Tag: experimental poetry

O! Son Of Trauma

The mental image that inspired my poem for this prompt is a photograph taken at Bhopal, after the catastrophic chemical plant explosion. (The image I mean is number 7 in this article, but please be warned it is an image of a dead child and very upsetting, don’t go there if you don’t want that in your mind).

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I’m extremely happy to be joined today by two more excellent poems. This one is by the wonderful Finola Scott:

He arrived late, but smelt so sweet
and forty years later he does it again
My bold boy, the Prodigal, I joke
to his sister. Her and I smile & sigh.

Today we high-wind hurtle city to city
across Scotland’s belted waist. He says
The Icelandic Symphony Orchestra play
capitally. As musician after musician
crowds the stage we giggle, so many tails.
Honey brass gleams, chestnut cellos wait
for sap-rise. He nudges, points at the timpani.

Then it soars, I’m swept into fiords, ice
melts, sea eagles swoop, glaciers calve.
Side by side we voyage out of ourselves
into each other.

And this one is donated by the equally wonderful Harry Gallagher:

The Sea

Today I almost gave my glasses to the sea
but the sea said no,
it could see where things were headed
and the ebb and the flow
hadn’t lost my address
it had just looked the other way
for a moment.

Today I tried to throw my stick into the sea
but the sea tossed it back
with a million tonnes of plastic,
said it was too full up for now
but if I stuck around
for at least another day
it could do with a hand itself.

Today I shot my slings at the sea wall
but all that came back
was an echo of a wave
as ancient as time,
a reminder that tomorrow is a choice
that will happen with or without
the sound of my voice.

Today I unloaded my woes to the sea.
The rage and the spray
of a world of injustice
was carried away on the westward wind
that battered and dropped me
then propped me back up
to await the turn of the tide.

 

Resplendent Incisors

When I was writing to this prompt, I really wanted to do something about the tiger who broke her front tooth and had it replaced with a gold one, but everything I tried turned out a bit – dunno, but wrong. So I did what I often do when I feel lacking, I tried out a form, a set of rules to play by. In this case, a Terrance Hayes A Gram of &s-type exercise. 11 lines, last word of each line must be found anagrammatically within the words of the title, 4+ letter words only, no pluralisation. I’m not saying the resulting poem is any great shakes, but it did come together with the little click that says ‘poem’ to me.

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If you’d like to try your own A Gram of &s poem, or any sort of piece playing with anagrams of this title, here’s my most interesting word list so far – what others can you find?

INCITE   RILE  SLICE  SORREL  SPLEEN   SPLENETIC   RINSE   SCISSOR   CORPSE   ROOST   CREST   STRIPE   INCISE   SPINDLE   SPIRE   INSPIRE   SPINE   STELE   STEEL   TREND   REPENT   INDENT   SPITE   SPORT   PORTER   PRESENT   PINCER   PRINCE   INTERRED   RESPECT   TINDER   SCREED   SECRET   SECRETE   CREED   REPEL   RISEN   RENNET   CRISP   CREPE   ROPED   DINNER   DINE  DINER   TINE  SITE   TENSE   CREDIT   SEER

Update! Ann Cuthbert found some more anagrams, and wrote this superb Gram of &s with them, about Mayan jade teeth…

Lady of Teotihuacan, you rise,
bones stripped but breath not spent,
while Kukulkan writhes, peers
from your mouth, from green serpentine
tooth, tartared and worn before the cist
claimed your corpse. Jade priestess,
you are the passageway, you entice
the serpent-god to emerge, spirit
up a wind, conjure ancestor-gods in rite
of resurrection. Green in your jaw, he sleeps.
At your summoning, he stirs.

The Lift And Aspirations Of The Line

I have a confession to make. I’ve done something a bit creepy. (It wasn’t meant to be creepy).  Ages ago, I followed someone on Twitter. I don’t know them in real life, and I’ve never interacted with their account, but someone recommended them as being ‘wholesome’, and I needed some benign influences on my feed. So, they are benign, just Tweeting their everyday, BUT ALSO they have a natural iambic pentameter going on in their Tweets. It’s like little bits of poetry. Their throwaway posts have the lift and lilt that my poetic lines aspire to….so I nicked 14 of them and made a ‘found sonnet’. Creepy Twitter stalker sonnet. Sorry not sorry.

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Mercifully, I am not the only one who has gone all ‘found poetry’ on this prompt! (Interesting….?) Here’s a lush one from Ann Cuthbert.

Dull battleship grey or goldish ochre.
If cold, it can be tough to cut.
Placing it in sun softens it, makes cutting easier.
Blades give different styles of cut,
narrow and deep, broad and shallow.
An accidental slip, a nasty gouge.
How deep to cut? A Goldilocks moment.
Too shallow and it fills up, too deep, you risk a hole.
Sacrifice a piece to try the blades.
You’ll soon get a feel for what’s just right.
Deeper and shallower lines, straight and curved.
Short, long, little stabs, jerking sideways.
What’s been cut away and what remains?
You didn’t mean to cut that part away.

