NOVEMBER 2016

(ALEXANDER POPE OBSERVES THE CURRENT ELECTION SEASON WITH A NOD TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS)

What has this election season wrought,
But clishmaclaver passed as cogent thought?
To every age where one or others rule
Will come a crop of freshly minted fools
Who stand in opposition as the Right
And promise to the poor a worsened plight.

Hands that pull our strings will make the choice
Of whom they want to buy as peoples’ voice
Who tells us what to think and to believe—
But are we all so easy to deceive?
Have we had enough of outright lies,
Arrant greed in blessing-us disguise?
Yeats, you know I write in rhyme:
Washington, not Bethlehem, this time.

 

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SEASONAL AFFECTIVE

Seasonal Affective

Improving the texture of the day
Takes more than simply getting stoned:
Circus colors ambience and sounds,
Shiny and the glitter in array,
Clowning props to set the tone,
Then listen as the laughing things rebound.

HOW MY POEMS HAPPEN (Too)

As I read over the previous Happen post, I thought, really that easy? I had oversimplified the procedures to the point it seemed poetry didn’t need work.
Poems start with the line and second line, but sometimes the second comes in only halfway and I have to struggle up the rest. Think suspended intuition, where the next word sort of hangs there and needs a push. Since I can’t carry my MacBook with me, I keep a notebook for that first two lines and the rest there or on the computer.

Nothing about writing is easy, and poetry is the hardest of all.

I have three rules governing my practice.
I never pay to publish or for editing or any other kind of service. This is a moot point since I couldn’t pay, but I wouldn’t if I could. If this means my work won’t be recognized until found in whatever nursing home I end up in, so be it.
Nothing gets thrown out. Some poems fizzle out and some constructions fail, so rather than simply deleting the words and lines, I save them in a separate folder I call “scraps.” Far off, I will mix and match and write a long crazy poem made of lines from the scraps and whatever else I add.
And everything I consider finished (read “sounds finished”) gets submitted whether I particularly like it or not.