Words of One Syllable
The old saying for plain, direct speech is “tell it in words of one syllable.”
Robert Pinsky
Try a poem that uses only words of one syllable. To make it harder, you might even forbid your poem the use of any form of the verb “to be.” This will push you into non-Latinate language and short active verbs. It is interesting to observe how these restrictions complicate and alter expression. It is difficult to find examples of poems written with only single syllable words. It is less difficult to find poems you could easily translate into words of one syllable. This first poem Pinsky found is sort of dark.
Tichborne’s “Elegy”
………Written with his own hand in the tower before his execution.
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I am but made.
The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
….….……………….….….….—Chidiock Tichborne
(1558-86)
(from an article by Robert Pinsky)
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right here too.
Han Shan/Gary Snyder
from Cold Mountain Poems
Monosyllabics I
I once sat on a log
at the edge of a field
in the dark with a man,
a friend, we talked.
We watched a star, a small ball
of fire, shoot an arc
down through the night
to land in the corn.
“Oh my God!” We yelled.
“Did you see that?”
A rock from space still sits
out there now in that field.
No one will know it if they find it.
It has turned tame and cool.
I can’t tell you the grand point,
just the gist of this small tale.
You must make your own point—
small as a rock, big as the sky. Try.
jch 3/26/13a
II
Bright white
bounced light
great plate
eye of night
full moon.
jch 3/27/13
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April 27th
Dream Prompt
Dreams, it has been said, were the first poems and stories told around the fire in ancient tribal cultures. Write a poem about a dream, or dreams, or dreaming.
Empire of Dreams
Charles Simic
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
Dream
Elizabeth Bishop
I see a postman everywhere
Vanishing in thin blue air
A mammoth letter in his hand,
Postmarked from a foreign land.
The postman’s uniform is blue.
The letter is of course from you
And I’d be able to read, I hope,
My own name on the envelope
But he has trouble with this letter
Which constantly grows bigger & bigger
And over and over with a stare,
He vanishes into blue, blue air.
Sleep is the best meditation.
The Dalai Lama
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
Bob Dylan
In Praise of Dreams
Wislawa Szymborska
In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.
I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.
I drive a car
that does what I want it to.
I am gifted
and write mighty epics.
I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.
My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.
I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.
Falling from the roof
I tumble gently to the grass.
I’ve got no problem
breathing under water.
I can’t complain:
I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.
It’s gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.
As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.
I’m a child of my age,
but I don’t have to be.
A few years ago
I saw two suns.
And night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
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Aprll 28
Title Search (not for Lawyers)
“An ideal poem: every line of it
can serve as the title for a book.”
Vera Pavlova
in Heaven is not Verbose: a Notebook
Poetry Magazine April 2012
When I read the quotation above, I started a little notebook of titles. It made me begin to hear titles everywhere.
Make a poem out of titles. They might be:
titles of poems you have yet to write,
titles of yet unwritten songs,
imagined titles of your novels,
chapter titles for your novels or memoir,
titles for children’s books,
titles for chapters in a quirky, imagined nonfiction book.
But somehow the titles should hang together as a poem and introduce an element of mystery. This exercise is great if you are a poet who has trouble escaping sentence structure as I do.
Table of Contents
Elaine Equi
Spree
Monster Gardens
Up Close, Out Back, Down Under
Flying Backward
The Drunken Voluptuary Workers in the Sanatorium
Dove Sighting
All The Yellow in the World
A Curse I Put on Myself
Three Sides of the Same Coin
Aria
Night Cream
Good Luck With Your Chaos
The Glass Stagecoach
In the Country of Mauve
Parrots and Dictators
Slumming
Walking the Evening Back Home
A Twelve-Course Dinner of Regret
The Gap Gatherer
Burning Down the Ocean
Multiple Choice
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April 29th
A Tentative Autobiography
Write an abbreviated autobiography (like Vera Pavlova’s), a Curriculum Vitae (like Lisel Mueller’s), or a poetic evasion of your life story (as in Mary Oliver’s poem).
A tentative bio:
caught fireflies,
read till dawn,
fell in love with weirdos,
cried buckets of tears
for reasons unknown,
birthed two daughters
by seven men.
Vera Pavlova
Translated from the Russian
by Steven Seymour
Curriculum Vitae Lisel Mueller 1992
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an
old man’s loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger
than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
From Dogfish
Mary Oliver
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
To the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story
A few people just trying
One way or another,
to survive.
Mostly I just want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
Swim through the fires to stay in
This world.
A Note to Strangers
