Venting via Poetry

Writing poetry is a very good venting mechanism for those times when you are angry, dissatisfied, annoyed or generally feeling upset. There is a catharsis in capturing your thoughts and reining them in. The Outlaw Poets are very accomplished in this form of venting.

You may in fact surprise yourself. I find that in such venting I often tap into some unconscious thoughts that I was unaware of. The words you use and their tone are often expressions of hidden and unexpressed thoughts.

So if you are angry, get it out and write a poem.

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Orange Monster

Squatting like
A flat orange
As only a flat orange
Can

The hot rod
Sat ready
For the skydiver
Or Juicer...

Note: Skydiver came up when
I misspelt juice

The G+ Force Highway

G force is so yesterday man
Today we have the G+ man, man.
So cool
So new
Cruising with the buds
down the G+
information
highway, man
like so totally
awesome
dude.

Guest Post - Morning Muse

The poem below was written as a challenge and response to my poem Night Time Stealth Poetry. Now I know whose bed the muse jumps into after mine. The poet is Paul Pindis

My Morning Muse

She slips beside me in my bed.
As yet, all others have not stirred.
She plants a kiss that says she’s here,
And once again my mind is hers.

I might attempt to close my eyes,
To hold off thoughts she chose to seed.
One might as well try block the sun
As not pursue what she’s decreed.

The inspiration that she brings,
Like clockwork, every day at dawn,
Will not delay a moment more.
I’m nothing but my muse’s pawn.

A mistress that won’t be denied,
‘Tis folly to think I’d complain.
For with her tasks she brings the gifts
No poet ever would disdain.

And here is my poem being which is being responded to.

Night Time Stealth Poetry

Why is night the time
To vent my spleen
Upon the page?

At night
The stillness creeps
entering
into my consciousness
like a stealthy cat,

Maybe the day is far to real
To allow me
To wander, explore and
Inhabit the place
That lies
Between my mind
and heart.

The place called the
Night Time Stealth and Poetry,
Arcade.

DK



Thanks Paul for rising to the challenge.

I now have a new genre of poetry called response poetry...

Grant


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Fragments of England

Snow, the Toon, Newcastle Brown Ale
Trees, parks, pristine fields.
The Underground, Metro and Railways,
Newcastle to London at 6am,
London to Newcastle at 6.05pm.
Castles, walls, history,
Literature, poetry.

Bronte, Woolf, Bloomsbury
Garsington, Sissinghurst,
Monks House, Charleston,
Leonard, Hogarth Press.
London, Birmingham, Nottingham
Hove, Shar, Hooriyah, Soleman.
Seamus, Andre and Yuliya
NUTH, Royal Berkshire.

The Black Swan, Victory
Millstone and Bacchus.












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A Lovely Quote about Poetry

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Audre Lorde

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A Found Poem from Stuff

The Greatest
Homicide Land Search
Overstayer used Uncles ID
Hang Glider crashes in Canterbury
No confirmation on NZ data
Train collides with crowd in US.

This is a compilation of headlines in the Stuff online publication for 16 November 2012.

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Mesostics a discovery

You have all heard of an acrostic, but do you know what a mesostic is? A mesostic builds around a spine with the spine of the mesostic running down the middle of the poem rather than the front. The spine and the text chosen to find the mesostic do not need to be related but it is often good if they do.

To construct a mesostic identify your spine word or words

Find a source text

Use the first word in your text that has the spine letter in any position other than the first or ultimate letter.

If you want to you can use wings where more than one word is used to encapsulate the spine

An example is shown below using MBSPOET as the spine and one of my poems "Saturday Morning" as the text.

The original poem is:

In bed

With iPad
Looking through
Poetry
And
Vocabulary
Just for you.

What is it
About poetry
That captivates me?
The power of
Words to mesmerise

The mesostic looks like this

Captivates Me
             In Bed
    MesmeriSe in
                iPad
           LoOking through
           PoEtry
          capTivates

The mesostic changes the meaning but reveals a truth that I am mesmerised by my iPad and poetry.

Ciao
DK

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Possibilities

Every poem starts with possibilities
and then wends its undetermined way
through the nooklets of thought
The surreal possibilities narrow
until we reach the
ORANGES and SARDINES.

This poem was something related to a poem by Frank O'Hara titled, "Why I am not a Painter". O'Hara was from the New York school who were influenced by the surrealists.

His poem is below:

Why I Am Not a Painter


by Frank O'Hara


I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,



for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

"Sit down and have a drink" he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. "You have SARDINES in it."

"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. "Where's SARDINES?"

All that's left is just

letters, "It was too much," Mike says.



But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven't mentioned

orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.



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The Poetic Mathematics

Like mathematics, poetry is capable of building another world. Mathematicians often live in a theoretical construct, an alternative mathematical universe which they find to be very satisfying. I believe that poetry also can be used to build a theoretical world where we can escape to. The connecting thread is idealism. Both mathematicians and poets are looking for a perfect world, a world of the ideal. This drive for the sublime is what makes poetry special for me.

Agree or disagree?

DK

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Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

I am currently one of 30,000 people taking the paper, "Modern and Contemporary American Poetry" by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania. This is classified as a Massively Open Online Course or MOOC and it can be accessed at http://coursera.org .

The course content is excellent and many poems are covered. Of special interest to me are the tutorial sessions that Al has with his TA's and that open up the poems in the course.

I have discovered a new (or new to me) poet: Frank O'Hara of the New York School.

If you love poetry you will enjoy this course and it's free as well.

Many thanks to Al and the ModPo team including the technical folk behind the scenes who help to make the top quality video productions and readings.


