Poetry Homeless Shelter: A Poem Sharing Event

I used to participate in a Sunday event called Poetry Pantry, which had its good points. But I thought it would be cool to have something more decentralized, free form, less intimidating, so I made a graphic and started this. Rules and details of the event below.

Forest Phases

the giants’ mothers

bomb

holes in the prairies

in iraq

not in iraq

the giants’ mothers

are

the bones of the forest

the pride

of the grass blades

the giants’ daughters

weep

far from their homes

far

from holes

the giants themselves

humiliate

the peaks of everest

in dreams

not in dreams

* * *

To Participate

If you are a poet, post a poem of yours as a comment to this post. Or post the poem on your own blog, post a few lines as a comment here with a link to your own blog post.

If you are not a poet, share a bit from a favorite poem—include poet’s name– in a comment, or post a poetry related post on your own blog, and a sample bit of the post with a link to a comment here.

Share a link to this post on your social media accounts. You may copy my graphic from this post to put on your own post.

I am not the boss of how you do this event, any more than I am in charge of how people write limericks on bathroom walls.

Does your poetry suck? Post it anyway. Do most people not get your work? Post it anyway. Did your English teacher tell you your poetry is an atrocity against the English language? Oh, you have definitely got to post that!

Read a few of the poems by other people, or not. Comment, or not. Try not to be a critic but a magical silver unicorn munching on bacon.

Note: on my particular blog I don’t want to see poems full of raunchy language or eroticism, or any links that lead to porno sites, but that doesn’t mean you can’t participate in this event with risque poetry. Just don’t post your naughty bits here.

Poetry Isn’t

The thing about 

P O E T R Y

is that it is not

a bunch of prose

***like a diary entry***

written all strung out in poetic lines.

Most of us got quite a few bum steers about poetry from school. Often they never ask us to read poetry and one day they hand us an assignment to write a haiku or free verse or whatever. The assignment sheet often included a few poem attempts written by other school children to keep us down to that level. The teachers would elicit the kind of poetry they wanted— in ghettoized minority-group schools, kids were expected to write about their poor, miserable lives to make readers feel racial guilt— the kids mustn’t be allowed to let their spirits soar or anything. Kids had to write environmental crap and pollution and how people must quit having children since kids are just another form of pollution— for reasons of indoctrination, rather then any intention of letting kids write actual poetry with actual poetic values.

School poems were praised for political reasons or just because every creative thing had to be praised to the skies to raise ‘self-esteem.’ And so we have teenagers or twenty-somethings who pull out their self-concerned, whiny, prosy diary entries and write them in poetic lines and expect to be praised somehow. 

Poetry is not just prose in poetic lines! Poems are full of meanings and images and sounds and rhythms and are more like condensed prose than prose-in-poetic-lines.

The way to learn poetry is this: READ poems of all sorts, good and bad, rhymed/metered and not. Avoid poetry from university poetry mags which can be heavy on dreck. Read poetry for YEARS, find some favorite poets and if they are people like Robert Service, so be it. Read your favorite poems over and over until you can recite them.

Then, when your poetic brain has ripened, start throwing words against the wall. Don’t revise them or plan them or make much of them. Just compose, write it down, and file the poems. Write on the computer or legal pads or a bathroom wall. By the time you’ve written a hundred or so poems, there are probably some good ones in the collection. If desired, get ‘Poet’s Market’ from Writer’s Digest Books and find some places to submit your poems to. In time you will get published. If you get published in more than one ‘zine, perhaps you are a Real Poet and can self-publish your poems in book or ebook form. Or perhaps you aren’t. Who knows?

And this is the One True Way to write poetry and become a poet. Or that’s what I’m claiming today, anyway.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

haiku

cats are melting

into the blue tiled floor

heat wave

(c) 2016

Learning About Poetry in an Anti-Poetry World

Even way back when I was in school, they didn’t teach poetry very well. I don’t remember learning much about poetry at all. I know my 6^th grade English book had a short poem at the beginning of each chapter, which the teacher ignored. Some were by e. e. cummings, which was a major influence on the absolute lack of capital letters in my early poetry.

I know we had an assignment to write haiku in 6^th grade, but I do not remember us ever being asked to READ any haiku in translation. It was more a syllable-counting exercise. I doubt any of us wrote anything that a real haiku poet would recognize as haiku. 

