A century of poems

On July 7th I caught up to the fact that writing friend Bridgette had embarked on one of her #100 jaunts, this time with poetry. I decided to join and wrote a couple a day until I caught up. (Somewhere along the line my poem number equaled the date in July.) It became both easier and more difficult. I think I’ll do a full download in a day or two, but today, the knowledge that the finish line has been crossed is exhilarating. I feel pretty good about it, and as I’m just regaining my energy after a lengthy battle with the flu, it’s good timing.

Here's to a century of poems!
To the angelic Muse who inspired
where human thought faltered.
To pain examined, to sorrow freed,
to joy remarked and justly praised.

Here's to blather, whimsey, musicality,
studious lexical construction, 
obstinacy, dread. To sheer, stubborn
perseverance. To posturing, to
pretense, to ego filled and deflated.

Here's to subjects barely scratched
and to those wrung dry. To daily
forays into unknown spaces, led
on by Trust, by Belief, by extra-
ordinary Chutzpah, by Faith.

Here's to allowing oneself to learn
by doing or perhaps by not-doing—
by re-examining the Done and
separating it from the Not Done
(the fantasy following us forever).

Here's to Attitude! To Meekness,
to Gracious Acceptance when
your best garners nothing, but
your mediocrity reaps praise
beyond your understanding.

Here's to not understanding
your own poem yet thinking
you can critique someone else's.
To mighty draughts of Ego 
sipped daily at a keyboard altar.

As with any history, this one
lumbers past its usefulness.
One hundred created anythings 
seems remarkable enough. Why
bother rehashing the hashed?

(because it feels so damn good!)

100/100
Oh! 100 poems in 100 days!

Poetry Workshop

Is it getting to be a bit much, what with flu recovery and all? Maybe…maybe a little bit.

Your poetry shelves will be as bare as the pasta section of your grocery store during the pandemic! Huzzah! April 2020.

Welcome to the Century Poetry Workshop
where getting it right never precludes
getting it done. While you're here you'll
experience the ups, downs of any lesser
program, but here you'll get to do so,
again, and again, and again, and...
again. Our founder realized the old
adage, "If at first you don't succeed..."
carried within it the implication 
that succeeding meant you could stop. 
Reasoning this didn't reflect real life, 
he instilled in us the belief that 
getting it right deserves a pat on 
your back and a well-deserved
feeling of accomplishment which
should last until tomorrow, when it
vanishes, just like it does for any 
baseball player who experiences
a victory in a late July game. And 
don't worry about "How will I
ever keep this up?" We've got you!
Our patented Stage of Global
Failure will make sure billions
have access to your daily task
to produce yet another poem.
Please note your publishing
platform has parameters in
place to reject one and two-lined
poems and frivolous limericks,
haiku, clerihews, and the like.
We're not making THAT mistake
again. (Also, shame parameters
have been increased for putting
such drivel online.) When you
'graduate' this program, a
century of verse under your
literary belt, you'll know you've
accomplished something! Will
you be able to call it literature?
That's up to you—we highly
recommend it, because how else
will you justify those daily doses of
depression to 'write just one more?'
Remember, as with any task like
mopping your kitchen floor, you
only get out of it what you put in!
So keep up the good work, avoid
those haunted eyes of the near-
graduates, and go write a poem!

95/100
100 poems in 100 days
(I can smell the finish line…)

Shells

Despite getting over this flu’s fever—and managing to stay awake all day!—crazy periods of dizziness keep washing over me like waves. This makes discovering yet another poem almost more problematic than letting a raging fever power Creation’s bark toward shore.

The Final Week of this 100-poem marathon would seem to demand a kick, but marathoners know kicks can’t usually be summoned after all that. Gutting it to the line and over remains a worthy goal. Perhaps a joyous sprint of several paces? It will have to do.

every beach day I turned over
rocks, peered into tidal pools,
walked wet sands while my head
defined my body's right angle.
shells, creatures, treasure—call them
by their true name: hopes. I planned
no plans, no marine aquarium, no
extensively labeled collection.
"to espy" my only goal, one not easily
satisfied. three score, more, yet still
my mind scours its sands searching
for treasures. when one's former
brilliance dims, when nothing 
can be espied, nothing plucked
even momentarily, no triumph
exclaimed—this little death brings
disproportionate chill. Would 
to have not known this stage
when audiences depart quietly,
embarrassed for the actor who
cannot seem to remember his lines.

