Queen
4) The Red Sweater by Joseph O. Legaspi
5) Alamogordo 1945 by Adriano Spatola
6) I Know My Soul by Claude McKay
7) Never Ever by Branda Shaughnessy
8) Combustion by Sara Eliza Johnson
9 ) Roads by Amy Lowell
10) White Sands by Arthur Sze
11) The Last Kingdom by Jennifer Foerster
12) My Shadow by Robert Louis Stevenson
13) Modern Love: XXVI by George Meredith
14)  I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror by Agha Shahid Ali
15) Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood
16) For You by Maureen N. McLane

Please find my Poetry Sisters' links to their centos below.  To a word, they are gorgeous.

Liz (with breaking)
Tanita (with like)
Laura (with glass)
Tricia (with under)

Andi and Kelly are on break.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Beyond LiteracyLink.