In high school, I had a teacher who gave us mimeographed pages with the words to Beatles songs in lieu of poetry. At the time I didn’t care much for Beatles songs— the Beatles were so OVER. I liked the Carpenters, Frankie Yankovic, and the Monkees instead. 

I also liked real poetry. My mom had a book called ‘The Best Loved Poems of the American People’ and I did read in it— at least the short poems, and the funny ones. 

Used to be some people thought that all poetry had to have rhyme and meter. Later, some people turned up their noses at poetry like that, calling it ‘greeting card verse.’ It IS hard to write rhymed-and-metered poetry without sounding trite, but some people can do it. Louis L’Amour, the famed Western writer, published a volume of poetry with many sonnets as his first book. I could no more write a sonnet than I could flap my arms and fly to Chicago.

Reading poetry, ideally from an early age, is the key to writing poetry. Think of it this way— poetry is another language, like German or Volapük. You learn a new language better if you start it before age 12— and if you don’t learn ANY language before age 12, as in the case of feral children, you likely will never learn to be a language user.

If you are older and haven’t much experience with poetry, you may never become a full ‘native speaker’ of the language of poetry. You may end up speaking the poetry language with a prose accent. But even if you are age 99, reading widely in poetry is a good step, for cultural literacy reasons even if you don’t plan on expressing yourself in poetic ways. 

What is YOUR history in reading poetry and learning about poetry? Share in a comment!

Poetic days to you,

Nissa Annakindt

 

Author-bloggers! My new FB group about author-blogs needs more victims (members.) Join at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/310331253293318/

becoming a dragonfly

Here is a poem I wrote two years ago, which should make it just ripe. Shared on Poets United’s Poetry Pantry.

becoming a dragonfly

and this is my life
since becoming a dragonfly i float
in the windows of the nobles to steal
their jewels
which i give to the old priest
who feeds the poor
and gives them rosaries
made with his old bent hands
and Job’s tears

over all of this the emperor
watches and smiles
fearing only the assassination attempts
made by the moon
that is his life
which shines and sparkles
but cannot fly
or find solitude

(c) 2016 Nissa Annakindt

This poem was written from the keywords ‘dragonfly, jewels, emperor, moon’ which I got from the book ‘Writing Poetry from the inside out’ by Sandford Lyne. This is one of the better ‘how to write poetry’ books I have, and I have written several poems from the long lists of keywords in the back of the book.

One expression that younger people may be unfamiliar with in the poem is ‘Job’s tears.’ Job’s tears is a plant with large seeds that are strung on threads to make rosaries. Job, on the other hand, is the main figure in one of the longest and most poetic books of the Old Testament.

---

I recently bought a book on the Romantic Poets, in the Ignatius Critical Edition series. It was the only book I found in the series that dealt with poetry and not prose. The series is edited by Joseph Pearce, who is not only an ‘acclaimed literary biographer,’ but he did some lectures on Shakespeare on the television channel EWTN.

---

Teaching Children to hate poetry

One way children are taught to hate poetry in the schools is when teachers put out signals that poetry is far too horrible and difficult for children, and that children’s exposure to the awful stuff must be limited. I had an English teacher in high school that was like that. To save us from the horror of reading an actual poem, he gave us lessons where he handed out sheets with Beatles song lyrics on them, which we were supposed to treat as if they were from the pen of Emily Dickinson.

The teacher thought he was being ‘cool.’ But while he, a rather young teacher, could remember Beatlemania as if it were yesterday, the children in his classroom thought of the Beatles as something that happened in the old days, like Kennedy’s assassination or Johnson lifting up his dog by the ears. I tended to look on Beatles lyrics only for their influence on Charles Manson and his followers— I was already a true crime geek.

So the upshot was we weren’t to read a great poet of the past, or even some contemporary poetry, but just song lyrics. Song lyrics may have poetry in them, but the main thing is song lyrics can be sung, the songs recorded, and sold for money. Lots of money if they make it to the top of the charts. The teacher had taught us that we didn’t have to read poetry, we could just listen to popular song lyrics instead. I think though if he had handed us a sheet with Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too,’ we might have coped with the horror of POETRY and even enjoyed it.

---

Follow me on Twitter or GAB: @nissalovescats  (Same on both services.)