94/100
100 poems in 100 days

Found poetry

[apologies for any typos or grammatical errors. I just didn’t take the time to proofread this.]

A reader responded to my recent post Found Poem #2 requesting a bit more knowledge about my input to the poem and the process used to create it. From Wikipedia:

Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage[1]) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.

The concept of found poetry is closely connected to the revision of the concept of authorship, in the 20th century, (as John Hollander put it, “anyone may ‘find’ a text; the poet is he who names it, ‘Text'”).

I’m rejecting these commonly accepted definitions, or rather, I’m expanding the boundaries of the definition. In my most recent example, I used the paradigm of my trip from Raleigh, NC, to Seattle, WA, as an organizing theme. I let my mind wander with minimal focus from the beginning of the flight out of Raleigh through to the family celebration of life held the next day for my cousin. The day started with my morning dose of blood pressure and anti-inflammatory meds plus the recently-added Vitamin D to heal my broken arms. The first take starts the launch into what I’m calling a ‘found poem’.

pills once taken for entertainment
now do anything but, maintaining 
dubious adherence to general 
opinion.

Through the comma, I’m just starting yet another poetic rant about being old. But, because I’m keeping my mind open to whatever pops into it, my added clause appends an opinion which floats in my head all the time: we take pills based on faith in a medical opinion not a medical reality. [Quick take: high cholesterol doesn’t guarantee a heart attack or stroke. It’s simply been observed that people with higher cholesterol also have a higher correlation to suffering a heart event. It’s therefore quite plausible if you have higher cholesterol you’re more likely to have such an event. Ah, but wait. In order to be measured, these terms need to be defined. What is “high” cholesterol? For that matter, what is “cholesterol” mean when uttered in the context I just put it in? What’s high for me is different than what’s high for you, because as every doctor I’ve consulted will say, “we-e-e-ellllll everybody’s different.” Therefore we issue recommendations for use of drugs which get codified by medical protocols and insurance providers into hard-and-fast rules use terms which have a little bit of arbitrariness to them and which we know don’t apply equally to anybody. And don’t get me started on the more-common-than-you-might-think possibility of lab error.]

Back to poetry: now that a theme has suggested itself—remember, based off of using my consciousness only to observe what popped into my mind. I “see” a reaction in my head. Explaining this would take many posts, but the gist is that almost everything I write is an attempt to describe something I see in my head. It’s not an idea I’m trying to convey, although I’ve attempted this a few times during this #100poems thing. It’s an actual picture of something in the way only a mind kind see. In my fledgling poem I now suddenly see a swirling vapor of accepted opinion that circulates around Profound Truth somewhat in the way Plato said that thing about shadow’s in the cave and the reality that cast them there. I look then to the next thing on my journey that occurred within the context of the now-established theme except I’m still not forcing conscious manipulation on it.

Next, in the sequence of the journey is the schedule I’m trying to meet to get to my airport at just the right time, defined by me as getting through TSA with enough time to assemble my Stashed Stuff (that which one removes to not set off alarms), pee, and start the boarding process. It’s never perfect, but I’m searching for that sweet spot where I walk up to the podium at TSA, traverse the security gamut, put my belt on and re-populate my pockets, pee, and walk up just as my boarding group is requested to line up. Here my subconscious serves up another gem:

schedules provide 
meaningless information to
entice us with false surety.

It occurs to me I’ve rarely started boarding exactly when the airline says it will start (to the minute), nor has the flight started at the time advertised more than 10% of the time. Hey, look, it’s another swirling piece of truth-vapor around Real Truth. Now the poem becomes easier. The next observation gets its frame of reference from how the experienced traveler becomes adept at moving through airport crowds, lines, and the overlapping PA announcements, all based on trying to move through St. Louis’s Lambert Airport. Moving through the automatic exit doors at Sea-Tac Airport prompted the next one, and the reflection on security in that one prompted me to jump backwards to an occurrence when I went through TSA back in Raleigh when I passed a tissue packet through the body scanner because he said something about metal and I thought, “hey it’s silver. Is it metallic?” (No, it wasn’t.)

