"Tell me a story” may have been how the literary arts began.
Telling stories the job of much early poetry, whose “poetical” aspects--the refrains and the tropes (those “rosy fingers of dawn” and “wine dark seas”)-- served, in part, as mnemonic devices, so that the poet would either not forget what came next, or could fill in time until he remembered it.
But Homer, I think, had some pretty great ideas. Narrative--an underlying story or even a hint of story--can help to keep a reader engaged in a poem in ways that even beautiful language may not. This seems to me to be especially true in longer pieces where narrative, even small fragments of narrative, can really help to keep a reader engaged. (You thought, for example, that you wanted to tour the Wasteland on foot, but Eliot’s little bits of implied story sprinkled throughout the poem--”Marie/Marie, hold on tight,”-- serve as friends who repeatedly stop and give the reader a lift.)
Narrative can appear in many different ways in a poem--sometimes so slyly that one can't exactly find the story, but glimpse the mere silhouette of a story, sometimes even just a curve of a silhouette. Yet, even that little bit of story still always feels like a friend to me, as reader, helping to carry me along.
So, here’s your task for the prompt. Simply think of some story in writing your poem--it could be the story of a moment or of a lifetime--and it need not be fully detailed. The poem may offer a bird’s eye view of the story or the small close-up of a magnifying glass, maybe just a sidelong glimpse. (It does not have to be a story of human beings; it could be the story of a rock or a raindrop.)
And, I repeat!--the story does not need to be told in full (unless you really do have a ballad in mind!)
Though, honestly, it would be great to distill your piece, keep it compressed, since we are writing poems or prose poems, and not full short stories. (Keeping something short is very hard so I’m not setting a word or line limit--only posing the challenge.)
I put up some drawings I’ve done that could be used in conjunction with your poems if you like; I tried to pick pieces that have story-like elements. NO REQUIREMENT TO USE ANY--but if you do use them, please give credit to me, Karin Gustafson.
Finally, an apology for not participating much of late--it’s been a very hard few months for me due to family illness, job, and country. I am so grateful to Kerry for letting me stay on with the group despite my inability to truly play along! I will be in airport when this posts, but I will be on my way home and will comment as soon as I can.
As I cast off on my maiden voyage as a host of the occasional 'Scribble It' prompt here in the garden ( I am honored by the way. Thank You Kerry for the invite) I came to pondering about your experiences of 'First Times'.
Were you Nervous? Excited? Full of anticipation.Unawares?
Where does that list of 'First Times' begin? Where might it end?
First steps, first teeth, first words, first flight, first kiss, first fall, first love, first....you get the drift.
Please pen me a poem that speaks in some way of a 'First Time,' one already met or perhaps to come.
Once penned please add your poem to the Mr Linky below.
Don't forget to visit each other to read and comment. It makes this community what it is.
Here's a little grist for the mill in both music and word. Enjoy.
The Scribbler ;)
Always For The First Time
by Andre Breton
Always for the first time Hardly do I know you by sight You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window A wholly imaginary house It is there that from one second to the next In the inviolate darkness I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring The one and only rift In the facade and in my heart The closer I come to you In reality The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room Where you appear alone before me At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness The elusive angle of a curtain It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse With the diagonal slant of its girls picking Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare Before them a T-square of dazzling light The curtain invisibly raised In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep You as though you could be The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you You pretend not to know I am watching you Marvelously I am no longer sure you know You idleness brings tears to my eyes A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures It's a honeydew hunt There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings Flaring out in the center of a great white clover There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time
Welcome to the Tuesday Platform, your unprompted free-range day for sharing poems in the Imaginary Garden. Please link up a poem, old or new, and spend some time this week visiting the offerings of our fellow writers.
Welcome to the Weekend Mini Challengewith
Kim from writinginnorthnorfolk.com!
One of my favourite poems by Philip Larkin is ‘The
Building’, which I cannot reproduce here due to copyright restrictions.
However, I can provide a link to the poem HERE
as well as a link to a YouTube recording of Larkin reading his poem:
What I like about it is the way in which the poem conveys
the physical appearance and atmosphere of a hospital without once using the
term ‘hospital’, through the use of certain words and connotations.