Learning to promote a poetry book

This is the cover of one of my poetry books, Where the Opium Cactus Grows. It contains most of my earlier poetic output. I used to think my poems were humorous because some of them make me laugh like a loon, but this book made my mother cry. So I don’t really know how to evaluate it.

When I came out with this book I didn’t know much about how any self-published book could be promoted, much less how to do it with a poetry book. I’ve read a lot of how-to-promote-books info since then. But I’ve been shy about applying it to my poetry, because, well, it’s poetry. And as I put the books together myself, I can see all the things I should have done better.

One of the problems is that I need to gain some fans for my blog and social media accounts who like poetry. On Twitter I have been following accounts that tweet haikus and other short poetry. I also have changed the title of my account there to “Nissa Annakindt, poet, Aspie and cat person.” Which is also the title of my Facebook author page.

One thing I have learned that the self-published authors who gain readers don’t publish just one book and wait for it to sell. You have to keep producing. To that end I am determined to come out with my next poetry book, Waiting for the Poison Shot, sometime this year. To make my life really impossible, I also seem to be committed to a book of found poetry created from the speeches of annoying Left-wing people. I think this will be an anthology with other conservative poets involved.

The main think I believe is that we shouldn’t be ashamed of the fact that our poetry books are— poetry. Yeah, some people don’t like poetry. There are also some people that hate romance novels, but that doesn’t stop romance writers from promoting their books. Be brave and find your ‘tribe’— a group of people who actually appreciates your work.

eggs in a cool place

This is another post in Poets United’s Poetry Pantry. Go to their site to read more.

eggs in a cool place

A stale egg rises in water
fresh eggs are heavy
and sink to the bottom
farewell I gladly bid thee

Eggs should be well covered
and kept in a cool place
wash eggs just before using
thy life is vain and sinful

Eggs should never be boiled
as that renders them tough
they should be cooked
just under the boiling point
I long to be in heaven

In the early spring or fall
when eggs are plentiful at at their best,
pack them away for future use
where they will be rewarded.

1-4-18 (c) Nissa Annakindt

This is an example of found poetry inspired by a poetry book I have just purchased, ‘Mornings Like This’ by Annie Dillard.
My main source was an old cookbook of mine, ‘The Settlement Cook Book’ by Mrs Simon Kander, 1947 edition. The last line in each stanza was from a hymn, Farewell I Gladly Give Thee, (Valet will ich dir geben) written by Valerius Herberger, 1613, translated by Catherine Winkworth, 1863.

Since this is a very newly written poem, some things are uncertain. I don’t really know what I am going to do about capitalizations and punctuations, for example. I don’t really know whether this poem is more than temporary amusement for me. I like to let a poem ‘cook’ for a while before I make final revisions. A lot of hard work ahead, like putting a comma in and then later taking it out. 😉

Buying Poetry Books:

I believe every poet would do well to buy books by other poets— or poetry magazines or anthologies— on a regular basis. We learn more from each poem we write. I bought the Annie Dillard book ‘Mornings Like This’ because it is found poetry, and because I am working on a major poetic project based on found poetry. I didn’t expect much and was quite pleased I was more inspired by it than I ever thought possible.

Future blog post project

I am planning a future blog post with a title ‘How to teach students to hate poetry.’ My contention is that school poetry lessons in most schools do a lot to make students hate poetry, rather than like it or read it. Since I suspect today’s blog post may be visited by a number of poets and poetry lovers, I would welcome your opinions on the teaching of poetry.

Ethics and Political Found Poetry

Recently I bought a book which was titled ‘The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump’ which was, according to the book cover, ‘created by Rob Sears.’ According to the inside flap, Rob Sears lives in Great Britain and has written fiction and comedy. Not poetry, evidently.

Creating poems from other people’s words is called found poetry. I haven’t done much pure found poetry, but I have mixed in a lot of found words and phrases from various sources into my poems.

Political found poetry seems to be a form of political mockery mostly. There was a ‘poet’ who created found poetry from the words of Donald Rumsfeld. He won a court case which found his work was his own creation and not just ripping off Donald Rumsfeld’s words.

One good thing Rob Sears did was document the source of every line from the utterances of Donald Trump. Sadly, most of these sources were tweets. Usually very well publicised tweets. One alleged haiku had 4 different sources. Four sources for a three lined poem? Sears adds TITLES to his ‘haiku’, and they also have their own sources.

