Quick attempt at a dance poem

Wretch
that you are
watchman
of botched steps,
the dogged eyes-
down dancer: Where

is your con-
nection? Insecure,
your graces
effloresce
like gypsum.
Transgress

your trellis,
my delicate, with no
apologies. Palm
to palm, confess
our perigee
palpable. Let’s

be like straw-
berry plants: Arms
a stolon between us.
Once aerial, now
sink into this
ground, into
this beat.

Someday
wallflowers
may fall
at your feet.

Transcribing Equations from Non-Poetry Sources

In my last post, I discussed finding equations in poems. Here’s a fun way to construct equations for a poem: take a nonwriting discipline, preferably a physical activity, or a kind of animal, or art form, and adapt its principles to a poem form.

For example, I really want to develop (and have tried so far unsuccessfully) a sonnet variation called “the Arctic Tern.” Mainly because I think it would be hilarious to make the sonnet’s “turn” (also called a “volta”) into the world’s farthest traveling bird. As I mentioned before, a good rule of thumb for poetry is that form should follow subject matter. The sonnet/tern combination would work well here because both the form and the bird wander a long way down one path, mental for the poem, physical for the bird, and then make a turn. The Arctic Tern equation would then also involve other aspects of tern life. Some possible rules in the equation:

                                                                The Arctic Tern Sonnet
1. The poem must be about the Arctic Tern
2. The poem must start in a cold place, pass through a warm place, and return to a cold place (up to your interpretation what that means)
3. Midway through the poem should be a place of feasting
4. The poem must proceed incredibly far in one direction, and then somehow return right back to where it came from.
5. As the bird returns from feeding to procreate, the poem should end in a generative act or statement, with the couplet functioning as the coupling of the two birds
Another area of the world once can raid for equations is dance and music. Music is obvious, and for a lot of history music has gone hand in hand with poetry. So take a dance form. I’ve been learning to dance West Coast Swing over the summer, a dance whose execution depends on a unique tension between two partners who stretch and compress. Poetry also depends on the use of tension, so I think West Coast could provide both apt subject matter and a relevant equation. Here’s how I might transcribe the equation:

                                                                  The West Coast Swing Poem

1. WCS: Has (normally) two dancers, a lead and a follow
    Poem: In couplets, or two subjects of the poem, or an aspect of the poem that leads and an aspect that follows, like one image following another in the train of thought.

2.  WCS: Dancers walk One, Two, Tri-Ple-Step, Tri-Ple-Step-- or “One, Two, Three And Four, Five And Six,”
     Poem: Perhaps make lines/words (long, long, short short short, short short short) or each stanza has ratio of 3(pause)/3(pause)/1/1/1(pause) /1/1/1(pause)

3. WCS: On the fourth beat, dancers “post,” or pull back slightly to half of full stretch, which is the leader signaling to the follower to stop traveling.
   Poem: A shorter fourth line, or a fourth line where tension is introduced

4. WCS: On the 6th beat, dancers reach full tension/stretch.
    Poem: Make the sixth line very tense, or bring one thing farthest away from another thing, like if you’ve made the poem about two subjects, show them at their farthest apart in stanza six, and then pull them back close together by stanza nine (that is, the third beat of a new sequence)

5. WCS: Dancers dance up and down a “slot,” with the follower going straight one way and then back the other way, and the leader stepping in and out of the slot to make way for them.
   Poem: Make the poem linear, but have it reverse directions now and then (when there is tension, which pulls it in the other direction!), have an aspect of the poem that steps out of the way for another aspect of the poem to pass.

6. WCS: Dancers roll their feet into the floor as they walk so they glide smoothly instead of flat footed
   Poem: Create a rolling meter, sounds that glide down the line and enjamb over, rather than full stops or hard consonants.

7. Ideal form: join the above form-based-on-WCS with a subject matter that IS about WCS dancing.

Now go out there and pick another hobby you love or a critter you think is cool and apply it to a poem equation!

Equations in Poems

Writing poems has often felt like working out a math problem to me; intuiting where a sound should go or how many words per line gives my brain the same workout as solving for x. Every poem follows an equation. If you work in a traditional form, the equation is super simple like addition or multiplication, for example, the sonnet: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF GG in iambic pentameter. But contemporary free verse poetry ranges from calculus to quantum mechanics.

