Places Poem

Side by Side

Soft cloth hugs my waist and

Hangs loose down my summer legs

Kissing them as I sprint through the

Fresh green grass that needs to be cut

Grass and weeds hug my feet

Trying to stop me, to

Make me be one with the night and

Feel the midnight air.

I don’t let it stop me.

We run with a laugh and a smile

Hearing him catching up

Laughing louder

Reaching the gate, coming to a stop

It opens up to us

Allowing us to the river.

An entrance of

Him going left, me going right

He sits on the break wall, I stand on the stairs

His feet dangle above the surface, mine down under

With no grip on the algae infested cement

Slipping down, my waist now submerged

Soft cloth now hangs heavy and cold

A blanket he brought replaces them.

Holding the blanket above my knees

I walk and dance in the water to his

Improvised guitar riffs, us both

Staring up at the stars and to the

Left where the city glows and the

Niagara Falls lets out its sigh.

The stars smile back at us.

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Also, I am excited for class tomorrow and would love to talk to you about that literary magazine you talked to me about at our meeting. I hope that there is room so that I have the chance to take part in it! If not, I understand. I just want you to know that I am very interested.

Emily Dickinson's use of dashes

Dickinson uses the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated words to rush together; she qualifies conventional language with her own different strains; and she confounds editorial attempts to reduce her "dashed off " jottings to a "final" version. Not only does she draw lines through her own drafts but also through the linguistic conventions of her society, and her challenges to God are euphemistic imprecations against conventional religion. Even the allusion to the Morse alphabet is not entirely irrelevant: through her unconventional use of punctuation, particularly the dash, Dickinson creates a poetry whose interpretation becomes a process of decoding the way each fragment signals meaning.

Dickinson's transition from a dominant use of the exclamation mark to a preference for the dash accompanied her shift from ejaculatory poems, which seem outcries aimed with considerable dramatic effect at God or others, to poems where the energies exist more in the relationships between words and between the poet and her words. In this intensely prolific period, Dickinson's excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit. Though these speculations are all subject to debate, it is clear that in the early 1860s Dickinson conducted her most intense exploration of language and used punctuation to disrupt conventional linguistic relations, whether in an attempt to express inexpressible psychological states or purely to vivify language.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/dash.htm

Renshi-Renku

This was my Renku from class today:

Tree branches rustle
Wind whistles through the ghost town
Everyone is gone

Starlight echoes through the trees
In an empty open night

The ghost of my past
Travels with wind.Oh, oh
Look behind you, sir

All of my failed hopes and dreams
Everything I should have done

And things that I did
I'll keep it hidden away
'Til my voice is heard

Heard by the people I love
Those who matter most to me

I dream of a day
The day to see my friends 'gain
Soon that day will come

For now I am alone still
but again my friends will come

The Ghazal of What Hurt

by Peter Cole
(source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20686)

Pain froze you, for years—and fear—leaving scars. But now, as though miraculously, it seems, here you are walking easily across the ground, and into town as though you were floating on air, which in part you are, or riding a wave of what feels like the world's good will— though helped along by something foreign and older than you are and yet much younger too, inside you, and so palpable an X-ray, you're sure, would show it, within the body you are, not all that far beneath the skin, and even in some bones. Making you wonder: Are you what you are— with all that isn't actually you having flowed through and settled in you, and made you what you are? The pain was never replaced, nor was it quite erased. It's memory now—so you know just how lucky you are. You didn't always. Were you then? And where's the fear? Inside your words, like an engine? The car you are?! Face it, friend, you most exist when you're driven away, or on—by forms and forces greater than you are.

Haiku's

We moved on to a new unit: Haiku's. I can honestly say that I am going to miss slam poetry, but I know that I will continue to search for it online and attempting to write it. I have one "slam poem" so far, but it is my first one ever, so I need to keep practicing.
Friday and today (Monday) we wrote our own haiku's:

Tree branches rustle.
Wind whistles through the debris.
Everyone is gone.
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Small silver bullets
Dart away through the water.
Shark remains hungry.
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The second haiku is based on a picture of hundreds of little fish swimming around a shark.
I think haiku's are easy to write. The challenging part is intertwining meaning in with just three lines of 5-7-5. I find the first haiku that I wrote, much stronger than the second.

Out of all of the structures of poems we have learned these past two classes (haiku, tanka, choka, ghazal) the haiku is my favorite. However, none of these have yet made me grow a strong liking or appeal to them. It is possible that more time focused on them in class will change that!

Slam Poetry!

On my free time, I have been searching through videos of slam poetry. I thought I would post one of my favorites that I came across.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0