Today’s challenge is to write about a building. It could be a
specific building with a name that we would all know without directly naming
it. It could be a church, a school or a building in which you have lived. It
could be a department store, a government building or a concert hall. It is up
to the reader to work out what the building is. Your poem does not have to
consist of nine stanzas like Larkin’s and can be in any form you choose, but it
should be a new poem.
Link up your new poem via Mr. Linky, visit other Toads, and leave some friendly graffiti on their buildings! It'll be fun trying to work out what those buildings are. Happy building!
Ahhhhh, the dulcet tones of guitar hero J. Mascis and his band Dinosaur Jr.! I figure any Toads who might be parents, and/or who know and love teenagers, and/or who were ever teenagers ourselves, can appreciate and find some fodder for writing in here. See if you can get to the end without feeling a little something in your eye. Love, love, enjoy!
Hey. Look up there. It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's a Skywriter! But wait. What's that traveling alongside? It's...it's...that aerial curiosity called a Fireblossom!
For our collaboration, which I can safely say we both thoroughly enjoyed working on, we have written a cascade poem. Without further ado, here is our poem.
POEM
OF A SILENT WOMAN
You think I am
silent; truth is, I never hush.
I am flow as well as bung; either way, I offer much.
You concern yourself with rind; not much further is the fruit.
The climbing rose grows bare and shaded at the root.
I am a west-wind owl in open
sky-- I create.
You are the saddle and boot, the
bull at the gate;
Wild mane, tossing tail, I canter
beyond the sagebrush.
You think I am silent;
truth is, I never hush.
My gate is vined,
and latched and tall
But opens, lockless, every Fall;
I am baskets hung with tendrils--fire--frost--and flush--
I am flow as well as bung; either way, I offer much.
You believe that
you know all that I am,
Read my smile
wrong, think me a lamb.
I am child of the
moon, ebb and tide--no absolute.
You concern
yourself with rind; not much further is the fruit.
Come by the moon--new, quarter, and full--
by degrees, shows its turned face--then shows all;
come through the gate--with the season slip through--
Welcome to the Imaginary Garden ... Greetings to all poets, travelers and friends ....
JULY 18 :: MANDELA DAY
This is the perfect day for me to touch upon our theme for 2017: Being Human. Today is Mandela Day which is commemorated annually on the date of the late Nelson Mandela's birth. The clip is a short interview with South African poet, Nkateko Masinga who is participating in the annual 67 Poems for Freedom for Mandela Day, hosted by UNISA Poetry Society, in which she recites one of her poems
It is also coincidentally the anniversary of the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads. Yes! Unbelievably, this site opened for business on July 18, 2011, which means we are officially 6 years old. Our origins were humble but we remained true to our concept of membership and became a support base for emerging poets as a place not only to showcase our writing but also to share ideas, encourage divergent thinking and make valuable connections within the online poetry community. These have stood the test of time. In celebration of our anniversary, we have relaunched our Toads in Tandem, in which members pair up and produce collaborative poetry. Please remember to stop by tomorrow to read the combine efforts of Fireblossom and Skylover.
And now, I open the floor to all who are here to participate in the open link. I suppose it would be too much for me to expect 67 poems, but feel free to dig into your archives, as far back as 2011, and share more than one post today.
Wallace-Wells starts with the
assumption that the human community will continue fail to rally the sufficient
motivation, energy and resources to address the immediate problem of climate change; that
the Paris Accord temperature rise boundary of two degrees Celsius by the end
of this century will be flagrantly surpassed, and that the planet will have been warmed at
least by four degrees with eight degrees at the upper arches of probability. If you live in the United States, it’s easy to
see how likely this more dire scenario may come to pass.
Noting that the last time the
planet was four degrees warmer the oceans were hundreds of feet higher than
now, Wallace-Wells then looks at the array of consequences which go far beyond
the mere drowning of our coasts: massive animal extinctions; insufferable heat rendering
uninhabitable large swaths around the Equator; diminished food
production; droughts withering the world’s arable lands; diseases not seen for
millions of years released as permafrost melts; ozone smog pollutions rising to
levels that will make the Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 look like blue sky
forever. Heat breeds violence, and incessant war will lead to permanent
economic collapse. Oceans will die, and Earth will become a dead zone, survived
only by bacteria living at the vents at the deep ocean.
And let’s remember, these processes
will continue to build over time, so if the Earth’s temperature eventually
rises 11 or 12 degrees, Earth becomes Venus—a dead broiler. No wonder Eton Musk
and Steven Hawking are separately urging us toward rapid deployment of extra-planetary
colonization.
