Great Month for Poetry

Despite what TS Eliot wrote (“April is the cruelest month”), I think April is a great time for National Poetry Month, especially for those of us who are committing to do some extra writing during these 30 days. At least in the Northern Hemisphere, since spring is inspirational and symbolic on so many levels.

I won’t say what my plan is, because I’ve found that making too formed of a writing plan kills the project before it’s born—but I will say that I’m doing something, hopefully around a certain theme and experience. 30 days is great time frame to develop a current project or generate a new body of work.

Are you in need of some added inspiration or direction? Both the Poetic Asides blog and Poets & Writers are posting daily prompts this month.

Practicing my Cinquains

You could write some, too! They’re the perfect length for a coffee break, or while you’re waiting in a doctor’s office. See where it takes you. Relax your mind and you might be surprised - or just have a little creative fun.

Playground
Snow-covered, somnolent
Waiting, watching, remembering
A factory stood here
Space

Park
Night-shrouded, star-dazzled
Humming, tripping, thumping
Senses of old buildings
History

Umbrella
Wet, unwieldy
Folding, opening, shielding
Held against the sky
Protection

Pomegranate
Chambered, embryonic
Waiting, ripening, rotting
Not death: a circle
Seeds

Wonders of the Babelfish

Who remembers the Babelfish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which translates every language when inserted into a person's ear? Today's circuitous route of wordplay began when I logged into www.gazettenet.com and read a story about an exchange student who became malnourished while overseas. The boy's father suspected Stockholm syndrom. I didn't know what this was, so I looked it up online. I found a block of text where the content was emotional but the tone very dry and clinical. I wondered about the text's potential for transformation.

When I was in high school, I was friends with a couple of exchange students from Germany and France. I loved listening to them speak because their near fluency caused them to use English words in uncustomary ways that made literal sense but were not colloquial. They seemed to refresh the language.

Juliana Spahr used the Altavista Bablefish while composing her chapbook about Hawaii, things of each possible relation hashing against one another. She wrote poems in English, then translated them into other languages and back into English. Since the translations are literal, word order gets mixed up. Syntax is skewed. Some nuances are lost and others created.

This is a way of using chance to refresh language, one of the many ways a writer can mitigate her tired language assumptions. What I did, after translating my block of text into Russian and then back again, was to pick out the best, most surprising lines and arrange them into a poem. Maybe I didn't completely "write" it, but I did make artisitic decisions in arranging it.

strategies for to remain living

They focus on kindness’s captors. As a result,
victims know much about captors, less about themselves.
An honest reaction to the destructive working,
victims are encouraged to begin
psychological characteristics pleasing to captors.
Both feel the fear also as love in these high anxiety acts.
Victims from the existing versions
know the impossibility to act, decide, think, etc.
Perceiving their victimizers as omnipotent,
victims fasten psychologically to captors.