Meet 2018 with a manifesto

Hello fellow amphibians, this is Bjorn and today in the last quivering hours of 2017 the time has come to both reflect and look ahead. For many of us 2017 will stand out as an Annus Horribilis. I am sure that there have also been a year of positive changes but maybe we tend to focus on negative movements. It’s like weather, we remember the days of hurricanes and rain and forget the many days of sunshine. The good thing about stormy weather is how much we appreciate the days that follows.

What can we do then to make 2018 into an Annus Mirabilis?

Many times we focus on the changes we can do ourselves by giving new year’s resolutions, but having lived some years I have learned how much this means failures. At the end of the day we are all alone in our resolutions, and if we are really successful we might end up with a better body, a happier mind, we might have found a new love or made some improvements to the housed, but we have failed to change the world.

Through history change has been driven through movements, through inspired actions and through art, and at the core of change there is often a declaration or a manifesto.

Today I want you to write a manifesto, for yourself, for a group (real or imaginary), for your writing or for any cause you find important.

Analyzing manifestos we find some common themes:

Name your manifesto to make it clear what you want to achieve. (e.g. Declaration of independence, the Communist Manifesto)

Write it in first person (singular or plural

State the problem but do not dwell too much on what is wrong but focus on what you think is right and what should happen

Use strong language. Use verbs. Start sentences with a pronomen (I will…, we believe…, I have a dream …

If you use metaphors make them clear and not ambiguous. In a manifesto you can (and should) use cliches that are easily understandable

Focus on rhythm and cadence. A manifesto should be written to be spoken.

Use repetitions and rephrase the main points of what you want to change.

Identify any threats and tell us how to deal with them.

You might even quote famous passages from other works and manifestos, like Martin Luther King reminded us of the declaration of independence.

But primarily: try to win me over to your views.

If you want some inspiration why not listen to Martin Luther King

I wish you all a happy new year, and let us make 2018 the best year ever. I will return with my Physics Prompts during 2018.

Instapoetry

We have now reached almost to the end of our poetic endeavour to write one poem per day. At this point I have the choice of letting you having something really simple, or maybe the last challenge that makes the total challenge even harder…

Kerry asked me to go easy on this, and then I asked myself what’s easy. Some of you prefer a blank canvas, where other wants restrictions. Some love forms other hates it.

So now here is my idea that should be possible for all. I call it Instapoetry from that camera that has now been replaced by phones and digital cameras. Here is the process.

1. Find your camera or phone.
2. Go to the closest window
3. Take a snapshot and process it as you like.

Now look carefully on your photograph and jot down a few words, a story or maybe just the colors of your image. Are there strangers in your image, try to feel what they might be thinking. If you are on instagram it would be fun to present the poem there as well. In that case tag it with Instapoetry. Inclusion of your picture is fun, but if you feel like not doing it, that's cool with me.

Write a poem using no more than 100 words.
Inclusion of your picture is fun, but if you feel like not doing it, that's cool with me.

Link up your poem below, and have fun reading what happens around the world through the eyes of poets.

Sunday Mini-Challenge Time-travel

Hello toads!

Hope that the season is treating you well. Myself I feel weighed down by heavy clouds and lack of clouds. I have sweet memories of the summer passed and I am looking forward to the season of  holidays, winter games and spring. 

From Wikimedia Commons

Already in my first sentence I have been in three times, the present, the past and the future. As a matter fact we are constantly in all these three times, and when writing we are sometimes aware of this, though we tend to tell more about the past. Today I like you to capture all the three times in one poem. How you do it is up to you, but it would be fun to see a poem that make use of all the possible tenses to tell a story that is much longer than the poem itself. But you can use time-jumps too and stick to one tense.

To physically do time travel require science fiction, but in our mind we can do it using the magic wand of our minds. But if you wan't to invent a time-machine and go sci-fi.. that would be a lot of fun.

So the challenge is easy enough. Write a piece of poetry or prose that use past, present and future in the same poem.

From free to form - Personal Challenge for Björn

Hi there, dear amphibians of a virtual garden, here is Björn, a quite recent tadpole, unaware of consequences of signing up I got an email from the renowned and most skilled poet Hedgewitch. I had missed this slight drawback from signing up to be a toad, but at least one of you will have to expect an email from me the next few days. As many of you might have noticed I share the rare interest of actually write poem to form and meter.

The challenge was fairly straightforward: to take a piece of free-verse of mine that I think could gain from being elaborated to a form poetry such as a pantoum, sonnet, villanelle or terza rima. Often I write my  form poetry because they help me get inspired with the progression of the poem, the rhymes for instance help me to push the story ahead (a little bit like found poetry). On the other hand when I write free verse I’m often inspired to start with, so form come secondary. Therefore this was more of challenge than I thought to start with.

A while ago Marian wrote a prompt on the music of David Hidalgo. I saw some of the music as a kind of death-dance where the dawn was the end, and I used a refrain there “this night of sanguine hips” and thought that this would work in a villanelle. I thought I wanted to keep the dance in my poem so I went with tetrameter instead of pentameter to make it more in line with the origin of the rural dances that are supposedly the origin of the villanelle. I have reworked this a lot more than I usually do with my  form poetry but I hope it works for you.

This glowing night of sanguine hips

In glowing nights of sanguine hips,

we shed our last maracas tears;

and sway away when sun has slipped.

From burning cheeks, mascara drips,

but doom of dawn is not yet near,

this glowing night of sanguine hips.

With graveyard dust on blood-filled lips,

we’re dancing with the utmost care;

and sway away when sun has slipped.

We’re blessed by songs in sooty scripts

within this shroud the light is dear,

in glowing nights of sanguine hips.

Cause 6 feet under, worms will grip

our corazon of moonlit years.

We sway away when sun has slipped.

You gently let your eyelids zip,

to quench the dread of concrete fears.

Our final night of sanguine hips,

sashay below when sun has slipped.

There is no link-up today, but if you feel inspired to write something from this, put it on the comment section or link it up on an open link challenge.