Tuesday poem: Link to a found poem
September 2, 2014
I’ve been thinking about found poems recently, that is, poems made from bits of text found in other poems, or elsewhere (signs, newspapers, comments on blogs). Famously, Voltaire wrote that “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.”
I think recycling is a better metaphor. Although some types of recycling become vandalism: you know, where someone cuts all the pictures out of an old book, or makes a bag from an old volume of say, Voltaire. “Look, I’m an intellectual. I carry my smartphone in something that could once be read.”
But a found poem can be an interesting mutant. Something as dangerously delicious as a mushroom can sprout from other people’s words. A spore type of poetry? An unhappy monster?
Click this link to find a poem about a found poem who hates being just that. In fact, he is a lost and found poem, who finds himself at Verity La:
http://verityla.com/thy-poetry-and-thy-pathos-all-so-strange-ps-cottier/
Other Tuesday poets may have found their poems on the beach, or at least made them up from lines from letters in a number of bottles. Those which were empty of wish-granting genies, that is.
Click this feather, dropped by a seagull, and find out:
Tuesday poem: Wetlands haiku
August 25, 2014
perched on a log
damp bark transfers water —
my pink frog bum
P.S. Cottier
I do not fully understand this image…
Now that damp croak of a poem was written at a great event which was held in O’Connor, just up the road from where your poetic blogger lives. (That’s me, if you were wondering.) A group of people met, heard about the wetlands and haiku, and wrote a brimming bucket of the tadpole poems.
The event was organised by Sarah St Vincent Welch (writer) and Edwina Robinson (Urban Waterways Coordinator). There are lovely photos and more poems at the following link, including some more serious ones. But I am particularly chuffed by the photo that follows on from the poem, in which I am indeed perched on a log.
http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/research/research-centres/cccr/publications/haiku
Canberra is a very lucky city, with features such as the urban waterways in the inner city. (If you are imagining a city such as Paris, or Sydney, please don’t. Canberra is not that type of place at all.) The waterways return some of the creek that flowed through this area to a more natural state after it was concreted at some stage. Philosophically, it is an interesting question whether these recreated ponds are ‘natural’, but I am pleased that they exist.
Similarly, is haiku in English actually haiku? Is a haiku that contains a rhyme a proper haiku? Should we worry about such notions of form and purity?
Or should we just play?
Press this feather, fly to New Zealand, and read even more poetry:
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Tuesday poem: Hope by Emily Brontë
August 13, 2014
Hope was but a timid friend;
She sat without the grated den,
Watching how my fate would tend,
Even as selfish-hearted men.
She was cruel in her fear;
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there,
And she turned her face away!
Like a false guard, false watch keeping,
Still, in strife, she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping;
If I listened, she would cease.
False she was, and unrelenting;
When my last joys strewed the ground,
Even Sorrow saw, repenting,
Those sad relics scattered round;
Hope, whose whisper would have given
Balm to all my frenzied pain,
Stretched her wings, and soared to heaven,
Went, and ne’er returned again!
There is another poem on the same subject by Emily Dickinson, of course, which mentions wings, but I prefer this one, being a renowned misery guts.
If you would like wingèd hope to plop onto your lap like an obese kakapo, may I suggest you press this feather? You will not fly, or run very fast, but you will find yourself reading many poems from New Zealand. However, a flightless parrot tells me that the very fine Hub Poem is by a member of what our Prime Minister just dubbed ‘Team Australia’. A phrase guaranteed to make any poet puke. If you don’t, please hand your licence back in to the Appropriate Authorities.
The poem at the hub is by a third Emily, by the way: Emily Manger.
Lizz Murphy at the Hub
July 28, 2014
That sounds like an ad for a jazz singer, at a club drenched in twilight like cheap cologne, where the sax wails like a lonely cat.
But it is not. It is purely informative, telling you, dear reader, that I edited the hub post for Tuesday Poem this week, and that it features the said Ms Murphy with a most beguiling poem. Press this feather and read:
Here is a photo of Lizz Murphy and myself in front of some wool, which bears absolutely no relation to the poem. She is the one who looks intelligent.
Tuesday poem: iPsalm
July 24, 2014
Sweet god of Twitter
keep me succinct
but not too avid.
Deliver your goat
from all foul trolls’
machinations.
May the words of
my blogs,
the firstworldproblems
of my speech
be acceptable
to your on-line policies.
O great moderator
#amen
P.S. Cottier
So here’s a poem partly about Twitter and Facebook by a person who resolutely refuses to do either. Twitter seems to bring out the inner thug in too many people, and Facebook, with its voluntary marketing of each person by each person as a commodity, is just sad. Although one of the books I have been involved in has its own Facebook page, admittedly. But that is a commodity, albeit a poetic one.
Blogs, of course, are inevitably saintly…
The following feather, dropped by a visiting angel, will take you to New Zealand and you can contemplate the wonders of technology as you fly there. Or not. That is entirely up to you.
This poem is appearing on Thursday, rather than Tuesday. Sorry for that.
By rights I should be in Sydney, recovering from the launch of The Stars Like Sand, but I was too sick to go. Rest is what I need right now.
I hope those who attended enjoyed the launch.
PS Cottier 