His sources for lines in each individual found poem can be decades apart and on differing topics. This bothers me. He is basically asserting that Trump said certain things about one topic while he actually said them about another. If you are going that route, you might as well take words from various subjects one at a time and you can make your subject say any stupid thing you like. But then it isn’t truly a found poem. It’s a concocted poem which falsely represents your subject-person.

Ethical rule: no matter how much a found poet may dislike his subject, the poet must not intentionally misrepresent that subject’s real stated viewpoints and ideas. You cannot turn Donald Trump into a hard-core anti-semite, for example, because of all the Jewish relatives he has. You cannot turn Elizabeth Warren into someone who hates American Indians, because she claims to be one.

Another ethical rule: Write found political poems about the leaders of your own country, if you please. It’s kind of dirty pool if you write about a foreign leader when you don’t fully understand both sides of the political equation in that country. It’s also just cruel to the citizens of your target nation. Making fun of their politics is another way to make fun of THEM. Mocking people for coming from a different nation than yours is a form of prejudice. You have the freedom of speech to utter prejudiced thoughts— but I have the freedom not to read them.

I am writing some political found poems myself lately— most of them derived from the speeches of Nancy Pelosi. I disagree with Miss Pelosi on many issues, and I’m appalled she considers herself Catholic. But I don’t feel that I can, as a Christian, hate her or any of her supporters. When I write a poem based on her speeches I take 1 speech, and I don’t introduce any opinions of my own intentionally. I’m trying to write about what she really says, not what I think she should have said.

 

Here is a short poem, called a Collom or Collom lune, taken from a Nancy Pelosi speech. It is from a gun control speech. I don’t agree with her speech. But I don’t wish to distort anything she says, either. (Colloms really shouldn’t have titles, so I just repeat the first line. I use the titles for filing purposes, mainly. I handle haiku the same way.)

Commonsense Gun Violence

Commonsense gun violence
Legislation – all over the country
Every single day

Source:
Nancy Pelosi speech
07-14-16

You can look up the full text of the speech on Pelosi’s official web page.

Cement Shrouds

CONTENT WARNING: POETRY

I used to share a poem on this blog on Sundays, but haven’t done it for ages. Today that will change. Since I’ve been sorting through my old poems in the process of assembling my third poetry book, I’ve been more conscious of my lack of poetry postings. I know poetry seems to offend so many people— I lost a Twitter follower over it. At least, one that I know about who actually told me to quit Tweeting poetry as if I’m going to shape my Twitter life to fit him, ONE follower.

I have been writing quite a bit of minimalist poetry in recent years. Haiku, of course. And Collom lunes. There are two kinds of lunes, both more suitable for school children’s poem writing projects than the haiku, which has a long history and a lot of rules— a haiku is not just counting syllables.

The Collom lune counts words, not syllables, in an 3-5-3 pattern. Learn more about regular lunes and Collom lunes here: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides/poets/poetic-form-lune

This seems like a lot of introduction for a tiny little poem, doesn’t it? Anyway, here it is. Duck!

Cement Shrouds

the teacher uses
cement shrouds to keep us
lined up proper

 

Shared on Poets United

How to write like uber-popular author Louis L’Amour

Louis L’Amour was born in 1908 and died in 1988. The heyday of his writing career was in the 1950s and 1960s. But— a few weeks ago I went into WalMart in the book section to find a Louis L’Amour book still available.

What is the secret of Louis L’Amour’s fiction-writing power? Why is he, a writer known for writing Westerns, not the most popular genre today, still on the WalMart buyer’s mind as someone to keep in stock? It may be in the nature of the very first book Louis L’Amour published.  A book of his poetry called Smoke from this Altar.

You see, here is the difference between writing a novel and writing poetry. In a novel there are thousands of words, and a writer who worries overmuch about whether word 27322 is exactly the most powerful and best word for that position doesn’t finish many novels. Words and sentences in a novel can be bland or dull, so long as the action in the novel keeps coming and you find ways to make readers identify with the characters.

In a poem, every word counts. A novel can have unnecessary words, sentences and even paragraphs so long as they don’t interfere with the flow of the story. A poem must not have a single word that does not serve the poetic purpose. The words in a poem must be powerful and evocative. Even the sounds and rhythms of words must be considered in a poem.

