Wallenberg

They made a stamp for him that matched his years
with first-class cents, but now he’s been replaced.
No one can mail a letter with his face.
Five decades lost: some claim he still appears

in Russian prisons; he must be alive!
But they say he died quickly, that a fool
who whispers his survival is too cruel.
His overburdened heart, at thirty-five,

gave out–no Russian blade to parse his lungs,
nor Stalin bullets needed to make peace.
And no call need be made for the release
of men dead half a century. The young

find him outdated, worthless as his stamps,
and call the suburbs concentration camps.

In my recent visits to Eratosphere, I am reminded of why I stopped participating there much. There are some great people there (and a few churls), but they aren’t my audience. I don’t want to write clever-clever metrical poems that have all the stresses in exactly the right places but never say anything important.

Different workshops end up with different feels. Erato’s in one of pedantic nitpickery and celebration of the most antiseptic impulses in poetry. But it’s inevitable. When you talk about sonnets too much, you end up hatcheting them just to have something to say. Non-metrical workshops tend to ooh and aah over metrical work, far beyond the poem’s merits.

I’ve never found a middle ground.

I don’t write in rhyme and meter as an end. They are tools, not the point of the exercise. Stating up front that I want a poem to be read as a “metrical” poem is so so where I want to be.

Yet I submitted a sonnet to the sonnet challenge. So I’m obviously a hypocrite, and a bad dresser to boot.

Deerfly

Deer flourish in this wildwood. I have stared
while dozens dapple through the Escher trees
in quick battalions. Yesterday, a pair
stood knee high in the grasses of the lea
between the wood and road. Winter’s dull teeth
had gnawed their hides, and scraped fat from their bones–
but not to death. Their dying, when it comes,
will be halogen, green-eyed on the hook
of headlights. Perhaps mine. I threw a stone
and shouted, but they didn’t even look.

… the poems you think are your best and the poems other people think are your best?

… the poems you like the most and the poems you think are your best?

I find these two questions pretty interesting, mainly because for me, there doesn’t seem to be a relationship. The poems I’ve written that I like aren’t generally the ones I think are pretty good. And if I post a poem here that I think is one of my best, chances are I won’t get a comment on it at all.

Of course, since I’m always right, it just means you all are cretins! Hurumphf.

I don’t know what it all means. Perhaps simply that I have no taste and no sense of quality. I’d prefer to think it’s more like an inability to hear your own voice. (Well, I’d really really prefer to think I’m the Wile E Coyote of the poetry world, but I have my doubts. I do have business cards, though.)

The cats are draped pathetically all over the house. They are trying to convince me that they are hot. I don’t need convincing, really. Irving just set the linoleum on fire with her toes.

Typical

That would be like the rain, to bend the world
so softly sparrows can’t see where it’s curled.

That Is the Ache of Wings

I wonder if the rain has etched a spotted
bull’s-eye on the window. Something lures
the bullet birds to smash and scrabble, knotted
toeholds in the screen. The blind obscures

their glitter eyes, their beaks like shining corn,
but not the skullthunk knocking on the glass,
the frantic clack of wings, their feathers, shorn
and flung like eggshells, strawing piebald grass.

The anonysonnet discussions on Erato continue, this time with fur-flying about initial capitals in a sonnet.

I am an enjambing fool, so I tend away from initial caps. When I read poetry aloud, I read to the sense of the sentence rather than the line, which is a defensible but controversial position. In other words, it is evidence of poet cooties!

In any case, I generally notice initial caps. In the case of this sonnet by Steve Schroeder, I didn’t notice them. I was trying to read the sonnet as a finalized work rather than a workshoppy piece, which means taking it as is instead of suggesting change. This is one of the problems I have with workshops in general, that they are more like fault-finding missions than general appraisals, but I digress.

Initial caps: Love ’em? Hate ’em? Love to berate ’em?

We did NaPo. We did MaPo. And now we’re sliding into June with a JuPo.

10 poems. 30 days. Mine will be sonnets, dizains, or at least 20 lines. In theory.

Equally crazy denizens of PFFA will be joining Howard and me. How about you?

When birds attack!

A bird just tried to get in my window. I mean a sustained attempt, with cheeping, scrabbling, and the knock-knock-knocking of what should be fragile wings but sounded more like brass knuckles on a bruiser named, well, Bruiser.

Dare I try to go to my car? What horrors await?