Hello dear Toads and fellow amphibians. To all of you who have stuck with this poem a day thang, good job!!! It isn't easy! So, now it's my turn--and my happy responsibility--to provide some inspiration for you for Day 12.
This being my last proper Fireblossom Friday--I do still have one April prompt left, on Monday the 22nd--I want to go back to the stuff poetry is made of. It's all well and fine to write about anything from fruit salad to politics, but the great majority of topics--in my view--lend themselves better to prose than to poetry. When it comes to poetry, the Big Three dwarf all other subjects and the Big Three are--drum roll please--nature, love and death. Nature is very busy this time of year, so we'll leave her to her duties. Death, I salute you, you are, as a subject, a poetic behemoth. Our knowledge of mortality--our own and that of those around us--lends an urgency, a richness, and a great well of sorrow to life, and poets through the ages have embraced this, pondered it, tried to express its impact and meaning. But today, I am going to ask Death to have a seat, over there, and wait for another day. Today we're about Love.
What can I say about Love? Poems have been written about every kind of love, and every emotion connected with it, from the giddy beginnings of romantic love, to the ruin and despair of losing love. Young love, mature love, sappy love, selfless love, familial love, star-crossed love, lost love, love for animals or home or country, all of these have been written about for centuries and still, the subject is never exhausted.
So, how shall I pare down this tremendous subject for our purposes here today? Here's what we'll do: write about love for someone who does not know you love them. The guy at the music store, the gal in the apartment across the hall. That actor on the screen, that character in your novel. You can write about someone you actually know or know of, or you can imagine someone. You could complicate it. Maybe they're married, maybe there's an age difference, maybe you don't want to rearrange your life, but there they are, making your heart beat faster anyway. Above all, write POETRY. It needn't rhyme, it needn't have a formal construction. But it can't be prose. Give us the emotion and the nuance. Make us sigh or laugh. I leave you with the lyrics to a favorite love song of mine, by Joan Jett:
Hello dear Toads and pond followers. Fireblossom here with another poetry challenge for you.
Often I stop with this song on my mind:
Willie works as the garden man. He plants trees. He burns leaves. He makes money for himself. Often I stop with his words on my mind-- Do spacemen pass dead souls on their way to the moon?
Which brings me to the idea for this challenge: write a poem which states a question. Oh, not a tired old chestnut like "Do you love me?" (I get that ALL the time. Honest!) Or "How much damage will carbon emissions do to the ecosystem?" Kind of hard to stay poetic with that, and besides, too much earnestness grates. (I was told that by Woody Guthrie. No kidding!)
There's a novel--the inspiration for a famous movie, I'm told-- called "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" THAT's the kind of question I want from you, my dear slippery amphibians.
So, let's review.
RIGHT: What if common crows started talking to me telepathically?
WRONG: What is the square root of 3,444?
REALLY WRONG: Does Johnny/Janey love me?
Okay, my hippity hoppity friends. Go forth and formulate an interesting and original question around which to construct a poem! Then link and become part of an intergalactic hive mind. Oh all right, no hive mind. (But you wouldn't have to ask if they love you.) Writers proceed!
Hello Toads and pond followers. Fireblossom here with another Fireblossom Friday for you.
Does it ever seem to you that there is something....something that should be there, but isn't? Or, has there ever been a thing so common that it seemed it could never be gone, but now it is? I can think of one--the thylacine.
The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial--let *that* sink in--which lived in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea from time immemorial until the early 20th century. Also known as the Tassie Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, it had striped hindquarters and its mouth could open to the widest gape of any land animal. Because it predated on chickens and livestock, a bounty was placed on its head, and it was hunted to extinction. The last known thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936.
And yet, the thylacine still holds a fascination for many of us today. Sightings occur rather often, and though none have been proven authentic, it is tantalizing to think that this odd and remarkable animal might still survive. In a larger sense, the thylacine is emblematic of human short-sightedness and the loss of something irreplacable.