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If Poems were Bonds I'd be Rich

If poems were bonds
I'd be rich
No more work for me

If poems were bonds
I'd write
and cash them in

If poems were bonds
I'd write more poems
And live the dreamers
Life

But alas
Poems are poems
legal tender only
with other poets
But not with banks
or bourses

And that my friend is why poets are not usually rich, in monetary terms, but rich in life experience and expression.

Keep well

DK
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Why is Business a Forbidden Poetry Subject?

Many of us, poets included, spend our daily life working in or running businesses yet there is a paucity of poems around this important subject area. Love, marriage, money, animals, family, travel and scenery are all used in poems but humble business is neglected.

So here is another business poem entitled Late Night at the Office

I'm here again
working late at the office
The rain falls noisily on the roof
while the cadences of my typing
Fill the empty air.

So much for work life balance
More like work and more work imbalance..oops
Nearly fell off
my hobby horse
A business related accident.

Still, and stillness, late at night
Have their benefits
I can think more clearly about
Love, marriage, money, animals,
Family, travel and scenery.

Right I'm out of here,
Home, hearth and books
are beckoning

Have a great day/night/morning/afternoon (delete non applicable items)

DK

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Home Sweet Home

 Poetry is a glue that can bind you to your roots. We went to the Wallace Gallery today in Morrinsville and I found a collection of poems from a collective of poets in Thames at the bottom of the Coromandel. I flicked through the poems for an area I do not yet know and wondered how I will feel once I know more of the lay of the land.

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Saturday Morning

In bed
With my iPad
Looking through
Poetry
and
Vocabulary
Just for you.

What is it
About poetry
That captivates me?
Its the power of
Words to mesmerize

Liberating Poetry from Academia

I am currently reading a book written by poet Dana Gioia called: Can Poetry Matter? This is a book of essays on poetry and the book takes it's title from the headline essay. This essay caused furore in the US when it was first published in November, 1991. 

The premise that poetry had been captured by academia rang true with many people who felt that poetry belongs to all and did not want to see poetry go the way of prose criticism which disappeared up it's own academic orifice with barely a trace.

Here are some key phrases from the introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of the book (revised in 2002).

As their testimonies demonstrated, they cared passionately for the art but felt isolated and disenfranchised from the official academic culture of poetry. An outsider myself, who worked in an office during the day and wrote at night, I felt a deep kinship with their situation...Their comments provided the clear and candid insight on the place poetry still occupied in the lives of many Americans (pxii).

Can Poetry Matter? opened up the public conversation about American poetry to a large number of readers and writers who had previously felt excluded. For many, the book's impact was as much emotional as intellectual. It gave them the strength of their convictions.

 Literary culture is essentially a conversation. When a substantial number of new people enter the exchange- especially from segments of society not previously represented - they raise new questions that change the course of events. By critiquing the role of academic institutions in fostering poetry and insisting that contemporary poetry had a constituency outside the university, Can Poetry Matter? invited a number of new participants from all walks of life and of every literary opinion to join the conversation (pxiii).

Although the university writing programs critiqued in the book remain largely the same, they have lost their monopoly on contemporary poetry because the literary culture around them has experienced a vast renewal by reconnecting poetry with a broader audience (pxiv).

Poetry has become an increasingly public and performative art (pxiv).

This book is a must read especially for those in the blogging community who write and publish their own poetry. The web has released the poetic genie (muse) from the university bottle and he has no intention of going back anytime soon.

When I was an undergraduate studying the humanities I made a conscious decision not to do post graduate study in English Literature. At that stage I had already had poetry published and seen the post modern twaddle that was beginning to prevail in academia. The approach took the student away from reading books and understanding them, into dry and arid places filled with nonsense illustrated by the quotation below from the writings of Guattari:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

In fact we can see nothing at all clearly from this passage. It is all illusory.

Instead of studying literature I went on to study management and business and in this way I came across Gioia who classes himself as a "business poet".

(He has a wonderful Standford podcast explaining how he is the only person who went to Stanford business school to learn how to become a poet!!)

Enough rabble rousing. I will now get back to the next essay and report back soon.

Ciao

DK

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Poetic Craft - Condensation

The art of a good poetry is to crystallise a human experience into a poem. This means that you need a good grasp on the language you are writing in. The craft is in working on variants of words until the poem is just right. This takes time and thought. Many of the best poems look like they have been written effortlessly but the blood, seat and tears are hidden behind the finished poems in it's iterative drafts.

Happy writing

Grant aka drkelp


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I hate ties

Having worked for many years in clinical and business environments I have had a hate/love relationship with that modern Elizabethan accoutrement, the tie.



I hate my tie

dangling lifeless thing

that it is

hanging limply

useless strip of limpid

cloth upon my chest.



I love my tie

colorful and bright

male plumage

of the corporate club

the old school tie.



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A Poem on the MBS Acronym

The acronym MBS in my blog name stands for Master of Business Studies. The poem below comes up with some alternatives:

Mad - madly in love with poetry
Bad - purveyor of trashy and terribly bad poems
Safe - because on average a bad poet earns as much as a good poet i.e. $0.00

Maudlin - the feeling when that poem just won't come
Blah - the feeling when it still won't come
Serendipity - the inspiration that falls from above to solve M&B above

Muse - she that comes but not when called
Bouyant - the feeling when she does arrive
Satisfaction - the feeling about the end product.

Ciao

Grant aka drkelp

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Fragment of a Poem by Neruda

I found this fragment today in a book I am reading:

to have lived
through one solitude to arrive at another,
to feel oneself many things and recover wholeness.

Pablo Neruda

This describes my life and poetic experience. As all poets know the craft is one of solitude but the end result, the poem, can encapsulate the many things becoming one.

Happy writing and reading in 2012

Grant aka drkelp



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