Wallace-Wells doesn't believe all
these things will come to pass because eventually humankind wake up, smell
the burning and commit finally to act. But what is so daunting (and perhaps
damning) is that we haven't reached that point yet. We’ve become accustomed to
rough news and harsh predictions about the earth; but with the terms so
abstract, our narratives are hard-pressed to factor them in. (Where were you
when carbon in the atmosphere passed 400 ppm?) And how much must be lost to future generations before enough is enough?
Wallace-Wells received some flack
from scientific community for the essay–not because the science is wrong, but because
it focuses so intently on worst outcomes. Pennyslvania State University's
Michael Mann, a climate researcher who has been sharp in fighting climate
change skepticism in the past, posted a rebuttal on his Facebook page soon
after the essay's publication. "The evidence that climate change is a
serious problem that we must contend with now is overwhelming on its own,"
he wrote. "There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when
it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness."
In a follow-up
post, Wallace-Wells rejected Mann's "doomist" characterization of
his essay. "Personally, I don't think we're doomed, just facing own a very
big challenge. But I own up to the alarmism in the story, which I describe as
an effort to survey the worst-case-scenario climate landscape. We have suffered
from a terrible failure of imagination when it comes to climate change, I
argue, and that is in part because most of us do not understand the real risks
and horrors that warming can bring."
In the original essay,
Wallace-Wells wondered why it is that humankind is so ill-equipped to deal with
this enormous challenge. We have the technology to address it (many are now
focusing on carbon capture, developing the means of extracting carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere): but our will to act is weak, distracted, enervated by
tiny screens and mindless pleasures. He cites a book-length essay, The Great Derangement by novelist Amitav
Ghosh, which suggests that our failure is primarily one of imagination. According
to Ghosh, writes Wallace-Wells, “the
dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of
stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to
emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous
miasma of social fate.”
Could it be that our human imagination needs to grow up in order
to see the peril ballooning before our eyes?
Two books I read recently provide some examples of how to accomplish
that. In While Glaciers Slept: Being
Human in a Time of Climate Change, M. Jackson writes about studying
glaciers in Alaska at the same time she experiences the death of one and then
the other parent. Her grief provides the imaginative scale she needs to find
words for the titanic theme of melting glaciers:
I cannot untangle in my mind the
scientific study of climate change and the death of my parents. My whole life,
climate change has been progressing, and I cannot understand realistically what
has happened to my family without stepping back and seeing what is happening to
this world. There are too many parallels, and, at times, there is too much
darkness. They can't be separated. The language and, to some extent, the
experiences for both remain deeply similar. Just as when I could not imagine my
parents' deaths, so I now hear us talk of climate change as an event we cannot
look beyond, we cannot imagine, of which we cannot see the other side. The
blindness clouds the reality that we are both in the midst of and on the other
side of climate change. The unimaginable is happening right now. Our job
remains, then, to begin re-imagining courageously. (21)
The other book is Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics For The Anthropocene. In it Purdy finds a
way to move our imagination of nature from private experience into the public (and
political) arena. A healthy environmental imagination means seeing clearly what
has been lost while at the same time envisioning the possibilities of what
remains. “Losing nature need not mean losing the value of the living world, but
it will mean engaging it differently,” he writes.
It may mean learning to find beauty
in ordinary places, not just wonder in wild ones. It may mean treasuring places
that are irremediably damaged, learning to prize what is neither pure nor
natural, but just is—the always imperfect joint product of human powers and the
natural world. All of this will require a vocabulary, an ethics, an aesthetics,
and a politics, for a time when the meaning of nature is ultimately a human
question. And since it is a question we must answer together, it should—but not
necessarily will—receive a democratic answer.” (10)
If we are stuck here (we may not survive to the day when the
extra-terrestrial visions of Hawking and Musk can come to pass), then we have
to figure out a better way to see our world and co-habit in it.Collective self-restraint within a framework
of political and regulatory action may not seem quite like the drastic measure
needed, but that in itself represent a radical change from the present. And it
is at essence an imaginative act, one we have to collectively dream our way
toward.