Equations can involve elements of sound, number of syllables, words per line, parallels and juxtaposition, chiasm, number of stanzas, metaphor, reiteration and chorus, etc. A good poem builds an equation out of the subject matter. For example, Robin Coste Lewis’ poem, “Summer”:

Summer

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin
on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being

postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see
them, nor understand what I knew to be circling

inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son
to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled

a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance,
His gall—to still expect our devotion

after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed
my son the papery dead skins so he could

know, too, what it feels like when something shows up
at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.

--

At its most basic level, this poem is about two snakes, so the equation for the poem calls for 2-line (couplet) stanzas. Among other things, the equations calls for:

1. Both lines of first and last stanza have variation of the word “two” in them: “two,” “two,” “too,” “twice.”
2. The two snakes are paralleled by two human characters
3. Six sentences across six stanzas.
4. The first line of the penultimate stanza encompasses three sentences, with one full-stopped sentence in the middle.
5. After this short sentence, a long sentence follows to end the poem.
6. Enjambment of all lines.
7. In the fourth stanza, first line ends with “His ____” and second line begins “His ____”

And so on. You can lift this equation from the poem and write a new poem based on it, that will likely be pretty decent. Why? Because every good poem has a good equation behind it. The subject matter and vocabulary complete a poem, but the equation performs a lot of the heavy lifting. Compare Mark Doty’s “A Display of Mackerel" with my poem using aspects of its equation: “Bruises”. I think “Bruises” is better than most of my poems on this blog, and while I did contribute my own vocabulary to create images that are not Doty’s, the poem’s success is because it’s build on Doty’s master equation.

At our novice level, I recommend finding poems you like and trying to break them down into their equations, then writing poems using those equations. The as you grow aware of equations and their interlocking parts, you internalize them, and can later build your own.

Experiment

I would like to be simple

  a puddle of polymer 

  pink muddling in a vial

so you could clasp me

  up to the light

  after a baptism

 in silvery

  superchilled nitrogen

  as if offering

me to some deity

  in a purple latex-

  gloved petition

and find answers

  or applications

  in my love, or hints.

I would like to be one

  of your experiments

  as you have been

one of mine

  superconducting

  signs and wonders

I can align with words

    and power a city

  in the psyche

your mere moving

  through the world

stirring images

for me to siphon

  and arrange 

  in poemed pages

but I am an organic compound

                whose application
                is purely theoretical-
unstable scraps 
                   useful for something
                   not yet invented
                                         perhaps.

The Nameless Woman

We have attempted christenings guerrilla-
style, flinging water from the second
and third floor balconies like hand grenades.
Librarians can’t shelve her, and the post
offices pile up with letters to
or from her. The taxonomists have tried
to find her twig by planting countless orchards.
We draw genomes and genealogies
from memory, in hopes of conjuring her
like alchemists. A group’s been gathering
night and day at the far edge of the field
to read out lists of names from every culture--
Kehinde, Lakshmi, Isabella, Asdza,
Elizabeth, Anisha, Dipti, Anne,
Priya, Sam, Margot--
                  sometimes she comes
only to join us, calling into the woods.

Greguería

To be human is to always be
becoming someone else
who makes the same mistakes.

Skin

My skin is an attentive
listener, it brims
with pent-up weeping,
red from the exertion,
when it hears
the sun’s long, lonely stories
seeping out of heaven.

My skin remembers
what the stove, the soap,
the bramble whisper.

Like those cards
libraries no longer
insert in covers,
charting the readers,
my skin keeps
the world’s attentions.

Draped in a shifting
landscape through whose
hills and fields
of hairs I hear,
my skin blends the fine
vibrato of the mosquito,
with the swelling
to crescendo
of the wasp’s gavotte,

and by it as by candlelight
I peruse the breeze
like a letter
from a lover overseas.

Janus Revisited

All is dazzle and dark. Don’t fall
for modern philosophies-- it was all

always dualities: glory all-colored,
void all-voids. Some days God

existed, others the only voice
empty and thin, was the wind between

our offices. I closed my eyes and saw
galaxies. I opened my eyes, and a second

lens of anxieties benighted them.
Looking back, was not night

co-eternal with day, left co-eternal
with stayed, surfeit co-heir

to the fruits of our striving
with blight?

Haiku

       BURNING IN MY CHEST --

                       ON A RUN IN THE NIGHT

I INHALED A FIREFLY

The Sumac Bush

I’m startled by this sumac
increasingly resplendent
every time I see it,

growing over my neighbor’s
driveway. I so want to
get at what it is, to describe

the redness of its fruit
deepening past crimson,
deepening past ruby.

