Thursday, March 13, 2014

Oulipost preview! boys, boys, boys.

The oulipost exercise starts in April, but I wanted to share my warm-up exercise.


here is the assignment:


TAUTOGRAM...
Compose a poem whose words -- or at least the principal ones -- all begin with the same letter. The words must be sourced from your newspaper.



This is what I did with that. It's probably not Shakespeare, but it's a start.





boys, boys:
behind Bellaire, Brandon
Buckley becoming Big Bird
bit by bit, but better,
brighter; back behind Bellaire

 
SOURCE:  Bellaire boys tracksters encouraged by early-season results, Houston Chronicle March 12







Monday, March 10, 2014

Five Questions (and roughly the same number of answers) about Oulipost

So, I am super psyched to be participating in Oulipost this year. See here for details and an explanation. In short, it's an experimental form of poetry creation.




http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/oulipost/




April will be pretty busy on this blog, so be sure to check back often. The assignment is to respond every day in April to one of the prompts, so be prepared to be surprised and amazed and enthralled each day you read this blog.




In any case, on to the starting five questions about Oulipost






1. WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT OULIPOST?


My writing has always been pretty "traditional" which among other things means that it lacks some of the surprise and whimsy that I like in other people's writing. I very much like the idea that artificially imposed structures can actually free you up to be creative. And there's nothing more artificially imposed, I suspect, than Oulipost. This is kind of a cool chance for me to see how I respond to structure, with some public accountability attached that will ensure I stick with it.




2. WHAT, IF ANYTHING, SCARES YOU ABOUT OULIPOST?


The distinct possibility that on a given day I won't be able to produce anything that doesn't suck, and won't be able to do what I usually do in such cases, which is keep it to myself.




3. HAVE YOU WRITTEN EXPERIMENTAL OR FOUND POETRY BEFORE? IF
SO, TELL US ABOUT IT.


Never, ever, ever.



4. WHAT NEWSPAPER WILL SERVE AS YOUR SOURCE TEXT?


The Houston Chronicle, which I'll access and consume at my local starbucks and do my initial response there as well.




5. WHO’S YOUR SPIRIT OULIPIAN?


Ummm... Burt Reynolds?





Friday, March 7, 2014

Page and Spine, the long and the short

So, things have been humming along with my writing. I have kind of shifted into writing prose for a bit, but my backlog of poems is periodically getting accepted and published.


I feel the poetry coming back, but there's no particular reason to force it.


Here's a link to the latest pair that got published in an online venue, Page and Spine. They're both eclectic and voluminous, which is probably good for oddballs like me.


Here's the link to the poems


http://www.pagespineficshowcase.com/148/category/all/1.html


"amber of the moment' I started fiddling around with about a year ago, maybe a little less. The title is a line from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five:


                  Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"
                  "That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"
                  "Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber    with three ladybugs embedded in it.
                  "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

The poem is kind of a short story, which speaks for itself, in broad contours. Sometimes people have very little in common other than their mutual obligations.


"the meaning of enough" is one I wrote a long time ago- it was one of the first poems I wrote when I started back into writing,  in the winter of 2007. It's also kind of a short story. The title comes from some online debate I witnessed about anti-natalism, where someone mangled the Martin Amis quote: "Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough."  I was thinking a lot at the time about how, in many ways, the lives of some mentally ill people are way more heroic than anything I could ever do. The link between those notions formed a story and it seemed to require a pretty tight structure.


It's my wife's favorite poem of mine, an opinion she seemed to be unique in, given responses of various editors over the years. But it has found its home.