So what happens when a poet, or someone who loves and reads poetry, writes a novel? The language gifts of the poet may find their way into the prose, making it more powerful. Here is an example taken from L’Amour’s ‘The Sackett Brand.’

“The trouble was, when I walked out on that point my mind went a-rambling like wild geese down a western sky.

What I looked upon was a sight of lovely country. Right at my feet was the river, a-churning and a-thrashing at least six hundred feet below me, with here and there a deep blue pool. Across the river, and clean to the horizon to the north and east of me, was the finest stand of pine timber this side of the Smokies.

Knobs of craggy rock thrust up, with occasional ridges showing bare spines to the westward where the timber thinned out and the country finally became desert. In front of me, but miles away, a gigantic wall reared up. That wall was at least a thousand feet higher than where I now stood, though this was high ground.”

Lest you think the above example was too descriptive, rest assured that someone gets shot by the end of the page. It still is an action-packed western. It’s just that L’Amour knew how to use language very well, as a result of his work as a poet. So he could through in a good bit of description that could bring the West to life.

If you are curious about the poems of L’Mour, his book ‘Smoke on the Water’ is available and so you can see for yourself. But until you get so far, here is an example poem that tells a Western story.

I have three friends, three faithful friends,
more faithful could not be-
and every night, by the dim firelight,
they come to sit with me.

the first of these is tall and thin
with hollow cheeks, and a toothless grin,
a ghastly tare, and scraggly hair,
and an ugly lump for a chin.

the second of these is short and fat
with beady eyes, like a starving rat-
he was soaked in sin to his oily skin,
and verminous, at that

the crouching one is of ape-like plan,
formed like a beast that resembled man:
a freakish thing, with arms a-swing,
and he was the third of that gruesome clan.

the first I stabbed with a Chinese knife,
and left on the white beach sand,
with his ghastly stare, and blood-soaked hair,
and an out-flung, claw-like hand;

the fat one stole a crumbling crust,
that he wolfed in his swinish way-
so i left him there, with eyes a-glare,
and his head cut of half-way.

we fought to kill, the brute and i,
that the one that lived might eat,
so i killed him too, and made a stew,
and dined on human meat.

and so these three come to visit me,
when without the night winds howl-
the one with the leer, the one with a sneer,
and and one with a brutish scowl;

their lips are dumb, but the three dead come
and cough by the hollow great-
the man that i stabbed, the man that i cut,
and the gruesome thing that i ate.

their lips are sealed, with blood congealed,
but they will not let me be,
and so they haunt, grim, ghastly, and gaunt,
till death shall set me free.

i have three friends, three faithful friends,
more faithful could not be-
and every night, by the dim firelight,
they come to sit with me.

#Micropoetry should be Tweeted

Poetry is dead? No, not really. Not on Twitter, anyway. There is a brave gang of us brave fools who share our shortest poems there— #micropoetry. There are a lot of #haiku. Some of them are actual haiku and others are more #senryu or other short poems.

Micropoetry is a great fit for our age when we have no attention spans and are trained by the FakeNews media to think in slogans and soundbites. Just as the longer poems were a fit for the Victorian age when local newspapers printed poems regularly and people read them.

Asian short poetic forms are a good fit for Twitter poetry and micropoetry. The sijo poem is too long to fit into a Tweet, but some have shared them in graphic form as Twitter poetry. Haiku is a natural. I often do Collom lunes, a poetic form of 3-5-3 words. I checked the hashtag #CollomLune and found others besides myself had used it, especially an antisemitic pro-palestinian fellow who is very persistent in his use of the hashtag.

I have been neglecting my poetic life for a few months and work up determined to do something about that. I looked up Collom lune online again so I could read a few and be inspired. Then I walked into the kitchen and saw a mother cat with a baby. Not actually HER baby, but a baby. And memorialized it in a Collom lune.

Cat Mama

cat sits on

small box. kitten is nursing

from her anyway.

 

Of course, Tweeting my poem, submitting it on Micropoetry.com, and posting it in this blog post mean that I can’t submit the poem to most poetry markets. But since poetry markets don’t pay, and most are aggressively unfriendly to conservative voices, I’m not worried about that. I can always include them in my next poetry book. Which I ought to start writing one of these days now.

Where the Opium Cactus Grows: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0557939135/