I won’t belabor the rest of it. I let my mind wander to the next salient event, hitting the bar up at my hotel, then to the Uber driver I had. His silence I imputed to be from a lack of English and suddenly Fear Of ICE jumped into my brain. The memorial was held at a golf course, and I’ll admit, I molded this line consciously based on my love of the beauty of golf and the wastefulness of maintaining the courses in these days of dwindling water.

And suddenly I realized my mental walk through the trip had brought me to where I sat physically in my hotel room. For some reason, the necktie I’d used just minutes before to clean my glasses—OMG, silk ties clean glasses better than anything!—put the image of Sylvester Stallone tying that rag around his head and the moment he says in, what, #2, “I’m coming to get you, Murdock!”

After walking through this process, I don’t think I should truly call this a found poem, although it had the outlines of it. My first one, described the process this way: “

I started with the opening line of a poem I drafted over a dozen years ago, then used random web pages to suggest a few words from which would spring the next line. I let whatever revealed itself in my creative half exist without immediately squashing it, merely shaping it, translating it from my interior language-without-words to a poor imitation in English. My Editor insisted on punching meaning into it, which I allowed. At the end I decided it needed to come full circle, thus lending meaning (I hope) to the final lines.

There you have it. I think it fits in the realm of Found Poetry given the heavy-handedness some poets used to create found poems back in the day.

Dichotomy, meet Contrary

Would it help to know I’m a double-Gemini (both sun sign and ascendent)?

Dichotomy, 
meet Contrary. 

Loved sport—disliked
jocks, hated pep rallies.
Baptized at thirteen,
Atheist at eighteen,
Agnostic at twenty-five,
Catholic at thirty-nine.
Supported group marriage
of the "line" variety, found
monogamy difficult enough.
Voted for Carter, editorialized 
supporting Reagan.
Call Washington "home,"
Can't live there—love rainy,
warm South-East. Love
spicy food, can't eat it.
Believe sobriety equals our
natural state; drink like a fish.
Studied communications,
journalism, wound up 
playing scientific expert.
Planned working to seventy,
retired at sixty-five.
Believe in "live every day
as if it's your last," stand
fixated in space-time's
ambergris, pinned by 
my dwindling time.

Don't believe astrology
(much) though I studied
it enough to know 
ascendents from sun-signs
yet how can this Gemini 
resist, confronting 
all these two-faced
contradictions?

80/100

Wednesdays

Wednesdays will always be troublesome. 
Mondays shine with possibility, 
Either week's beginning or Sunday's cleanup crew. 
Tuesdays just fail. With no
Expectations (they're not Monday
After all), Tuesdays become
Confused-days, not knowing if they should emulate Monday or
Jump into end-of-week shenanigans. 
Failing at both, they give way to dear equivocal Wednesdays. 
Knowing neither beginning or end
Wednesday attempts nothing, gives
Nothing, muddles around, muddies one's mind. 
First Friday follows then Real Friday, 
Then expansive jovial Saturday. 
(Sunday stands alone; we won't disturb her). 
Poor Wednesday. Trying nothing, gaining nothing. 
Leaving me wondering if I should write her something.

Nearly forgot to write a poem

71/100

My other lives

Inspired by this poem from Bridgette Kay.

Hopped a freight, saw gang in Thompson 
Falls, flatcar next track over. They liked 
my car better, took it by force. No, wait...
Hopped freight into someone else's car,
who pushed me out again without my
knapsack, broke my leg, or...
I remember: clinging to moving car, one
hand desperately grabbing a handle,
slipped, lost my legs while those
startled drivers waited, watched,
horrified behind barricades. Or
did the speed freak sipping Mickey's
Big Mouths not drop me off, but
instead mug me miles from home?

Eloquently, asked blond Orphan Annie
out when snow bounced like Styrofoam.
Followed her eastward to Midwest. Sat
bouncing one child after another while
she conducted services at her church.
Or did we split angrily over my lack
of faith? I can never remember.

