Poems in April - Asking Questions

Today we are very close to the end of the April challenge of writing poems, and I wanted to bring up the subject of questions in poetry, and the preference is for short poetry.

Let me start with three examples for having this prompt

My first example comes from the Douglas Adams’, “Hitchhiker’s guide to the Universe”, where the answer is given as 42, but what question is it that gives the answer, to some extent that is one of the basic ideas from which to spin the novels.

The second example comes from politics, where we expect the politicians giving us answers when they should rather be asking us questions to form our future, i think only by asking the right questions can we get to the right answers.

The third example is from Poetry and Pablo Neruda’s “Book of questions” where he provokes us by asking questions, sometimes leading us to the answer, sometimes being totally open ended.

Tell me, is the rose naked

or is that her only dress?

I think especially open questions leads us to think, where answers leads blocks our thinking often in a dividing manner.

So the challenge today is quite simply, write a poem consisting only of questions.

If you want to take it to the next level, why not write your own answer to the question(s) in the form of a response to your own questions.

Let’s have fun and share our thoughts with questions, remember to read and visit other poet’s writing.

Poems in April - Photographic Images Reimagined

Unidentified Woman ca. 1950's - Walter Silver Photographs

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/90070510-e04b-0131-be59-58d385a7bbd0

Congratulations if this is your 28th day of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo).  I fell off the wagon halfway through April, but I enjoyed the ride while it lasted.  I am here to offer those on or off the "April" Poetry wagon a poetic challenge.

These images are free to download and use.   I linked the sites and you are also free to choose one for yourself if these don't inspire you creatively.    

I would like you to interpret your chosen image one of three ways:

1)  Use an ekphrastic writing approach by closely observing the photo. (vivid description)

2)  Create a narrative beyond the frame and reimagine the photo (storytelling)

3)  Interpret or impart an impression of sentiment or promise from the photo

The kiss, Terre Haute, Ind./ Clarence H. White 1904

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.49537/

Inez Milholland - Suffrage parade

About this lady: HERE

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.11399/

House with trees and clothesline - Walter Silver Photographs

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/63491f30-e905-0131-b25d-3c075448cc4b

Milkyway over Lassen National Park, USA - Thomas Ciszewski

https://unsplash.com/photos/JnY_xqJE230

Play for Me - Ian Dooley

https://unsplash.com/photos/oSq5ejr23so

In a Station of the Metro

Today is the 27th of the NAPOWRIMO! Only three more days until the end.  Some of us are starting to look a little bedraggled and tired but still we press on.  To help us towards the end, I give you a poem prompt by no less than Ezra Pound; it is about … The Big End, so to speak.

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

To say it is brief is one thing, to say it is breathtaking and thought provoking is yet another thing. In two lines Pound gives us a vision of ghosts - the faces whipping past us in the stroboscopic light and he gives us a vision of the after world.  The subway car becomes Charon's boat rowing the dead across the River Styx.  He also gives us a feel of mono no aware (mo*no no ah*wah* ray) - the Japanese words for "sadness or wistfulness at the passing of things"- the seasons, leaves rotting, the last sip of tea, the kiss before dying.  The Japanese have written literally millions of poems about cherry blossoms - all the with the tang of mono no aware mixed in with the sweetness of the blossoms and their inevitable brief life and death.

Your prompt for 27th day of NAPOWRIMO:  Write a two line poem in which you convey some startling image, an image that juxtaposes two images.  That is all.  Make is stark, make it beautiful, make it heartbreaking, make it full of humor.  The choice is yours.

See you at the end!

Reboot, Rewind, Recycle, Rebirth - Poems in April

Reboot, rewind, retool, recycle, rebirth.

And take a deep breath.  (If you have been doing a poem a day in April, take several! )

I split my time between City and mountains and am very conscious of the movement of the seasons, in part because I get to see them twice--spring in city parks and then (some weeks later) in the country. Seeing rewinds of spring (and autumn too) makes me acutely aware of the recharging of the landscape in those times. (Last weekend--rainy-- the landscape upstate changed from brown to emerald in the course of a few hours.) 

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The prompt is to write about those moments of re-charging, rebooting, re-winding, re-birthing.  It is meant to be as general as possible --meaning, please don’t write about spring or fall  (unless you actually want to.) 