For our writing, there are several possibilities. You could write about the actual creature, either from your own or the animal's (imagined) point of view. You could write about the thylacine metaphorically, as a symbol for anything gone, wasted, missed, or surviving despite all odds against it. Finally, you could celebrate the thylacine for its utter uniqueness--there is no other like it. Take this and run with it, poets, but I prefer that you not go the jokey route, ok? Let's show this fascinating animal some respect, at long last. Poems of any length or style are fine, as is flash fiction or flash 55 (exactly 55 words.) Then link, visit, etc.
English is a funny language. A lot of it came from other languages, and some of those words retain their foreign sound. Some remain foreign and not strictly English at all, but are used much in the manner of "Voila!" Moreover, some of them roll off the tongue very poetically, it seems to me. Even without knowing what they mean, they just sound cool. Add the meaning, and it's pretty much nerd heaven.
What I want you to do is to take one of the following words and build a poem around it. Don't just jam it in some place where it sticks out like a sore thumb. Make the word you choose central to your poem. I think we may get some interesting results. Write, link, enjoy!
The words:
1. Schadenfreude. (German) The experience of joy, pleasure, or self-satisfaction that comes from the learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures or humiliation of another.
2. Bete Noire. (French) A person or thing that one particularly dislikes.
3. Sturm Und Drang. (German) Storm and stress.
4, Saudade. (Portuguese) A deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.
5. Mox Nix. (German) Bastardization of "Es macht nichts", used by American GI's in WWII Europe to mean "It doesn't matter" or "It makes no difference." Some of them brought the phrase home with them.
6. Fahrvergnugen (German) Driving pleasure. Used in 1990 ads for Volkswagen automobiles. "Say the word!" I got the whole idea for this post from listening to a tape I made of songs off the radio from around 1990. Amid the Howard Jones and Toto songs were ads featuring "Fahrvergnugen" (for VW) and Joe Isuzu, not to mention Tubby's Submarines "No Place For Wimps." So I ran with it.
Form, length, subject? Mox nix, baby. Just get writing. :-)
Hello dear Toads and pond followers. Fireblossom here with a very special (to me) Fireblossom Friday, which requires just a smidgen of backstory. Not too awfully long ago, I had my DNA tested by one of those popular sites. My results weren't very surprising but one unexpected and pleasant result is that I made a connection with a cousin I hadn't known before. We dove into researching the family tree a little bit, and so I pulled out some materials I had. Way back in 1990, I thought I ought to ask my dad if he would tell me some stuff about the family history, because I knew he had researched it, and because he was already 78 at the time (I was a late-life baby) and I thought it's now or never, maybe.
"The Lightbearer" design by Edward Emerson Simmons, executed by Louis Comfort Tiffany
In January of 1991, I received 15 typewritten pages--not surprising at all from my newspaperman father. He loved a research project. Naturally, I read it several times upon receiving it. I found out all kinds of things, from my philandering great-grandfather who made three fortunes and blew them all on fast women (except the third--he died aboard ship while in the process of blowing that!), to his wife the long-suffering schoolteacher who died at age 89 when she caught herself on fire from the stove, ran out into the street and died, to my step-grandfather, a card-carrying socialist who lost his job at Ford Motor Company during the depths of the Depression for standing up to Harry Bennett, Henry Ford's henchman and right hand man.
"Gathering Wood" by Edward Emerson Simmons
My father also mentioned a painter on his side of the family, but I had never heard of the man, and this was more than a decade before I would be connected to the internet, so researching him was something I never pursued--until, spurred by my cousin, I researched him quite recently. Lo and behold, he was a painter of some note! His work graces the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, the Library of Congress, and several state capitols. His name is Edward Emerson Simmons. My father says he had a copy of Simmons's autobiography "From Seven To Seventy: Memoirs Of A Painter And A Yankee" but goodness knows where it is by now. Not in my hands, anyway.
