Lamb-eyes, lathes, & buoyancy.
My responses to your poetry challenges—plus a new challenge for you.
Below, my rollicking attempts to respond to two readers’ poetry challenges! I think the end result for both poems was playful and perhaps a bit cheesy, but today I’m feeling both those things! Might as well draw on such giddy and fun emotions while they’re present. I really enjoyed the push to learn and/or use vocabulary that isn’t part of my everyday pool of words.
1. Challenge from Peter Tunstall:
TOPIC: tears, hagiography, lambs and lions, time, a storm.
MOOD: grim, innocent, incantatory, confused.
NUMBER: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32.
WORDS: treachery, telemetry, bruised, shorn, fluke, paradox, craft, fraught, weigh, deep, end, face, calamity, grace, lathe, haunt.
My poem:
A Paradoxickal Vita
In the deep end of his life, Saint Reticent—
his bruised face unfit for treachery (two lambs
for eyes, conjoined lion cubs for a uvula, brows
shorn from their footings with misguided style)
invented a craft; a system.
Hit young with an affliction—a haunt of tears whenever
he’d speak—a genetic fluke, his nerves were unequal
to singing, quizzing, or even flinging words
at others. Sure, he’d speak when alone, to himself or
to any animal who’d listen and offer opinions,
but in human company? Always a quietude; calamity.
Timidity a merciless lathe that shaped his days
with a machine-like lack of rage; as if a weigh-in of
the pros and cons had been done by some committee
of sociopaths. So it was one evening (in the bath,
conversing with a thrush who’d hopped in under the door
to escape a summer storm) the agéd saint birthed
telemetry and its accoutrements—devices to transmit,
sensors to collect, software to analyze what’s said,
and hardware too of course, since
one cannot put the cart before the horse.
His infrastructures and servers employed thousands
of engineers, til at last he was prepared to transmit
his first words to humanity. Words of grace;
of God. He wrested them from his head,
typed them in, hit “return,” then dropped dead.
Sadly, it didn’t send. Something something LAN—
UDP—bandwidth—mailer
daemon—failure! His body
was retrieved by bees and a beaver family,
embalmed with honey, then buried at (shallow) sea
after his hairs were plucked for nest-linings,
a strand to every bird on earth. And thus
we ought to pray—whenever prepping to declaim—
in birdy forests (in between checking our phones
for messages, in good Saint Reticent’s name).
My comments
Good grief Peter! haha, you gave me quite an assignment. I know you, so I know your “Number” refers to absolutely anything (rather than line numbers), and you gave me six options! (Or you gave me a geometric progression.) I decided, with a dash of obstinance, to ignore them entirely. Similarly with the words—you gave me umpteen! Hardly fair, mister. But I believe I used them all.
To make this poem, I had to look up telemetry, and pluck some vocabulary from that world. (It refers to automatic, remote communications systems). I also researched the different types of hagiographical forms (hagiography is the writing of the lives of saints).
I learned about the vita, the passio, the inventio or revelatio, the translatio, the visio, and the miraculum, each of them types of biographies that focus on different aspects of the saint’s life or death. I ended up using rough variations of the vita (a story about a saint’s achievements) and the translatio (describing what was done with the saint’s relics, or remains).
My favorite part of this challenge was finding a way to include “confused” in the mood. I eventually landed on confusion around why his message wouldn’t send.
Thanks for a great challenge that let me meet poor sad shy Saint Reticent!
2. Challenge from Kate Copeland:
TOPIC = aeroplane(s)
MOOD = buoyant
NUMBER OF LINES: 12-15
FIVE WORDS TO INCLUDE = joy / suitcase(s) / waiting / clouds / bubble
My poem:
when I come
with lift
I’ll climb the ceiling
pre-shook, waiting
to be unbattened
un screwed
I’ll clothe your city’s lawns
in effervescence
from my bubble-drawn carriage
I’ll touch down
yawing with prowling-cat joy
through cloud cover
make your town
mine
my suitcase in your room:
home
My comments:
Thank you Kate! Your assignment immediately made me picture a long-distance relationship, specifically the buoyancy and high anticipation of meeting after a long time apart. The sexually charged wordplay kind of sprang up of its own accord, I suppose quite reasonably from imagining this scene!
Given the vocab/topics of clouds and aeroplane, I looked up vocabulary around flight and aerodynamics. That was fun. And I found way more cool stuff that I didn’t end up using—like the fantastic word camber (referring to the curvature of a wing).
Another poetry challenge!
If you’d like to try your hand, here’s another poetry challenge:
10 lines
A persona poem told from the point of view of a group of two or more beings—using first person plural (we, us, our, ours)
Switches moods partway through—from gloomy to happy, anxious to calm, or vice versa, or any other mood transition.
Uses at least one vocabulary word that you either don’t know, or have never used before in a poem
And last but not least, a survey!
Next time, I’ll be writing about how to know when a poem is truly finished.
After that, what poetry topics would you like me to write about?
Leave a comment below—I’d love to hear. As a quick reminder, here’s a list of what I’ve already covered (but each of these topics have many other potential facets to explore, so even if it’s already listed below, let me know more specifically what you’re thinking of).
The craft of impact (surprise, goosebumps, etc)
Grabbing in-between moments to write
Poetry in large forms (eg. poetry novels)