I want to understand by starting
as I usually do, with it
is like. But it is

more and more like
itself only, and chastening,
its color seems to proclaim

that a day comes when
the time for naming
will be over. Soon,

it seems to say,
it will take no imagination
to see things as they are.

Exercise in Conduplicatio (repetitions)

Ploce

 The drowning one cries, “Help! Help!”  

Paroemion

Hurry! He hails, heed his harrowing holler!  

Anaphora    

He weakens! He won’t last long!

 He is the last one left alive in the wreck!

Diacope

His arms flail, his arms flutter!

Epistrophe
Yes, his flailing arms flutter

on the water, like bathing seabirds flutter

Anatanaclasis

and he waves and he sinks and he rises!

Soon he will disappear in the waves!

Syncope

He will collapse, insensible, into darkness!

Bruises

They shapeshift with the hours
in her skin, lilac to forsythia
polygons of porphyry

inscribed with scratch marks
which outline the subcutaneous’
succulent shadows

like the mortar between tesserae
in a Pompeian mosaic.
Unfurling, polychrome

peacocks: think, emeralds
winking through the black
carapace of pyroclastic rock,

think goblets of purpura.
Penumbra, and penumbra
and not a freckle left

solitary in space
---no plane of skin
unorbited. Instead

moles, birthmarks, glint,
clots in the rubble
of a sacked city,

strings in a supernova.

Note

This poem was patterned on an equation lifted from the first 7 stanzas of Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel" which may be read here.

Cookie Manifesto

I

Even a stale cookie provides comfort, a cookie from the back of the fridge, hard, half-frozen, like a heart in mourning.

In the beginning was the dough, and the dough was made fresh, and smelled delicious. And there was much moaning and gnashing of teeth.

II

Ask not what you can do for a cookie, but what a cookie can do for you.

Pump the cookie full of performance enhancing drugs like vanilla extract and baking soda until its chocolate chips bulge like pug’s eyes.

III

Serve yourself the cookie individually, on a teacup saucer.

Dunk only your enemies in milk. Stop eating cookies with accompaniment. Let the thick cream of cookie plaster up the inside of your mouth.

IV

Tear the cookie jar from the shelf, tear the cookies themselves from the jars. Smash the cookie jars in every house you visit, in an iconoclasm of shame.

Whisper cookies to your secrets.

Simply Perfect Sweet Potatoes

a found and markov'd poem

Heat oven to 400° F.
Make It

Variation
Pierce each sweet potato several times with the sweet potato.
Piercing each sweet potato intensifies their sweetness.

Variation
Top with 1 tablespoon of sweet potatoes.

Variation
Make a slit in the temperature.

Variation
If you crave something over the top, try some walnuts in adobo, a pinch of maple syrup, a handful of applesauce or honey, jarred ginger, burnt orange, crystallized chipotles, or caramelized sour cream.

Variation

Top with the tines of a fork

Julia Child Emphasizes Asparagus

found and markov'd poem The show opens with Child stressing the importance of asparagus, the exceptional taste of asparagus, the importance of preparing asparagus. Child emphasizes the importance of cook and eat asparagus and her ingredients over heat asparagus. Child demonstrates how to judge, purchase, and salt. She demonstrates how it can be served cold as well as a substitute for a custard, or a change. Child stresses over heat unusual in a salad course. Child stresses over how much she asparagus. She points over heat until it becomes a sparagus. Child emphasizes the French way, you preparagus.

(--)ily

Enter Emily: Anchoritic anomaly, imprisoned in Amherst -- an insubordinate inhabitant -- immured, immobilized, in anxiety (anorexia?) -- Enacting an intimate, invisible insurrection, Emily envisioned empire, immortality, amorous encounters-- engendered ingenious images-- ennobling, unnerving, enduring images -- images enfolding images -- analogies -- intensities in indian ink invoking entities, energies, infinities in an instant -- America! An Amazon! Animals, insects, amphibians -- emeralds, amethysts, ambers, indigos -- anemones, inlets! -- indigenous angiosperms, inselbergs immolated in amaryllises! -- Intuiting amity in enmity, invigoration in ennui, ennoblement in entropy, Emily ended enduring endogamous antagonism. Indecent interpretations. Inserted injustices. Impaired, incised, analyzed, embargoed. Entombed, inaudible, in anthologies. Ended in infamy. In mis- Understandings. “Miss Emily.” “Poetess.” -- Missing the indefinable defined in the em --

Rubus Occidentalis

Black caps

ruby through obsidian

unripe sparks in the green,

I glimpse you -- your inflamed

hearts, tangled in their summer

tack. Behold, my bold bright

beauties sleeping, your beloved

bridegroom comes through

the thicket. To my lips

I press you with the pink

caps of my fingers, dappled

purple and pierced by your

displeasure. Gracelessness

has cost me, but my arms,

laced with the raised red thread

your thorns inlaid, will carry

you over the threshold

of my teeth. This tongue

where you have lain,

and stained, shall sing

your aubades even when

your taste has faded, for I forage with

the haste that others throw away

in prayer -- to saints aglow

in gilded alcoves and

in their backseat or motel-room affairs.

