Nearly cheating, I know, but I finished off another triolet in the Beatriz sequence. Real poem, really!

I started with Joanne’s link to O’Hara, and re-read “The Day Lady Died”, and then randomly looked at all the poems whose first line begin with M and found Pound’s translation of “The Seafarer”. And realized that I wanted to riff on it. So I began:

I sing for myself               words of my own making
to ride out rough times               in rough seas.
The chop and calm               become the same,
the current carries               pain and pleasure
equally away               and equally as fast.

but I am much too tired to keep it up. I want to come back to this one. (This makes the third poem I have swirling that is a translation of an existing poem, all in languages I do not speak.)

I got nowhere with the arches. Really, I tried. No poem, no scribbling.

I do not want to write today
said little Peggy Ann McKay.
I have a life, or maybe tunes,
would rather sport and run with loons.
(Bad picture, there,
what do I care?)
I have a tic in my right eye
that makes my meter go awry.
My pencil’s wet, my pen is dry,
alliterations multiply.
My neck is stiff, personas weak,
you’ll hardly miss me when I sneak
some stolen words into my verse.
NaPoWriMo can’t get much worse…

I think the last two days’ work has been too serious. Today, at Job 2, Clayton gave me this punchline (which, on another night, could have become a serious poem, and still might):

For a Botanist

Key this leaf.
Monocot? Dicot?
Its time of flowering?
Its neighbors in the field
or wood or coastline of the marsh?
The men who’ve walked
out of the rising sun
(their skin too pale
to know its rays)
have offered me my weight
in millet for these stringy stems
found roadside
as they entered my domain.
Ah, my kingdom…

I was challenged to re-write yesterday‘s poem idea without a rapist, as they are, possibly, “easy antagonists”. (See “Mr Hyde’s Daughter”.)

So, I got about twenty lines in, building story, but don’t think I have the stamina tonight to finish. Violence is short-hand for many things but sister-speaking is a longer thing. More on this later.

Opening lines:

You went when the banners came.
Your war found me mid-field,
misbehaving, tongue-slip of your name
stilling the overseer’s slap. Magic

I took Peg’s line from yesterday about the harp and wrote something. The opening lines go:

I had Nero’s fiddle as a role-model
but four strings only bring a city down.

because I may take down the graphic later:
[poof]

Seventeen lines on the immorality of toads, thanks to Ryan.  Like everything I write, it started with me and some meter, and I thought I had left the toads behind until they made for a good twist to the trajectory.

A line-break darling:

no bird can sing, neither can the sun
come up, but they are metaphor

This one I would like to polish and do something with.

I nearly wrote about copper tungsten this evening because I was still being goaded by Jeannine’s periodic table from yesterday and CuW has such a beautiful look to it.

Instead, I did my 3 pages of scribbling, which went all over (but neither to arches nor tungsten), and ended up with a sonnet idea and an almost-quatrain.  Perhaps something to come back to, tomorrow.

I had intended to post last night with my goals for this writing marathon and having failed to do so I feel as if I am already behind.

My goal is to write every day, not just every weekday. If it’s new scribbling, I’m holding myself to my three page rule from last time. I would like to work on Queen of the Steppe if so motivated, so I’m going to count revision as writing. Also, I would like to write at least one (new) pantoum because the journal is becoming all triolets, all the time.

Tonight? There are so many options, Joanne gives metaphor,
the Portland Art Museum an enchanting picture of arches I must return to, Jeannine the periodic table. So I confess to jealousy:

The whole world’s made of metal
to an astro geek, too heavy
with its many shells and layers,
banal in its scarcity.
Give me exploding pink shockwaves
of hydrogen, abundant mother
material whose lightweight arms
curve matter with the grip of gravity.

Real spark even if not high art. What fun.