Poem 19 - This Day




Photo: Sally Douglas

this day

today

was a day

to sleep

in the

sun

under a sky

of birdsong

today

I have

not

wasted

my life

Sally Douglas

Poems 17 and 18 - Blackout Poems

A Blackout Poem

Blackouts are another form of erasure poem, but in a blackout poem the poet selects words to be kept from a text and crosses out the rest. In this way one is left with a space that holds new meaning within the shape of the old. I was reminded of this method by a prompt tweeted yesterday by Jo Bell, who included a link to the Newspaper Blackout  website which has an amazing array of this type of poem. It's fun to do, but can become rather addictive...

Here's another. I've chopped up the columns to fit it in here, but they're in the original order. Michael Gove, in case any of my readers haven't heard of him, is the somewhat Gradgrindian UK politician in charge of education policy.

The Facts



Poem 16 - The Voices

Photo: Sally Douglas

Voices

I am the leaves that grew from the tree

I am the river that grew from the rain

I am the mountain that grew from the rock

I am the waves which grew from the sea

I am the sea that poured through your hands

I am the tree that grew in your bones

I am the rain that washed your heart

I am the rock that splintered your lands

I am the land that is covered with sea

I am the bones that are carved from rain

I am the heart that is chipped from rock

I am the hands that shatter the tree

Sally Douglas

Poem 15 - When

Photo: Sally Douglas

When

and when your hands are black from the stories

wash them with ink

and when your mouth is silent

wash it out with inoculations

and when the horizon is pared to a small impossibility

wash out your eyes with potato peelings

and if you think we are living in a tinderbox of legends

wash it out with flame

wash out the book with mime

wash out the sky with elevens

wash out the bones with milk

wash everything with something and

wash out the everlasting and  

Sally Douglas

This poem came from the NaPoWriMo website's prompt for Day 18: write a poem beginning and ending with the same word.

What's working quite well for me at the moment is taking an external prompt and then going back to my notebooks and seeing if it sparks with anything there. In this case I was drawn to something I had written late one night about washing in ink. This is what resulted.

The photo was taken in St Austell, Cornwall, UK, last week.

Fourteen NaPoWriMo Poems

Well, I'm half way through the month, and I've managed 14 poems. Some are better than others, but they are 14 poems that wouldn't have got written otherwise. The exercise has shown me that I can break the block.

Of course there is a problem with putting these poems out in the public domain. I won't be able to submit them to magazines or competitions, as being on this blog will count as 'previously published'. Also, they are unpolished, a very scary thing for someone who is used to obsessive editing and rewriting over a long period. There are bound to be flaws which I would have noticed with more time to ripen.

But the benefits of this speed production have been immense. It has motivated me to work intensively towards a moment of release. a letting go of each piece, which means that I can go on to start the next. It has also meant that I have to produce something - no excuses - so I have been working very hard on looking for prompts and inspiration.

I'm not sure I shall manage the full thirty by the deadline - there have been and will be the odd days when I actually have no time at all - but I aim to get as close as possible, and to catch up if I can.

How are other people doing? It would be great to hear your experience!

Poem 14 - Looking Out

Photo: Sally Douglas

Looking Out

The moon is like an unwashed plate.

The stars creak in the sky’s tight skin.

I don’t remember coming in.

Morning girl’s still in the glass,

smiling like a broken window.

How slow the minutes pass.

Her eyes are big as sand and cold as worms.

They cast a searchlight beam.

Too bright to let me dream.

I want to see her smile, her sleek-slack smile,

watering the blackened railway tracks.

But only for a while.

Sally Douglas

Recently I've been looking through old notebooks and abandoned bits of writing on my hard drive. And I'm amazed by how much I've written that I'd completely forgotten. This poem has its roots in a bit of prose I wrote years ago as an exercise in surrealism. I thought I might be able to use some fragments in a poem, but I didn't really know where to go with it until I saw The Poetry School's prompt for today. This mentioned writing about what you don't remember rather than what you do. That notion of not remembering gave me the hook I needed, and the poem grew from there.

I've gone for a shifting rhyme scheme and uneasy rhythms to reflect the content of the poem.

And you might not believe it, but these are not the wildest images that were in that original piece of prose...

Poem 13 - Ghazal

Photo: Sally Douglas

Ghazal

Wind spatters stars against the sky.

Like my words hurled against the outstretched sky.

Questions curve the light of breaking day

Under the bell of the outstretched sky.

Like stones thrown at a window pane

Birds burst into the outstretched sky.

In the morning fields dawn pools in furrows

Pouring down from the outstretched sky.

I hold a cold stone in my outstretched palm.

And offer it up to the outstretched sky.

The day swoops down and steals the stone

And my burden is borne by the outstretched sky.

Sally Douglas

The idea of trying my hand at a ghazal came from reading a very good book on the practice of therapeutic writing: Writing Works: A resource handbook for therapeutic writing workshops and activities, edited by Gillie Bolton, Victoria Field and Kate Thompson (Jessica Kingsley, 2006). I'd been thinking about writing therapies because I've been following Sali Mustafic's blog which links her therapy practice with the NaPoWriMo poems she is writing, and was flicking through this book when I came across the section by Jane Tozer on how the ghazal broke her writer's block.

The ghazal is a form of Arabic, Persian and Urdu origin. It comprises of 5 - 15 couplets. Each couplet must act as an independent poem as well as being part of the whole, and each must finish with the radif, the refrain which is set up in the first couplet. There is never an enjambment between the couplets. In the original form, the final couplet usually plays upon the poet's name, but Western versions have often dropped this characteristic. There's more about the ghazal here.

I found it strange at first, trying to fit my head into the form, but once I had tuned into the pacing of it, the way the radif works both as a line cast out and as an anchor, I found the ghazal a very satisfying form to explore.  I'm sure I shall be returning to it.