"Melpomene" by Edward Emerson Simmons, Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington DC
My father was 19 when the painter died, but before that happened, Edward Simmons gave my father this bit of family wisdom: "We Simmonses are peculiar galoots but each one can usually do one thing good enough to get by." ("well" enough, Edward!) For Edward, it was obviously painting. For my father it was newspaper work. For me, hosting Fireblossom Friday perhaps? In any case, I probably have the "peculiar galoot" part down. ;-)
"High Sea" by Edward Emerson Simmons
To goose you to greater poetic heights, I offer the work of my relative, Edward Emerson Simmons, for inspiration. You may use any of these provided (public domain) or any you can find HERE. Then just link up and go visiting. Do please be sure to credit Edward for his work. :-)
It's day 29 of NapoWriMO, and I want to offer congratulations to all who have made it this far, and to all who have tried.
This isn't the end, but the end is just around the corner. That's what I'd like us to write about.
Sometimes, the moment just before something ends is as poignant as the actual ending. One could write about the Twin Towers on 9/10, with business going on as usual, never knowing what the morning would bring. Or, one could keep the focus much smaller, and write about a love affair about to end, but which hasn't actually ended just yet.
"When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, Look out your window and I'll be gone. You're the reason I'm traveling on. Don't think twice, it's all right." --Bob Dylan
In the above example, Dylan's character hasn't left yet, but knows he's about to.
"Don't look so sad. I know it's over, But life goes on, and this old world will keep on turning. Let's just be glad we had some time to spend together... There's no need to watch the bridges that we're burning." ---Kris Kristofferson "For The Good Times"
Here, a man talks about life going on, but a bittersweet ending is about to happen first.
Maybe you'd like to write about the winding-down of a great performer. In 1935, baseball legend Babe Ruth had been let go by the famed New York Yankees, and was playing out the string with the lowly Boston Braves. The Babe was old and fat and knew the end was near. But one day he went out and hit three home runs in a game, one of which was one of the longest he ever hit. It wasn't his final game; he appeared in a handful more, without remarkable result. But for that one day, he was like the candle that burns brighter just before guttering out.
So let's write about almost-endings. Endings that haven't happened yet, but are surely close at hand. No restrictions on length or form, but do make it a new poem.
Hello slippery pond folk. Fireblossom here, splashing around, trying to catch a few of you and plop you in my special Poetry Bucket. Today I'd like to talk about poetic imagery.
There are a lot of things that go into the construction of a good poem. The sheer beauty of the words and the way the sound when written skillfully, the energy behind those words, the message they carry, and the form of the poem--all these are important. But my text today, my dear amphibious flock, is poetic imagery.
I see a lot of "poems" that aren't really poems. What follows is the sort of non-poem I am talking about:
I wanted to sleep five minutes more, so I hit the snooze button and rolled over.
Simply breaking an ordinary sentence up into little lines does not make it poetry. It just means your "enter" key has a nervous disorder.
You may give me the squinty eye and argue that you write free verse, or remind me that there is such a thing as prose poetry. (I know, I write it fairly often!) However, writing free verse without any poetic imagery is a little like entering the Texas Chili Cook-Off without bringing any spices. You could do it, and call it chili, but it wouldn't be. So, pardners, let's take a look at some poetic imagery in the hands of masters.
The following is quoted from "Ballad Of The Black Sorrow" by Federico Garcia Lorca:
The pick-axes of roosters dig, searching for dawn, when down the dark hill comes Soledad Montoya. Yellow copper, her flesh smells of horse and shade. Smoked anvils, her breasts moan round songs.
"The pick-axes of roosters dig, searching for dawn" beats the living snot out of "It was 5 a.m." don't you think? So, one thing about poetic imagery is its originality--the use of unexpected words and phrases to describe something. Another is Lorca's fantastic LSD trip out of the ordinary world. As the Acid Queen in "Tommy" advised, "Your mind must learn to roam." Don't write "she is voluptuous" when you could write "Smoked anvils, her breasts moan round songs." Don't be a squirrel when you can be a lion!