The Stupid Bus

for the 33 Everyone must get

on the stupid bus
going in the wrong direction

in one big loop
instead of here to there.
Everyone must get

used to absurdity
on the stupid bus
going in the wrong direction.

It’s like a joke nobody gets
delivered like one
everyone must get,

How you could have walked
a mile the right way instead of
going in the wrong direction,

if you didn’t sweat, and if
you didn’t have so much to carry.
Everyone must get

on, so there’s camaraderie,
and plenty to see out windows
going in the wrong direction.

Anyway it’s an unacknowledged truth
that to get going at all-- you, me,
everyone-- must get
going in the wrong direction.

City Eater

All around us
the red brick houses sizzle
like steaks in the heat,
their layered slabs of rust the
russet grain of muscle, their concrete
interstices the grey fat marbling
the meat.
The gutters seem to swirl
with gravy, and the potholes gobble up
the buttered crumbs that fall
under the table from a cornbread
sun.
The skyline’s highrise incisors
flash, full of cavities a hunger

for the spun sugar of clouds has
fostered.
 One by one
those cotton candy cumuli dissolve
into mirages on the highway’s tongue.

The Dance

The wind does not command
the tree. The tree does not dance
until a handsome wind asks. The wind
slips a single finger against the small
of the bark-laced back. The leaves
lean their cheeks against the billowing
shoulder. The two spin in the low
glowing of the sun’s chandelier
as wallflowers wink from other branches.
They keep dancing for what seems
like forever, a graceful gust
around a wooden waist.

Then, when a couple hundred
years of songs have passed, the strong
arm dips,  the supple spine
reclines. Verdant hair touches
the forest floor as roots
weightlessly upturn into the air.

DIY: a song of myself

“Listen to
yourself.

talk to
yourself

and others
will also.”

-- “Poem Written in by Dreams by W.C.W.” via Allen Ginsberg

Often, I have sparked arguments keeping my thoughts to myself. I like to keep to myself. I keep myself as one keeps vigil. I keep myself as one keeps chickens, in the coop of myself, where my self can glut on the good seed of myself and couple with the cock of my self. I pray long hours to myself at midnight, in the dark night of myself.  I brood by myself and hatch my self, myself. When they remark how quiet I am, I know it is the beginning of a great conversation-- they with themself. Yes! I am full of myself. I want others to be too. Things must be full so they can overflow. A selfless self is like a chapel without a chant, or a coop without a cluck. Nobody should be left selfless, if only for the sake of song.

Substitutions

When I quit smoking,
I started carrying a pack
of cards. I went all in.
I put out aces
in ashtrays everywhere.

And when, in the evening, I peeped
in the lamplit windows, I saw
a bouquet of white roses, giant
and brighter than the moon.
Deer in Diana’s headlights,
my dreams devoured me.

Spring came, I grew sick
of my friends. I gathered
cherry blossoms, listless and lovely.

Among the unfeeling grass,
I married them.

10 Ways of Looking at a Dogwood in Bloom

I
Deliverer of envelopes
without their letters, or letters sent
backwards. Unlicked, unstamped
unaddressed, unfolded, unwritten.

II
Shards of porcelain and the shadow
of the nurse’s cat as it escapes
across the green shag.

III
Refurbished brooch
an heirloom bezel boiling over
with new cabochons. Soon
to be stripped again.

IV
A reason.

V
A catch-colt loosed, casting
its dark limbs like lots
in new snow drifts. Hoof-
scythed skyward, flakes fall
a second time, on its back
like a burial.

VI.
A reason
but not
a pardon.

VII
A garden of moss-stained
gravestones, over which
hover ghosts of gone-by
butterflies. A catbird
leaves a nest
in lieu of flowers.

VIII
A collection of all words
that go at the end of letters:
sincerely, love, all the best
p.s., yours.

IX
A gift delivered like a pardon.
A pardon delivered like a child
stillborn. Not awful
unto itself.

X
All the best, yours.
All the worst,
yours.