There are plenty of other moments when rebooting or rebirthing may happen (a deep breath, a swallowed word, a spoken word, maybe even just a bathroom break! )  

These may be very long moments, involving several years of swallowed or spoken words (and innumerable bathroom breaks) or a second's epiphany. 

In writing your poem, please try to be with the moment or experience that you write of, and not to write of generalities. (Note, this prompt is not to write about bathroom breaks unless those are especially meaningful to you! But any moment of breaking and remaking.) 

If you can’t think of anything, take an old poem and retool it!

For fun--but not as a particular part of the prompt, I set forth here three drawings on paper (ink and watercolor). All of these were done on top of old pen and ink drawings, in part as a way of recycling paper.  If you do use one, please reference that they are the work of Karin Gustafson.) 

Have a good day, and many congratulations to those of you who have been doing the poem a day in April--you are almost done!

Kerry Says ~ Let's Be Imagists!

The Sea and it's Raining. I Missed You So Much
Artist: Wura-Natasha Ogunji
33^rd Bienal de São Paulo
Photograph: Kenia Santos

“The point is that you start with any image … Contemplate it and carefully observe how the picture begins to unfold or to change. Don’t try to make it into something, just do nothing but observe what its spontaneous changes are. Any mental picture you contemplate in this way will sooner or later change through a spontaneous association that causes a slight alteration of the picture. You must carefully avoid impatient jumping from one subject to another. Hold fast to the one image you have chosen and wait until it changes by itself. Note all these changes and eventually step into the picture yourself, and if it is a speaking figure at all then say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what he or she has to say.” ~ C.G. Jung

The Sea and it's Raining. I Missed You So Much
Artist: Wura-Natasha Ogunji
33^rd Bienal de São Paulo
Photograph: Kenia Santos

Imagism was born in England and America in the early Twentieth Century. A reactionary movement against Romanticism and Victorian poetry, Imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images. The movement was rooted in ideas first developed by English philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme, who, as early as 1908, spoke of poetry based on an absolutely accurate presentation of its subject, with no excess verbiage. [Source]

The challenge for today's poem is to follow the advice of Carl Jung: "The point is you start with any image..." and tell us what it has to say to you. Remember the key points of simplicity, clarity and precision.

Kenia Santos kindly allowed me to use her photos from her visit to the 33rd Bienal de Sao Paulo, as well as this link to a video clip on Facebook, which features this Contemporary Artwork by Wura-Natasha Ogunji. If you use an image on your blog, please use the accreditation used beneath the picture. If you display the image on Instagram please tag @kenia.cs. Kenia blogs at An Exercise in Existing

Weekend Mini-Challenge, in April: Three Spring Shorts

Do you ever do like a bee? Are you lured by the scent and colors and the wild loveliness of flowers? Do you talk to the green that grows in your yard or the park or the street or (if you’re very lucky) the nearby woods?

I hope you’ve answered “Yes” to at least one of the questions above. Because for today’s prompt, I invite you to write 3 micro-poems (in 3 lines or fewer) inspired by flowers.

Here are some examples from my very own doing like a (human)bee moments:

spring births bright

purple crocuses

 through dead leaves

Falling can be a chance

to appreciate familiar beauty
from a different angle.

when it rains,

tulips blow kisses 

 at the clouds

You don’t have to include pictures with your responses. But… if you have them, I hope you share them. Also, feel free to use the pictures I just shared as inspiration for this prompt.

Add the direct link to your poem (the 20^th! if you are participating in 30/30 in April) to Mr. Linky. Do visit other Toads. And as always, share your thoughts on the ink-flowers blooming in their Imaginary Garden.

Micro Poetry ~ "I am my own muse ..."

"I am my own muse, the subject I know best."
Frida Kahlo 

Greetings to all poets on Day 19 of Poetry Writing Month. By this time, I am sure that many a muse is feeling torn between exhilaration and exhaustion. For our challenge today, I am returning to one of my favourite prompts, the Micro Poem of between one and twelve lines in a form of your choice.

By way of inspiration, I have chosen the poem, aptly entitled, April, by Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate, the late W.S. Merwin.

