Showing posts with label 21st Century poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 21st Century poetry. Show all posts

Saturday, June 22, 2013

The Life Giving Tree (Robert Owuodihia)


Remixed photo, original by Jim Bahn
From Wikipedia
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She gives us breath
She gives us life
She takes us through the strife
And protects us here on earth
Against global warming
Against ice melting
Food she gives us
Shelter to protect us
Clothing to clothe us
And medicine to cure us
Yet of her immense contributions
We do not show her our appreciation
A tree we must each grow
Before death shall crow
For if the last tree dies
The last man too dies
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Robert is an 18-year-old Ghanaian and a 2013 graduate from Achimota Senior High School in Ghana. He is a science major who loves literature.

He enjoys writing poems and has written over 80 of them.

He is currently seeking a publisher for his work.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

On Seeing Rothko's No. 14, 1960 (Carolyn Foster Segal)

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It's a Roman shade, the thick dull red

falling halfway, to blot out

the evening sky,

or a thick swath of happiness,

the kind that arrives from nowhere

and knocks you out,

or the last scene in a Bergman film--

the black line at the horizon,

that hilltop parade of

the dead--backlit and

somehow triumphant.
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See Rothko's No. 14, 1960

Mark Rothko
No. 14, 1960, 1960
oil on canvas
114 1/2 in. x 105 5/8 in. (290.83 cm x 268.29 cm)
Collection SFMOMA, Helen Crocker Russell Fund purchase
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Carolyn Foster Segal teaches creative writing, American literature, and film at Cedar Crest college, in Allentown, PA. She writes humorous essays for The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, and The Irascible Professor; her other essays, stories, and poems have appeared in over fifty publications, including, most recently, 2RiverView and Long Island Quarterly.

This poem is copyright 2009 by Carolyn Foster Segal and is posted here with permission.

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Thursday, June 4, 2009

Rounds (Carolyn Foster Segal)

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“Thank you for

coming,” my father says

at the beginning and

end of each visit, and “How’s

the family?” and “Do you know

if there’s a kind of flower called

rose?” When we go for a drive,

he calls out the name

of each street

as if it were

an exotic place he’s seeing

for the first time,

as indeed he is, each day blank

and shimmering

and open, like

the snow-covered lawn

that he’s studying now.

“That’s snow,” I tell him, and

he says, “Imagine that.”
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Carolyn Foster Segal teaches creative writing, American literature, and film at Cedar Crest college, in Allentown, PA. She writes humorous essays for The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, and The Irascible Professor; her other essays, stories, and poems have appeared in over fifty publications, including, most recently, 2RiverView and Long Island Quarterly.

This poem is copyright 2009 by Carolyn Foster Segal and is posted here with permission.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Resistance (John Lawson)

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These fields and creeks, these woods and hills and hummocked spots,

Where rabbits crouch among the briars, none of these

Recognize their owners or the claims they stake.

They sleep, unmoving and unmoved, long winter through, and wake

To bear the tractor and the plow, the rake

In sullen silence, but connive to bring

Forth into the sun and feed

The hornet, thistle, and the rattlesnake.

Honeysuckle, yellow-green

And hostile, heaps the fences, breaks them.



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John Lawson teaches Rhetoric and Creative Writing at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. His book, Generations, was published by the St. Andrews College Press in 2007, and his poems have appeared in a variety of print and online venues. His first published play, "Playing Through," recently appeared in the online journal Public Republic.
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Monday, March 23, 2009

Molting (Anca Vlasopolos)

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Male chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs)
__________________________________________________________


this winter says it has settled
for good
so that even now
late March we expect
more and more snow
mocking
a post-equinox sun

yet on the finch feeder
there’s no denying
even if smiles still crack lips
that pathetic ridiculous
mix
of olive camouflage
starting to tatter
being pushed
aside

patches
bright-lemon yellow
opera black
struggling toward
dapper array
males on the make
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Anca Vlasopolos is the author of The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); Penguins in a Warming World (Ragged Sky Press, 2007); No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000); a poetry e-chapbook, Sidereal and Closer Griefs, print chapbooks Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members (trans. Miembros Ausentes, Madrid, 2009). She has also placed over two hundred poems and short stories in literary magazines.

____________________________________________


Copyright 2009, Anca Vlasopolos

Posted with permission from author.


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A Day at the Bird Feeder



davidkade

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Sunday, March 22, 2009

Constellations (Gary B. Fitzgerald)

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My father, the pilot, taught me

the names of the stars:

Betelgeuse, Sirius, Rigel, Polaris.

He taught me the constellations:

Orion & Leo, Pegasus, Centaurus,

the eternal portraits of imagination

painted on the infinity of dark.



I was only three or four when,

just before sleep, he came into my room.

He told me that he would be home soon,

that he had to leave to hang the moon.

The next night I’d ask my grandmother

to take me outside to see "the moom,"

so I could be sure that he really was

still up there.



Long after the B-17s and the DC-3s,

but before his beloved 707s,

my father flew the magnificent old three-tailed

Constellations, and many souls were carried

over empty seas, along the edge

of the heavens, presidents and kings and VIPs,

in skies then just as empty.