Let's look at another example. This one tones down the LSD trip while losing none of the poetic power:
The girl made of wood didn't come here on foot; suddenly there she was on the beach, sitting on the cobbles, her head covered with old sea flowers, her expression the sadness of roots.
There she stayed, watching over our open lives, the moving and being and going and coming, over the earth, as the day faded its gradual petals. She watched over us without seeing us, the girl made of wood:
crowned by ancient waves, she looked out through her shipwrecked eyes. She knew we live in a distant net
of time and water and waves and noise and rain, without knowing if we exist, or if we are her dream. This is the story of the girl made of wood.
This is Pablo Neruda's description of a ship's figurehead. Would it have worked as well had he said, "There was an old figurehead on the beach at sunset"? Don't use a tired expression like "fiery sunset" when you can say "the day faded its gradual petals." This will mean not being satisfied with your first draft. Go over your poem and ask yourself, "Could I say this word, this phrase, this stanza, better?" Ermagerd, better words!
Okay, you rascally reptiles. Blow me away with your poetic imagery! I normally stipulate a new poem, but for this prompt you may also rework an older poem in keeping with the idea of poetic imagery. Any style, length or subject, but no ordinary or tired language. Owsley optional. ;-)
Fireblossom here with the gala return of Fireblossom Friday. Don't worry, I scored tix for everyone!
Ever think about all the expressions there are for different kinds of tickets?
Maybe you've got a friend. You've known them so long that they've "bought their ticket" with you and you know you'll always be there for each other. Friends are good!
Maybe you've "punched your ticket" and so won't be writing for this prompt? Gee, I hope not!
Maybe you need a "ticket out." Like, right now!
Or maybe it's just an annoyance, like a traffic ticket.
Got two tickets to Paradise?
Or, a ticket to ride and you don't care?
Write me a NEW poem or flash fiction which includes some kind of a ticket. Any length or style except haiku. Haiku makes me run amok, and we can't have that. Then sign the linky and visit others. There, that's the ticket!
Happy Halloween season, dear Pond dwellers and visitors. Fireblossom here with a spooky Fireblossom Friday for you. This will be my last FBF for 2017 as I will be taking a break from hosting. Gosh, what has come over me?
Painting by John William Waterhouse
Maybe somebody put a spell on me. Do you believe in that? Do you think incantations, objects, fire, pins and the like can alter actual events and, more to the point, people?
There is all kinds of literature concerning people being influenced or even taken over by something outside of themselves. Gypsy curses. Love spells. Possessions. Altered states.
Sometimes, a duplicate of a living person takes form, called a Doppelganger. The double does things the original person is unaware of, but others see.
"I didn't know what I was doing." "I didn't know what my double was doing." (!) "I don't know what came over me." Maybe these are more than just common expressions. Maybe our wills are not always our own. What do you think? Let's write about it.
Please write a NEW poem for this challenge. No haiku--haiku gives me the nervous shakes. Then link up so that we can come see what you--or someone who seems like you--has written. Bwahahaha.
Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in "Jane Eyre."
Hello, poets. Fireblossom here with another Fireblossom Friday writing challenge for you. This time we're going to put our faces right up to the eyepiece and look at things through a distorted lens.
What happens if we can't trust our senses, or our mind's ability to interpret what they convey? Sometimes an illness or a brain injury can result in some very peculiar states of mind. Oliver Sacks reports about a man who believed that everyone in his life was an exact--yet false--duplicate of the people they pretended to be. It turned out that the pathways in his brain that connected facial recognition with emotional response had been compromised. As a result, this man saw faces he knew, but did not feel anything about them and so concluded that they had to be fakes.
