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PURDY COUNTRY LITERARY FESTIVAL #3

press release June 11/09

The third annual PURDY COUNTRY LITERARY FESTIVAL (PurdyFest #3) will
again be held over the August holiday weekend. This year events have
been expanded to five days and four locations: Malone pioneer hamlet,
Marmora, Brighton, and Ameliasburgh. Co-organizer James Deahl has called
PurdyFests "Woodstock for poets".

Activities begin on Thursday, July 30, with a HAIKU DAY garden party at
ZenRiver Gardens retreat in Malone. Haijin Claudia Coutu Radmore will
lead in the creation of a linked haiku sequence called renga, and all
poets are invited to participate. Popular Marmora singer/songwriter
Morley Ellis will perform at many of the Marmora area events.

Poetry activites continue on Friday at ZenRiver Gardens, with the annual
POETS FOR PEACE meeting chaired by Hamilton poet James Deahl scheduled
for 3 pm. This will be followed by a casual MEET & GREET and POTLUCK
SUPPER for participants. The elements willing, a campfire round robin
poetry reading will complete the day.

On Saturday, August 1, a SYMPOSIUM ON AL PURDY will be held in the
Marmora Library Building. Participants include poets David Day and James
Deahl, and philosopher/author Terry Barker. In the evening ANOTHER DAM
POETRY READING will take place on the island in the Marmora Dam. Over 40
poets have already committed to reading at PurdyFest #3, and many of
these will be reading their poems published in the special Canadian
issue of "Dreamcatchers'" magazine.

On Sunday, Aug. 2, events move to Brighton, where they will be organized
by Canada-Cuba Literary Alliance President Richard (Tai) Grove. Over a
dozen of the poets who attended last summer's PurdyFest have work
included in the launching of AND LEFT A PLACE TO STAND ON, a fund
raising anthology from Hidden Brook Press for the restoration of Purdy's
historic A-frame house and the possible formation of a
writers-in-residence program.

On Monday, Aug. 2, there will be another PICNIC WITH AL in the little
cemetery where Al Purdy is buried in Ameliasburgh.

All Purdy Country Literary Festival events are free, and in the
democratic spirit of People's Poets Milton Acorn and Al Purdy, most
events will offer everyone attending a chance to read at least one of
their poems.

PurdyFests have become an increasingly important literary and cultural
event. The highly published and the yet-to-be-published meet and mingle
on common ground in the ruggedly beautiful countryside Purdy
immortalized in his poem "The Country North of Belleville". Dr. John
Burke, who attended PurdyFest #3, described as "transformative" readings
by Ottawa poet Jim Larwill and Montreal poet Katherine Beeman.

Other events will likely be planned for PurdyFest #3, and times and
locations will be posted as they are confirmed. Limited rough camping is
available, and information on area bed & breakfasts and motels can be
obtained from the various township websites. For further information on
PurdyFest #3, please email Chris Faiers at: zenriver[at]sympatico[dot]ca

poetry reading

a succession of stories, above the nose foldings
somberness, a chin tightening with smiles, cadence
of chat, ambiant sounds in the room rising, bodies cotton
moving with, against the regularity of playback from page.
come even the tuning of fiddle the baby dozes, nurses,
lays content.

daddy talks and baby stirs. then the poems
and a room of cries. a stamp of wrong, distress.
ask, how much do we do this to ourselves, rehearse
grief's postures from set text. some, those called
sensitive find poetry a downer; only want to be cheered,
comforted with pablum, airplane zooms of wit;
a reprieve from everything having meaning;
get a payoff of sugar or wish to reform, a map of
how; wish listeners would be considered by the egos
who impose sure confusions as if everyone else
had a shortage.

we buffer off the effects, screen ourselves
into words behind words. go to recourses
of other mandates (for peace, for humor),
nibble at silence with rhyme, but the baby
is restless, upset. at 7 weeks doesn't know why
dad is unhappy, his projected voice is hard,
strange. baby wriggles in sympathetic discomfort,
fusses at his voice alone. this shows what
is news. shows how tender his usual tones
how often, how sweet.

At Mayday [link was via Chris] Mlinko lists her senses of the requirement of contemporary poetry including these characteristics (and I paraphrase):
- words that are slanted to the heavily sensory,
- partitioning details of perception instead of holistically plotted,
- indirect telling pushed as far as possible into loose associative, obscure connections/connotations,
- harsh, intense subjective narration that is personal/stylized, anti-sensical and anti-science.

Hardly seems like a compliment.

Elegantly simple didn't make the cut. Nor did humor. Surprising insight. Sense of inevitability. Mystic to grounded dynamic is absent. Pop culture or dissent towards political peace, not mentioned. Maybe these are universals to poetry. The distinctions can cross genres of poetry from short forms to visual to lyrical.

To say modern art is not representational isn't to deny that it uses color.

Labels never sit well with me. Categorical statement never do either. Like the one in the sentence before this one.

Curious at who Barbara Carey chose for Canada's best 10 Canadian poets? (and their best work)

Haiku poets Philomene Kocher (Kingston) and Terry Ann Carter (Ottawa) will be facilitating a "Haiku Poetry and Beyond" workshop at the Wintergreen Studios education and retreat centre on Sunday, July 12 from 10 to 4.

The morning will focus on crafting haiku with an opportunity for one-on-one tutorials. The afternoon will focus on making small books and collage to showcase your poems.