And now at night when I look up

I think of him and all the constellations.

I wonder how, after all these years,

they’ve never changed,

how all he ever taught me was still true.

I look up at the moon and imagine

what distant seas are flown,

what stars now skirted by his wings,

now that I’m sure that he really is

still up there.



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Copyright 2008 – SOFTWOOD-Seventy-eight poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Burn Pile (Gary B. Fitzgerald)

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Warm Spring evening at my burn pile,

hissing restless of the fire,

pierce of an occasional hawk overhead.

Otherwise quiet.

Out burning Winter’s trimmings in the pasture:

wind-fall sticks, old hay and rosebush clippings,

broken fence boards and leftover pages.

Some cardboard boxes.

A pleasant fire on a warm Spring night,

relaxed like a deep woods campfire,

just thirty feet past the fence from my back yard.

Safe and serene, but a fire still primeval,

like Neanderthal after a good hunt,

bellies full, protected and sleepy.

I drift in a reverie, communing with the ghosts.


But that damned tractor across the pond keeps

on working, roaring, noisy diesel clatter,

snapping of saplings and trees

destroying this otherwise quiet,

destroying the otherwise pristine,

disturbing my tranquil evening alone

with the ancient spirits and popping peaceful

of the fire. Some voices are never heard,

others never cease to intrude.

Did I mention what was in the

cardboard boxes?



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Copyright 2008, by Gary B. Fitzgerald

From HARDWOOD-77 Poems
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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Mild Nights (Anca Vlasopolos)

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It’s a mild night we stand in--all friends
recapping the gathering, thrusts and parries,
touché and worse, wounds

a shape cuts itself out of darkness
to cross the barely lit street
a cat with a kitten held by the nape
only this is no maternal hold
this no offspring of hers
this one knows and screams and screams
and screams
till the street falls silent as we
now that death has fed


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Anca Vlasopolos is the author of The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); Penguins in a Warming World (Ragged Sky Press, 2007); No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000); a poetry e-chapbook, Sidereal and Closer Griefs, print chapbooks Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members (trans. Miembros Ausentes, Madrid, 2009). She has also placed over two hundred poems and short stories in literary magazines.
____________________________________________

Copyright 2009, Anca Vlasopolos

Posted with permission from author.

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Friday, January 16, 2009

Burying the Next-Door Neighbor (Anca Vlasopolos)

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like patches off an old quilt beaten for
dust her mind began to unravel

detach float settle unexpectedly
end up being fingered stepped on each day

she would stop my garden travails
air at five-minute intervals the same griefs

stuck record looped tape
memory digging wrongs

then she began to forget how to drink
feed breathe yet not how to love

for her mind’s divorce decree from her body
didn’t betray dog and cats in her care

yet despite that coming apart
or perhaps because the holding together

no longer scattered laser focus of knowing
she prophesied her near ones’ raptor gyres

and they swooped as she told me and told
and they carried her away in the night

now a dumpster sits in the driveway
colossal black bags appear at the curb
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Anca Vlasopolos is the author of The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); Penguins in a Warming World (Ragged Sky Press, 2007); No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000); a poetry e-chapbook, Sidereal and Closer Griefs, print chapbooks Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members (trans. Miembros Ausentes, Madrid, 2009). She has also placed over two hundred poems and short stories in literary magazines.

____________________________________________

Copyright 2009, Anca Vlasopolos

Posted with permission from author.


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Raptors in Motion



aquiline

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Modern Poetry: "Crystal Day" (Gary B. Fitzgerald)

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Crystal calcite ball on a light box
___________________________________________________________


Almost imperceptible the change
from dark to day's first light,
a feeble streak of amber
as the coal of night ignites

and burning bursts into vivid citrine flames,
rays like rosy quartz
illuminating wisps of pearly clouds,
and a crystal day starts.

I leave for work beneath a turquoise sky,
hoping for the best,
silver clouds drift slowly
like pale ghosts into the West.

And through the crystal day I march
under marbled skies,
while, preoccupied with my work, unnoticed
the glittering morning dies.

Like shards of milky quartz white nimbus clouds
are embedded deep in sapphire fields.
I focus on my business
and the living which it wields.

Aquamarine, now, as evening arrives
slowly darkening the day
with widening bands of ruby
like a painting by Monet.

Home at last to find my gray cat Jasper
decided he should die.
Heavy and cold, my heart; he as still as stone.
I bury him as I cry.

The sun, a topaz set in amethyst,
slowly sinks from view;
clouds of gold low over your grave.
I sit, remember you.

A life is gone and, hard as rock,
diamonds glow in jet black skies.
Twilight fades back into night
and a crystal day now also dies.

______________________________________________________

Copyright 2005, Evolving - Poems 1965-2005
Copyright 2006, Specimens - Selected Poems
Gary B. Fitzgerald


Posted with permission from poet.
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Photo/Illustration: Copyright 2008, Jennifer Semple Siegel

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Four Parts: Song + Story. Reality + Inference (Monday Love)


T.S. Eliot--Photo from Wikipedia

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On the Poets.net forum, Jepson said:

I read in one of the blogs an argument about performance poetry. One person argued that there is no such thing. They argued that performance poetry is a cheap tactic needed because the poetry is so bad. I don't think it has to be that way. I think if you start with well written poetry on paper then it will make everything else easier. I think we need to breathe some life back into poetry, and that needs to start before we ever go knocking on the publisher's door.