My epileptic buddy seized while training
for his bicycle road race, hit his head,
died. Knowing he didn't take his meds,
dedicated my life to medical counseling,
patient support/advocacy. Died early,
stress from lack of success, debt.

Indulged whim to own motorcycle.
Pretending to slalom along Woods Creek,
hit gravel, slid into oncoming lane,
already occupied by one-ton pickup.
Or did I just slide right over the edge,
mangling my body, my hopes for 
being energetic weekly news reporter?

Did my heart burst when I snorted
Black Beauties? Or did I die after
doing same with PCP disguised
as so-called cannabinol? How 'bout
that time "chocolate mesc" turned
out to be rat poison, not placebo?

Millions of me's live in my memories,
branched from events gone right,
events gone wrong, events gone
different. When my editor ended
my career for once again failing 
to put "ly" on adverbs. When my 
employer marketed my database, 
fame, money, a new career following.
When I got hired in Southern
California instead of upstate 
New York. When my wife died
from cancer instead of lived.

70/100
100 poems in 100 days

Every one of those branching events could have happened, the only speculative one being the one about getting fired for not using “ly” on adverbs—although an editor/publisher could have ended my teaching career before it started when upon learning I intended to teach journalism he laughed and said, “You?”

I did indeed hop a freight while in college. There was a sinister looking bunch of guys on a flatbed. There could have been a guy in my car. I did hang on gamely when I tried to mount a moving freight car now way too high due to a raised railbed. After getting off of the freight, a tweaked out guy picked me up in a Roadrunner around midnight.
I did have a crush on that young woman in college, but too insecure, I didn’t ask her out. I speculated on her future career.
My epileptic buddy fortunately had his seizure on the dormitory floor, not while he was out training for the race. He’d stopped taking his meds.
I did slide right into the oncoming lane of traffic. It was a lonely road. I righted the bike, got back into my own lane.
Uh….yeah I did do those substances as described. The capsules at the end only had chocolate in them, not mescaline.
The rest is self-explanatory.

It’s interesting to me how I think about all of the ways my life could’ve gone wrong, only rarely think how it could’ve gone differently, and not at all how something could have gone right instead of how it went down. Does that make me a glass-half-full kind of guy? Or do some of us innately focus on good things instead of bad ones?

My shortest poem

Why I fail

Because I try to succeed.

63/100

Failure, horticultural-style. Every spray of green you see is a crape myrtle. The tallest one which grazes the top of the photo, is over five feet tall. Other than the columbine you see in the extreme lower right, and the yellow tassels of goldenrod peeking through the crape myrtle, everything you see in the foreground is a crape myrtle. We paid last October to have the one crape myrtle which grew here removed. August 2026.

In some ways that’s a pretty cheap get I’ve put up there, but here’s what’s been playing on my mind:

Recently I’ve been attempting to not over-plan my days and then just hope I make good in-roads on completing some of them, nibbling at some others, and just feeling crummy about all the important ones that didn’t see a bit of my attention. “Wow,” I’ll say to my wife, “I really need to get to [insert important item].” I’ve found I use it as subterfuge. I’ll plan 6-10 tasks, a good handful of them all-day-and-more projects, then I’ll cherry pick the ones I want to work on. That one I’ve “really got to get to” becomes the sacrifice day after day. Plus, if you condition yourself to not getting things done, you begin to feel only superficially guilty about not doing them. Instead, the past two weeks I’ve estimated the amount of time certain tasks will take, generally held to that regardless of them getting completed, and planned no more of them than there is time in my day. I try to learn where I need to get more accurate on projecting how long a task will take. And just to keep it real, I plan 90 minutes called “personal time/time sucks” to acknowledge there are just unavoidable interruptions in everyone’s day. Thus, I’ve been failing because I’ve attempted to over-succeed.
In a larger sense, it’s difficult these days to go more than a month or two without encountering “you’ve got to fail to succeed,” spouted by some motivational type of person. (Gah! I thought I would get away from cheerleaders when I got out of school!) While I can quibble a bit with the mentality—I can point to many people, many situations where they will continue to fail, never experiencing success—it’s true right down in the gut that quitting because you’ve failed once isn’t a very good strategy. Date someone and they break up with you? I guess you’re not cut out for love! Put all your money on red and it comes up black? “I guess I’ll never win at roulette.” Or how about, “I could never make myself write. I guess I’m just not a writer.” Now look at the boy. Shooting for success almost always guarantees encountering some failure.
And last week I read “These 20 Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures” an article about a very short poem by Ezra Pound. (I hope that link gets you behind the paywall. I’ve never tried to share an article to the entire world before.) Let’s dispense with the fact Pound collaborated with the fascist regime in Italy in WWII. Ernest Hemingway seems to have been a pretty good male chauvinist, and Michael Jackson, well, where do I start? All have undeniable artistic talent. Coming back to the poem and the article, I realized poetry takes a multiplicity of forms. As a writing friend told me a month ago, “It’s a poem if you say it’s a poem.” I hope the person saying it’s a poem (me) has enough artistic integrity to adhere to his idea of poetry. I think 25-40% of my poems have not been very good in this 100-poems-in-100-days thing. Poems condense meaning. They are to literature what a fine spirit is to alcoholic beverages. They seek not the pretty good word, but the right word, the best word. One doesn’t find the jigsaw piece which closely fits and just hammer it into the puzzle. One seeks for that piece which perfectly fits the hole. I’m going to continue to attempt to write successful poems. I will fail…but maybe not all of the time.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Summer ’76

Pop quiz: young man below (who hopefully will not be recognized because I doubt he will be flattered) was a real-life grad student. This photo represents what?

A. a waste of his parents’ money
B. proof “too much education” actually is a thing
C. the dangers of drinking
D. the empirical method at work, determining remaining quantity of beer
E. a complete lack of hand-eye coordination
F. pick any two above and provide a complete argument for your choices

Summer, nineteen seventy-six,
living my self-realized dream of
poverty, danger, emotional
confusion combined with
dead-end work. No car.
Walk two miles to work,
six days per, rain, shine.
Three of us with Crazy
Pete supervising(?),
performing work long since
killed by technology's steady
advance. Loaned co-worker
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 
Maintenance precipitating
his mental descent, believing
himself to be Jesus. Nearly
killed my roommate, here now 
first confessed. My defense,
your honor, has to do with
his pistol-waving girlfriend,
sister to his wife—plus their
side business, stealing pills
from our state mental ward
to sell them later. Thinking
America's Bicentennial 
would prompt Jefferson
Starship plus Grateful Dead
to perform freely in
Golden Gate Park, headed
south with friend Ray, driving
one-oh-one down entire coast
(nearly killing us when his
bald-tired Vee-Dub spun
circles on twisting roads
through California's
redwoods). No concert
transpired but our good
friend entertained us
from his expensive digs 
above Oakland, serving up
ridge views with top-flight
drugs. Returning, faced up
to first failure as freelance
writer of fiction, looked in
my mirror, predicted, "If
you don't get your ass back
to college for some kind of
degree, you never will."
U-Dub to my rescue,
restoring my transcripts,
enabling graduation
in five college quarters.

Postscript: afraid to take
summer off (because I'd
drop out again), attended
said institution for nineteen
months, grabbed its
sheepskin after Christmas,
proving to myself how one
can be right/wrong 
simultaneously.

52/100

No poem today

I feel bad because I’m breaking the chain for real today. I had planned to write a poem as we flew eastward, but I chose to finish Hamnet instead… and sleep. Then I thought, “I’ll dash it off at home.” We walked into a house without air-conditioning! 😲😰 It was 60 degF as we walked to the Seattle airport. We dropped into 85 degrees with over 70% humidity here in Raleigh, NC… And the house was the same.

I love the East especially the southeast of North Carolina where we landed, but I was raised in Eastern Washington where hot days didn’t carry that humidity and were balanced by cool nights. This was reinforced by our recent visit there. (Of course all the smoke from fires and the dry, dessicated grasses reminded me why I like the East. )

I will get drafting right now!