Without finding a way to charge our imaginations to this task,
we are left with living-dead and atavistic head-in-the-sand metaphors and daily
footage of slow annihilation. How long we wait will define the weird sense of
time to come. Wallace-Wells writes,
Surely this blindness will not last —
the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer
world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we
will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control
typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly
with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The
strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new
categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider
and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans
used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in
its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about “deep
time” — the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or
that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us
is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”:
the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of
encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors,
heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching
footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening
all at once.
And this, my fellow Pondsters, brings me at last to today's
challenge.
In a poem of any length or style, imagine for us the plight of
this world and your place in it—as citizen, sibling, primate, victim, survivor and
singer. What do you love, what would you not lose, and where can you take us
which shows us how that place will continue?
Some other ways into this vision challenge:
How
is poetry best suited for imagining the world now coming into view as a result
of climate change?
The
other day, an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off from the Larsen shelf Antarctica. Relate that event to the intimate details of your own life that
day.
How
is our sense of time changing? How do our short human lives stand in relation
to deep time, and what does it mean to become a change agent of that eternity?
What
does if feel like to have a heart full of grief for a changing world?
What
is there to celebrate as the sixth massive species die-off in the history of
the Earth now unfolds?
Do
humans have a place in the world's future, or should we stop advocating for our
survival?
In
a world that has been largely changed or damaged by human influence, just what
does the natural now look and feel like, and how might that be different from
the sublime encounters of a John Muir?
If
the world is visibly transforming before our eyes and we are yet finding it
difficult to see, what else are we missing?
Are
we developing a cultural autism, rendering us unable to read affliction in the
face of the world? As nature degrades, is there something forever lost in the
human as well?
Take a good, deep, long, grieving, loving look at the world ... then come back and tell us what you behold.
Bang, you're dead. Maybe that crazy kid driver ran you down, or maybe the aneurysm you didn't know was in your head exploded. It could have been any of a thousand things, but no matter how you slice it, you won't be participating in that charity run this afternoon.
Still, this doesn't have to be the end, despite what you might have heard. Don't you feel like you still have something to say? Don't be shy. After all, what can anyone do to you now? Presentation is strictly up to you. Automatic writing, poltergeist activity, dream messages from the great beyond. C'mon, get happy! You're gonna slay 'em.
So. To whom may I direct your (phantom) call? What do you want, spirit? Time is money, chop chop, let's go. You're killing me here. Just write an original NEW poem and sign the linky. It never, uh, expires.
Welcome to the Tuesday Platform, a place for sharing poetry. How? Link up a poem from your blog, old or new. Then visit, read, and comment on the offerings of others. Simple! Enjoy, and we look forward to reading your work.
Greetings, dear Toads, and welcome to another Weekend
Mini-Challenge. Today, the Prompt Muse (yes, she exists) comes bearing flowers,
bugs, herbs… and three phrases (because in my challenges *and in stories* the
best things come in threes).
The
prompt is simple: write a 3-stanza
poem using one of the following images plus the phrase that precedes it.
Feel free to share the photo with your poem (credit the photographer). If
you choose not to share your chosen image, please add a note letting the rest
of us know which photo inspired your poem.
Nearly high noon of summer here in the northern hemisphere.
What they won't say anymore, or ask, is what happened to birdsong?
Maybe it's only here in concrete southern California - maybe where you are, there are more than crow squawks and gull cries and the occasional dove coo at dusk.
For this edition of get listed, see if you can bring the sounds of summer to the page - something missing, or maybe something just waiting to get noticed again.
As always, please post an original poem to your blog, link that pen to Mr. Linky, then visit back to read and comment on the other poems as the days go by. The prompt will remain open.
Please use at least 3 of these words (or reasonable variants):
What happens when runaway sentence and a dash of sunny team up? Magic! When Marian and I first began writing we were practically on the same wavelength and ended up selecting the same topic. Writing alongside her was an amazing experience! Hope you guys like our poem.
The form we chose is called Huitain also known as The Monk's Stanza (first introduced in the Garden by Kerry a few years ago, here). The verse form was popular in the 16th century and was often used for epigrams in the 18th century. The true Huitain is a single verse, eight line poem with eight syllables per line. The rhyme scheme is: ababbcbc
I remember going into panic mode when first trying to write in this form but Marian's cheerfulness and optimism removed every trace of doubt from my soul. Thank you Marian for being such a wonderful writing partner and Kerry for assigning such a lovely project to us.
