Florilegium: Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi is the newest addition to my list of favorite writers. Her books are mysterious, magical, disturbing, and beautiful. Boy Snow Bird is the first novel I read by her, and this found poem was really difficult to put together because her prose is already so poetic and spare. I'm not totally satisfied with it, but here it is.

Death isn’t anything to run toward, 

    doesn’t stop me

but it certainly isn’t anything to run from

    wishing you were my bad luck.

I’ve always wanted to know 

    somewhere along the line there’ll be weirdness

what kind of person the name was supposed to 

    stick with it ’til the end and

help me grow up, either.

Novel with calendula

Florilegium: 2001: A Space Odyssey

I had never seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, so my dad borrowed it from the library and we watched it together. What a trip that was! I immediately wanted to read the book and see how it compared—and I was fascinated by Clarke's imaginings. This poem is the florilegium I put together after reading it.

He was prepared, he thought, for any wonder

but discontent had come into his soul.

Infinite range and all but infinite power:

the shining silence it could never reach.

We do not know if you will meet with good or evil—or only with ruins

across another half billion miles of comet-haunted emptiness.

He had taken one small step. It was unreasonable to expect more.

Though there was still plenty of talking,

you could be terrified, but you could not be worried.

I never imagined I'd be an amateur brain surgeon—

carrying out a lobotomy beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Everyone who looked an inch beyond his nose

would find his life, his values, his philosophy, subtly changed

over the restless Jovian cloudscape.

Already he had seen wonders for which many men

would have sacrificed their lives. 

The only thing he had never expected was the utterly commonplace

flooding the land below with its radiance. 

 

Library book with lily of the valley

 

Florilegium: Hag-Seed

Recently, I spent a year reading with the intention to look out for "sparklets" that jumped out at me from the text and to then arrange these gems into found poems, or florilegia. This poem is one I constructed from the novel Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, which is a re-imagining of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale.

She did not exist

in the usual way

The brain completes the illusion

as much as anyone can

All you need is a few items: 

the right words in the right order

Working out his own destiny

would have been a shock to her

From now on the boy will be 

a magic flying blue alien 

 

 

Library book with calendula and scabiosa

Introducing Florilegia Found Poems

Ever since I stopped going to church regularly, I’ve been looking for something to salve the spiritual hole in my heart. A couple years ago, I found it: the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. In this weekly missive, two divinity school graduates (a non-practicing Christian and an atheist Jew) discuss progressive values, living with intention, and finding the sacred in the everyday through a close reading of one chapter at a time of this great series. I recommend it if any of that sounds appealing to you!

One of the best gifts I’ve taken from the podcast is a new activity of writing found poems based on florilegia. Podcast hosts Casper and Vanessa create florilegia as a way of sacred reading. I’ve tweaked the practice for my own use as a way to further engage with the books I read.

A florilegium is a gathering of writings or quotations; Merriam-Webster says that “editors who compile florilegia … can be thought of as gathering a bouquet of sweet literary blossoms.” As I read, when a sentence or phrase jumps off the page, I copy it down. Then when I’m done with the book, I read through these blossoms and cut and arrange them. It’s fun both as a writing exercise and as a way to study the text more deeply.

Of course, not every book makes good found poetry — some stories are simply entertaining, and that’s fine. But introspective memoirs, novels that wrestle with big, thorny questions, and volumes of poetry are fertile ground for growing and gathering these poems.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share some of the florilegium poems I’ve created for these books and others.

Let’s Try This Again: Time's Avenue

After a 3-year hiatus due to, you know, life and death and stuff, Dragon’s Meow is back! Making time for art, writing, and contemplation never ceases to be a challenge — but I have a hopeful feeling about the coming months, friends.

This post is about an artist’s date I took with my friends Lauren Kindle and her daughter in Manhattan last December. Lauren’s a big Chagall fan, so we started out by visiting Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922 at the Jewish Museum. Then we walked down 5th Avenue and decided to visit the Guggenheim, too, because a friend of Lauren’s had heartily recommended Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. The show was amazing! Transcendent, even.

Seeing the two shows in the order we did felt like walking through a story of unfolding consciousness. That’s what this poem is about.

Time’s Avenue

In the beginning were the lovers,
drinking wine and dancing in the village.
The houses — upside down and sideways.
The goats — in the air, everywhere.
Next, the idealists moved in.
Angular and colorless, they edged out
the old master’s dream-creations.
Finally, the realist unspooled her mind.
Her thoughts were multicolored,
geometric yet generous, so we could travel
through space and spiral into ourselves,
then out again into a library of voices.


Here are some pictures of the art and architecture that inspired the poem.

“the lovers, / drinking wine and dancing”

Marc Chagall, Double Portrait with Wine Glass, 1917-18

“Her thoughts were multicolored…”

Admiring The Ten Largest by Hilma af Klint

“we could travel / through space and spiral into ourselves”

The “library of voices”

The Aye Simon Reading Room

Poetry and the Selfie

Yesterday, thanks to a Facebook post by Shape&Nature Press, I read a great post on Literary Hub. In Poet Selfies: Searching for the Thing-In-Itselfie, 39 poets respond to questions about selfies. The answers range from surrealist and goofy to heartfelt and thought provoking. It was also cool to see the non-traditional selfies that some of the poets supplied and I felt inspired by their responses to write one of my own. I was at first surprised and then not surprised by my answer, which I’m sharing below. 

Question: What is the relationship between poetry and the selfie?

I don't like my selfies when I'm the only person in them. I've tried and failed to take a solo selfie I like, even in awesome situations like at concerts or while rock climbing. And it's not because I don't like how I look. It's because I don't like seeing myself alone.

I'm an only child, but I didn't mind that until I was 8 and my parents moved us from a New York City apartment building that served as my neighborhood to a small town in Pennsylvania where the kids on the street thought I was weird and made fun of me (for being tall or Episcopalian or a bookworm or something—and later for having purple hair).

I made friends at school and at the church where my mom worked, but something in me never got over the loneliness of the next 10 years spent without any neighborhood friends. For the first year or so, I had imaginary friends. Tracy lived three blocks down the hill and was always sitting on her front porch swing when I walked by to get her on my way to the corner store. David hung out in the yard that bordered ours in the back and would hop the fence to climb part way up the spruce tree and then just sit with me.

When those friends faded away I turned to nature and books. These have been my refuge and my sources of inspiration, poetic and otherwise, ever since.

I take selfies with other people to capture moments, and also to prove to myself that I'm not alone. Look, I have a friend, she's not imaginary, she shows up in pixels! 

Answer: The poem explores what the selfie avoids.

Winter Solstice Poem

I wrote this poem in response to the wonderful food grown at Mountain View Farm in Easthampton, MA. For this December's distribution of our "community supported agriculture" share, they made it extra special with these luminaries! 

Prayer in Winter

  

Luminous paper bags show the way

to parsnips, carrots, beets

summer radiance transformed

for sale at the farm stand.

May this food

shine through me

let my words light the path

for people trying to find

food on a cold night,

nothing but paper in their fists.

The horizon is heavy

the future is leaden

but still we push back
with our little lights.