A stroke victim may lose "right" or "left" altogether, depending upon which side of the brain has been damaged. In her book "Left Neglected", Lisa Genova--author of "Still Alice"--writes about a (fictional) woman who has completely lost the notion of "left." Half the world ceases to exist for her.
Mental illness can also certainly distort a person's understanding of the world around them. Such conditions as depression, paranoia, schizophrenia and dementia, not to mention alcoholism and drug addiction, can turn the world into a dark or absurd landscape.
So, your task is to write from the point of view of someone who is seeing reality through a distorted lens. New poems only. No haiku because I have a deathly fear of Oriental forms. Enjoy.
Today I am asking you to write a poem about a monster or monsters, be they real or imagined, mythical or made up, symbolic, surreal, abstract, nightmare or waking reality. You get the idea, I am sure.
I leave you with the famous words spoken by Iago in Othello:
"O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meet it feeds on,"
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.
Hi everyone. Fireblossom here with another Fireblossom Friday writing challenge for you! Lately, I have had an old standard stuck in my head, called "It's Only A Paper Moon."
It's a Barnum & Bailey world/ just as phony as it can be/ but it wouldn't be make believe/ if you believed in me.
The challenge this time is simple! Write something that makes us believe in something that isn't real. No autobiographical tell-alls this time! Make something up out of whole cloth and make us believe in the world, person, or thing that you create. That's it! Please make it a NEW poem or flash fiction. No haiku. Then sign the linky and visit others. have fun!
Today I'm asking you to write a poem involving a crow, or crows. They happen to be my totem animal, and I adore them, but even if you don't like crows, they make wonderful fodder for writing.
As most of you know, a group of crows is called a "murder" of crows. Crows are often used in literature and films to convey a sense of foreboding or death. But crows are extremely intelligent birds who can figure out complex tasks--like using a stick to help them retrieve a piece of food--and they can distinguish individual human faces so that they know who is a friend and who to avoid. If you feed crows, they will sometimes bring trinkets and shiny objects to leave as gifts for you.
So, write about crows, or from the point of view of a crow, or use them as metaphors. Just write about crows! New poems only. You can write haiku if you want, but crows will come and peck your eyes out, and I won't feel one bit sorry for you.
Today's text, my flock, concerns incongruity. Specifically, we are going to try to write setting that doesn't match action, or character that does not coincide with setting. Let's start with the first.
For illustration, here is my poem "Garden Wall":
They stood daddy up against the garden wall and shot him through the head for writing against the regime.
Our ginger cat hid behind the tomato vines. Its eyes were yellow. The sky was blue. The leaves speckled red on the green.
The peaceful sunlit setting does not line up with the brutal act that takes place within it. This incongruity jars the reader and heightens the effect.
What about the latter? For this, my poem "In The Year Of":
In the year of the pestilence, in the time of the puppet government, we fell in love.
We held hands, and gamboled as others doubled over and died.
In the year of the pogrom, in the hour of the public noose, we were giddy,
and grateful for our milky corneas our couplings, and our luck.
Although this is not actually a love poem--but, rather, a piece about willful blindness--it *seems* like a love poem, played out against a backdrop of revolution and death.
Both these examples are rather grim in their subject matter, but incongruity lies at the heart of humor, as well. It is the absurd, the thing we don't expect, that is often the very thing which makes us laugh. And so, your poem can be light, if you wish.
So, mix it up, explore incongruity. Then link! Please write a NEW poem for this prompt, and no haiku or such like.
"Focus!" screams your personal trainer. "Focus!" you scold yourself at work on Monday morning. "Focus" yells the emcee, introducing the ancient Dutch rock band. Focusing is fine, especially when writing poetry. BUT. Poetry is a funny animal. It isn't like prose, or journalism, where we just pop out the facts bam bam bam starting with the most important. No, poetry is more amorphous, almost dream-like at times, and though it can be in-your-face, it is more often subtle.
