Sunday, April 6, 2014

A more traditional form: found blank verse for oulipost (accept it's not my club)


accept it’s not my club 
(I love my club. Except its not my club):
Its high school didn’t teach evolution;
The family cancers would keep coming;
Sometimes he’d literally shut his eyes.


I love my club. Except it’s not my club:
You really want to make your parents proud of you-
She gave me rides until I got my car
(If I do this or that I can turn pro)

You really want to make your parents proud of you:
(I was lost out there on the tour sometimes)
She was so happy when they bought the house
(I love my club, except it’s not my club)

I really didn’t think I could beat him
(You want to make your parents proud of you;
Sometimes he’d literally shut his eyes)
I love my club, except it’s not my club.


Sources
Ackerman, Todd. “This Scientist Just Might Cure Cancer.” Houston Chronicle 6 Apr. 2014: A1, A20, A21.
Robertson, Dale. "River Oaks Sees Giammalva Come of Age.’" Houston Chronicle 6 Apr. 2014: C7.
Marinia, Richard, & Christensen, Sig. “Victim’s Wife Heard Fatal Shots” Houston Chronicle 6 Apr. 2014: B3


Note:
Wow. This was even more work. The task was to find sentences that were iambic pentameter and make a poem out of them. Newspaper stories are surprisingly wordy, with may more composite sentences than you might expect, until you ask yourself, “Holy crap, will this sentence ever end? And how am I supposed to find a sentence short enough” and then you say to your reader, “see what I did there?” I could probably have focused on lines rather than sentences and there were several that really jumped out at me, but I wanted to see what I could do with the tighter constraint of sentences, not just lines. The title is a different take on half of one of the sentences.

In any case, I was happy with the pieces of iambic pentameter I came up with. I didn’t think that there would be repetition, but putting them together in different ways just asked to be done. So I did it.

Here is the prompt I was responding to:
Compose a poem using unintentional lines of iambic pentameter found in your newspaper.

4 comments:

Barbara said...

I like this a lot, Richard. It has that teenage "angsty" thing going on. I think repetition is one good tool for this challenge - it provides a thread to hang everything else on, important when you have to scour a number of articles to come up with anything.

Richard Thompson said...

Thanks! At a certain point I realized I would do better working with the building blocks I had instead of trying to find more

Trish Hopkinson said...

I don't think I could have done it if I stuck to sentences. Impressive piece!

Elizabeth said...

I like the repetition too, and the shifting parentheses.