(phrases lifted from ‘Getting started with lino printing’ Marion Body Evans)

Itinerant Line

I have been reading far too many books on poetic form by Penned In The Margins, and so have been forced to write a poem entirely made of anagrams of the prompt (except for the little joining words because I’m not completely brilliant/psychotic).

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Luckily, I also have more sensible poems here from Jules Clare

Travelling from place to place
Plane, train, automobile
A Climatic emergency disgrace
Turning down the emission dial

A line is easy to define
Especially if it’s mine
Locally from Newcastle to Scotland
The Lowlands to The Highlands sublime

How will I get on in life?
Will I be in a dream?
Will I proffer a knife ?
Personal challenges unclean

Purple visions and strife
Dressed to kill in Docs
Travelling between Lisbon and Fife
Observing European Goths

And from Jo Colley – thank you, both!

The line between acceptable and unacceptable
The line between here and there
The line between what is mine and what is yours
which shifts like the line of the tide, a salt stain
on the sand, watermarked silk
The line between now and then, ungraspable
like water, like the wings of a hummingbird
Yesterday, today and tomorrow with the light
growing and shrinking on the horizon, the sky
forever an endless bowl without a single line
where we will all fall upwards into infinity

Better Ways To Fail

Does anyone actually enjoy failing? In my first blog about my writing residency at MIMA, I said I was going to experiment with a really wide range of techniques, and fail as interestingly as possible. But of course, I secretly hoped that everything I touched would turn to gold.

Readers, it did not.

I’ve shown you some of what I feel are the better pieces to come out of the residency so far – now here are a couple of bits I’ve binned.

The power of this African life, this free life, crosses history

I’m happy enough with the content of this blackout poem, but as an object it is ugly and dull- it actually looks much better in photographs than it does in real life, thanks to the miracle of editing tools.


I tried first to erase text using a stippling technique, then when that didn’t work I covered over text with masking tape.

That was a really revolting mess of a white-out, so I started painting the masking tape with black ink, hoping for a sort of stormy sea effect. It dried and took on a patchwork leather effect, which looks like a mistake on this crappy bit of cardboard. I used some of the blackout squares from a previous film to try to create more interest. Meh.

Can it be turned around? I think the only thing that might work is if I were to apply this technique to a human figure or silhouette. Then it might be possible to think in terms of the literal scars of slavery, or dreadful stories about the use of human hides. Then the leathery, bandaged surface might become something powerful and moving. Am I the right person to do this? I think not. But that is what the final texture of the piece brought to my mind. If I were to do this with an anonymous human form, it would be an exercise in objectification. Himid’s life-sized figure works because he is named, reclaimed, celebrated in all his individual glory.

This second piece is a more convention blackout poem, using felt-tip pen. I was experimenting with a non-linear, non-grammatical construction. Basically a sort of mind-map springing out of the central phrase “questions of migration”. It’s  too random a cloud of words, requiring too much interpretation by the reader to have much of an impact.


So – there you have it, I have managed to fail as promised, though maybe not as interestingly as I would like. Not yet, anyway! Onwards! The next phase of the residency is inspired by Brazilian artist Brigida Baltar, and I’m still working on the written aspect. I’ll be back once I have some visuals for you! Plus, watch out for some writing prompts coming your way…

Playing with form

Recently I’ve been reading Asteronymes by Claire Trevien, a collection of poems that has repeatedly and deservedly been called ‘playful’. Lots of the poems muck about with wordplay, redaction, and poetic form. There’s a form in there that Claire has invented, where she splits four-letter words down the middle and uses them to start the first word of a line, and end the last word. This is most evident in the poem ‘Goatfell’, whose first two lines read thusly (emphasis my own)

GOthic scrabble of rocks, we chAT

FEy and murder: how this chap feLL

I rather like this game, so I had a go at it myself. I found it tricky but interesting, as it forced out a strange little poem quite unlike what I would usually write. The inspiration for the subject matter was a conversation I had with Husband as we sauntered through a churchyard. Husband says he’d like to be buried with a video camera in the coffin, so people could watch some kind of live stream decomposition. Grim, but funny, and potentially a spiritual act – it reminded me of a set of Buddhist watercolours I saw in the touring ‘Flesh’ exhibition, which portray stages of decomposition as an aid to meditation on impermanence.

What I really wanted to do was create a version of the poem where lines would fade, or decompose. I’ve seen similar things online, and had hoimagesped it would be something I could do via Twine – but alas, no, it needs properly coding and I am ignorant of this arcane magic. So instead I have rendered it as a Powerpoint presentation with slides that fade into each other! Neat! If you’d like to read it, please click on the link below to download it.

Underground, his face and body disintegrate