Picture a room. In this room there is a table, a cat, a bowl of fruit on the table, a window with drapes, a rug, a fireplace, and some books. Sitting in the foreground is a woman with some knitting. She's what we see first. Then we might take in the cat, and all the rest. Suppose, though, that the fireplace hasn't been well tended. Suppose a tiny spark has caused a book left too close to the grate to begin to smoulder (way back there, in the background.) NOW what's the most important thing in this picture of ours?
I want you to try to write a slightly dishonest poem. A little bit misleading. Give us something to focus on--the apparent subject of your poem. But slip in a detail that is really more important. Make it a new poem for this challenge, please. Then link!
Fireblossom here, filling in for our very own Hannaballistic. Today I am facing what I fear the most: filling out tedious forms and finding documents and organizing finances and all the stuff that fills me with cold horror. It makes me long for a simpler time, when a girl could stroll through the sunflowers or conjure spells in her Gypsy wagon without applying for a permit.
So, here is what I want you to do. Take a look at these pictures and find one that speaks to you and write from that.
We take our inspiration today from Cuban-born American sculptor, photographer, and conceptual artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres known for work in a variety of media that addresses issues of identity, desire, originality, loss, the metaphor of journey, and the private versus the public domain. Like many artists of the 1980s, Gonzalez-Torres used the postmodern strategy of appropriating ready-made motifs and objects to create his art, thereby challenging the idea of the unique art object that was so much a hallmark of Modernism. (source)
His Untitled (Perfect Lovers) piece shown above is described thus: “These two identical, adjacent, battery-operated clocks were initially set to the same time, but, with time, they will inevitably fall out of sync.”
For this challenge, I would like you to visit his page on WikiArt.org and view the selection of sculptures on display there. You will notice that all pieces are "Untitled" with a description placed in brackets. Write a new poem, with the same method of title. The content and style of the poem is open, but let us take our cue from "issues of identity, desire, originality, loss, the metaphor of journey"
The Christmas theme is banned. (Bah, Humbug!).
Shay here with another Fireblossom Friday writing challenge. In 1971, if memory serves, a successful songwriter released an album in which she sang her own new songs and it became a phenomenon--Carole King's "Tapestry." One of the songs I remember best from that album was called "I Feel The Earth Move." It's a love song, but I want to take that seismic idea in another direction.
What happens when the earth moves? I mean literally. Things shake, crumble collapse; everything known becomes changed, unfamiliar, disorienting. The very ground you stand upon becomes unsteady. What can you count on when that happens?
I want you to write about a situation where the earth moves under your feet. Maybe your significant other has been found to have their own significant other. Maybe your own body or that of a loved one turned traitor and a lump is found, or something that was easy and natural now involves pain and effort. Maybe your world view has been shattered and Everything You Know Is Wrong. Perhaps it's a crisis of faith. (Maybe it's even Donald Trump winning the White House.) Whatever it is, write a new poem about being shaken up, tossed about, made to doubt what you thought was solid. Then link up and visit other Toads. Don't wait until it's Too Late, baby. Feel the earth move and write about it.
Greetings to all. Yes, it is Kerry here, standing in for the nonpareil Fireblossom, who could not post this week, due to unforeseen circumstances. In the spirit of the genuine article and inspired by one of Shay's favourite poets, I bring you today's challenge.
Shipwrecks were common in Dickinson's time, and in this poem she contrasts the joy that the storm is over and four people were saved with the sorrow that forty people lost their lives. Notice how Dickinson uses punctuation marks to emphasize feeling. The sombre tone in the final stanza is an appropriate response to the pointed question of the children. We seem to live in a society increasingly hungry for stories of other people's suffering, and often forget that individual lives are a part of those news headlines.
Thus, today's challenge is to write about what it means to be shipwrecked in our times, either literally or figuratively. You may choose your own point of view: are you a witness, a survivor, or one who will go down with the ship?