Poetry has become stuffy. It's mutated into this thing we tote around in university textbooks so that academics can browbeat it all day long. We might as well be selling long division. We need to motivate, uplift, piss off, and inspire our audience. It needs to move beyond the 'poets who love poets' club and start a grassroots movement of new readers.

You find an audience who wants to read/hear your work and there won't be any need to enter publishing 'contests.' The publishers will come to you.

Monday Love's response to Jepson:

I think you are speaking to the heart of the matter. The young Philip Sidney was a rock star before there was such a thing.

I hate to blame TS Eliot, because there's many people to blame, and TS Eliot couldn't help it that he wrote a great poem (Prufrock) and then grew old, but...Eliot with his 'difficulty' agenda and his reading/speaking fame which coincided with his old age did a lot of damage to poetry as an exciting art for the young.


Fame has to be carefully crafted before it 'explodes.' The conditions have to be right. The manufacture of Poetry Fame has been handled very badly in the last couple hundred years. It hasn't really been handled at all. Poetry needs cunning Managers.

I've been listening to the 'Poetry Speaks' series of CDs of famous poets reading their work, introduced by Charles Osgood. Anyway, what one notices is the voices are those of old men who sound like frogs or business executives. This is mostly due to the fact that poets don't acquire the fame to get themselves recorded until they are old, and recording technology was just beginning as poets born in the 19th century were getting old.

Of course old men and women should write and read their poetry. Don't get me wrong. But let's be frank about what it takes to get crowds lining up around the block to 'see' poetry. Old TS Eliot could get such crowds, though I think this was mostly at universities. TS Eliot's best stuff also was not 'difficult.' "Prufrock" and "Hollow Men" and a few others are anything but 'difficult.' Eliot had it, whatever it was, although he was a depressed person, beset with personal issues, and so he couldn't bring it very often, I suspect.

If we divide the world into four parts, we have song and story in the 'fiction' realm and info and inference in the 'reality' realm. The two sides of existence, fiction and reality, each have two distinct parts which are exact opposites of each other.

Song is brief and bounded, but its pleasure is indefinite. Story is long, and its pleasure is more definite. Story's popularity (think of novels and film) is based on the fact that the audience becomes immersed in the story of other human beings--the pleasure is based on an acute identification with another human reality. You watch a good play or movie and you are totally absorbed by character and what will happen to them and what they might do to each other. It is the replication of life which we enjoy, and we escape into its existence.

Song, on the other hand, or the poem, allows our minds to wander. Who has not experienced this at a poetry reading? You find yourself thinking of other things. Or sitting at a concert, listening to a piece of music? We free-associate as we listen to the music, whereas if you are watching a good play or film, you are fixated on the protagonist and watching his every move. Even a simple pop song begins a little concert within our own bodies, a sensual pleasure that is not grounded on exact information, but on indefinite feelings. A good play or movie has you interested in what is happening on the stage/screen. A song affects us differently.

So 'song' produces an indefinite pleasure, while 'story' produces a definite one. And songs are not 'difficult.' I was just listening to the current best-selling rock act, "The Black Keys:" their new album, "Attack and Release." It's new, the band is young, it's selling well, but it's just the blues! Their songs are not 'difficult.' Your mind is allowed to wander as you listen to it. Their songs do not demand you pay attention to every note. The chord changes are terribly obvious (it's the blues!) and the drums are obvious and the lyrics are dreamy and simple.

Let's now examine the other realm. In 'reality,' the info is like the 'song,' since it is brief and has definite attributes and a certain internal logic, but here a 'definite' thing is expressed--the information. "Here's how you fix a roof or bake bread." "Would you hand me that hammer, please?" This is how we convey information to each other: through clear, step-by-step, "information-songs." 'Story' is definite in the fiction realm, but indefinite in the reality realm, for here 'story' stands for all the random bits and sensations and speculations and gossip of which life is comprised. 'Story' is the free, random, immersion aspect of 'reality.' It is indefinite.

So Fiction = Song (brief, indefinite) + Story (long, definite). Reality = Info (brief, definite) + Inference (long, indefinite)

The poets erred with the 'difficult' poem. For as the mind strives to understand the 'difficult' poem, it cannot possibly enjoy the song-pleasure. The song-pleasure never forces the mind to think; on the contrary, it frees the mind and allows the senses to enjoy the song (poem). When I listen to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens read their poetry aloud in these recordings, I don't find I enjoy it at all. Both men strive to be philosophical and thoughtful in their poems and to listen to them read is just a huge bore. And I like these two guys on the page.

But listening to them made me realize something.

OLD MEN READ THEIR DIFFICULT POEMS! DON'T MISS IT! COME ONE, COME ALL!

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Source: Publishers' Reading Fees: Pro or Con? (Make your comments there)

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