April
W.S. Merwin
(1927 - 2019)

Writing in the Guardian, Jay Parini described Merwin’s mature style as “his own kind of free verse, [where] he layered image upon bright image, allowing the lines to hang in space, largely without punctuation, without rhymes ... with a kind of graceful urgency.” Although Merwin’s writing has undergone stylistic changes through the course of his career, a recurring theme is man’s separation from nature.

Do you have a recurring theme which continues to inspire you to write poetry? I believe that poetry is at its most authentic when the poet becomes, as Frida Kahlo puts it so eloquently, his/her own muse.

I do hope that your own muse will speak to you today as you return to your unique theme. In addition, as this is FRIDAY, a poem in 55 words would be welcomed.

Poems in April ~ Somewhere in the midst of stirring April

Originally meant to astound the Puritanical sensibilities of the 1920s, Cummings's poems of romantic and sexual love remain just as provocative, thrilling and fresh today. For today's prompt I have selected one which completely blew my mind:

 

The Mind Is Its Own Beautiful Prisoner

the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.
Mine looked long at the sticky moon
opening in dusk her new wings

then decently hanged himself, one afternoon.

The last thing he saw was you
naked amid unnaked things,

your flesh, a succinct wand-like animal,
a little strolling with the futile purr
of blood; your sex squeaked like a billiard-cue
chalking itself, as not to make an error,
with twists spontaneously methodical.
He suddenly tasted worms windows and roses

he laughed, and closed his eyes as a girl closes
her left hand upon a mirror.

Cummings exhibited an ongoing interest in both love and the erotic as a subject in both his writing and his painting. As a painter, he dedicated a separate series of paintings each to nudes, burlesques, and to lovers. 

As a poet, he was a sensitive and supple writer who ferreted out distinguishing nuances in relation to love and its complements unlove and lust. The poem speaks of a man who has lost his lover and covers various themes such as loss, betrayal, paradoxical dichotomy and mental self-imprisonment.

Our frame of reference is the title of Cummings's poem. Choose your own form or write in free verse, if preferred. I look forward to reading what you guys come up with. Please do visit others and remember to comment on their poems. Have fun!🍓

The Touch of Snow

Today is the 15th day of our poetry journey! I was re-reading Basho's Oku no Hosomichi, or The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In this momentous work, he creates the haibun - a prosimetric form. It consists of a brief, biographical part ended with a haiku. I was struck again by his spare yet deeply moving prose and the haiku at the end.  This haibun beautifully illustrates the Japanese concept of Mono no Aware - sadness or wistfulness at the passing of "things".

In the west, we tend to add much flowery description of the prose portion, making a very long poem to read. In its original form, the haibun is brief. His haibun run between 98 to 150 words. Each is complete and descriptive, humorous, wistful, sad. These are basically the first poet becoming a journalist! The haibun below shows his loneliness on the road, towards the end, his feeling his age, his offering of a poem - all he had at this point.

Write a haibun of 44 - to 150 words of some event in your life - a love gone wrong, birth of a child, a daily walk, a day out of a vacation...anything will work! Remember: haibun are based on a true experience in your life; it is NOT flash fiction.

"Wherever I travel, wherever I happen to find myself, I am not from there. In fact, the whole world is just such a place to me. I have spent the past six or seven months on the road, a nocturnal traveler who has survived, so far, many devastating illnesses as I made my way onward. I found the more alien I came to see myself, the more I missed beloved faces, lifelong friends and aging students, until my steps were drawn irresistibly back toward the outskirts of Edo. And sure enough, day after day they appeared, coming to sit in the small hut of a poor man and talk to me. I had nothing to offer in return except my poem,
I am still alive
but why silvery grass that
withers at the touch of the snow"

Weekend Mini-Challenge, in April: 1 Poem, 3 Titles

Greetings, ink-kissed Toads and visitors. If you’re participating on 30/30 in April, you have my respect. I did it once. And when the thought of doing it again reached my mind, my sweet muse threatened to dropkick my skull until the thought of 30 poems in 30 days spilled out screaming.

For the 13^th day of Poems in April, I invite you to write a new poem that includes 3 book titles (each title must contain at least 3 words, and you must not rearrange or delete any of the words).

Choose titles from your favorite books. Or, follow this link to Goodreads. Please, list your chosen titles.

Add the direct link to your poem to Mr. Linky. Visit other Toads. Keep enjoying 30/30 in April.