Wintergreen is approximately an hour from Kingston and 2 hours from Ottawa. Overnight accommodation is also available. For details and registration, contact Wintergreen Studios at (613) 273-8745 or their website: http://www.wintergreenstudios.com./Haiku.php

Pierre DesRuisseaux, poet, editor, translator and authority on Quebec popular culture, has been named the new parliamentary poet laureate and took office this week. In the tradition of bilingualism, the poet laureate for this 2 year term is French. He has 14 books of poetry since his first in '79. Hopefully as Poet Laureate, DesRuisseaux will make his time in office, an active one.

The post was created by Parliament in 2001 to promote literature, culture and language. The position includes composing poetry, especially for state occasions, sponsoring poetry readings and advising the parliamentary librarian on acquisitions.

[The news came to me via Patrick Miekle's writers' news list]

---

Patti points out Wislawa Szymborska's A few words on the soul which remarks comically on what an unreliable lag-about the thing is,

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Yay, for humour and self-deprecating sort of observations, all the kinds of others within each of us.

Elsewhere, Joshua Beckman has a new book this year from Wave Books called Take it. The page gives 2 sample poems including this I excerpt further,

[Cracked drags the callous enchantment of thought]

[...]Even the most fascinating, dynamic and
wonderful people and things are, with distressing
regularity (near complete), mishandled and forgotten.
I feel now like I am saying sorry for something when

what I am saying here is[... ]

(Teaser.) Something arms-length about the diction but like the clip it moves along at and he's going for a truth which is nice to see sometimes.

In the other sample, [I don't long, I don't die, I don't await]

No more great songs of satisfaction,
no more wailing upon the hill to the hillside.
Be kind, for trust is not addition and addition
is not acceptance and acceptance is not humility.
Simply put, we are a failed and ruined people
incapable of even silence.

It's a bit harsh perhaps. Bluntly put but c'mon let's move away from the blah-de-blather romanticism is rather a refreshing sentiment to hear.

Lorri Neilsen was the poem of the day at the League of Canadian Poets with Prairie storm,

Bargaining faith for sleep, you see light stir at the window, white

hissing above the crow-knuckled elms, exposing the wet furrows

-

of the seeded fields cooling after the longest day of the year.

The turning. Air thickening electric, forks bulging with spark. Imagine

What a killer opening phrase. The sounds of the poem sound like rain and enclosed in storm. Crow-knuckled elms, birds as tree knuckles I expect to stay with me. It's got a nice energy to it.

I came across the chapbook of the top 3 finalists for the The RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, announced a couple weeks ago. (How odd that gloaming should be used 3 times by 2 of the poets.) Untouched nature poem and poet in were heavy parts of selections from two of the poets. Hm. There is a time and a mood which isn't me currently. Still, Emily McGiffin has some lovely slowed control of pacing and showed reveals at turns, such as after a long time standing in Wokkpash (p. 2-3)

Dusk. On all sides
mountains.

[...] From the folding summer, night
draws its old breadth,

restless. This shifty light and silence
gnaw at your hands

with that old wish
to have done better. And the dying

asters, the fireweed
blazing seed, the grey and fossil-scarred scree,

it all sould have
tried harder. Maybe

Lovely play on expectation of breath. And the extending self-blame out to the rocks, divesting anger to flowers so it is appropriate hyperbole of how absurd the clenched frustration is. Then the poem veers back to solid ground of poeterly expansive.

Jeff Latosik, however, finds poetry in the everyday urban of Toronto Island, Summer, (an excerpt from page 20) and dares to integrate that which gets cropped out of poetry, the refuse we are often remiss in mentioning.

We were scared to swim because of what was down there.
We were down there.
                         Or, we counted everything that could be dumped
from our vast reservoirs of taste: magazines, subway ads, Hollywood
movies that bobbed like buoys in our conversation.
                                     We listed our favourite natural disasters.
We heard some kids has swum out past the roped-in shallows
so we booked it over, expectations dog-paddling their way
             through reasons against, even hate.

Like the sharper energy and the mix of expected and unexpected. Something is communicated. And thru his turns thru more of the poem, he has opinions rather than just attempting to be neutral observer. Also nice to see in this communicative genre.

Telling Stories is the call for the next issue of Magma. (Submissions due by July 15.) According to the guest editor of the issue, Clare Pollard,

Finally, I’ve also chosen the theme because I feel too much contemporary poetry is self-indulgent – concentrating on self-expression to the point where it forgets it has an audience. I feel strongly that, even if our subject matter is deeply personal, we should always be aware we have responsibilities to our reader – to give them everything they need to understand the poem; to entertain; to tell them something new.

Great storytellers know how to keep us engaged, leaving space for the reader to make their own interpretations – as my favourite philosopher, Hannah Arendt, said: “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

So the search begins for sparkling anecdotes and tall tales… Only remember the sign pinned above Anne Sexton’s desk: WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T BE BORING.

From the prompt of 1. haiku 2. poem about haiku, I got distracted into zips. Have you heard of zips? Addictive little form. A caesura like an open zipper between the parts. I like them best when they can read left to right or a column at a time.


found the red book         on the shelf
I've been looking for       that's yellow


1.
double vision
arthritic fingers pinch
where sunglasses aren't

--

2.
a kigo
observe then pivot
present contrast

I had a few ideas going into the workshop about what to do to get past inner obstacles to make a spark. They are below. At the other blog is what the brainstorming and wisdom of crowds came up with.

So can't write, what to do?
Nothing to Say, Visualize...
….Immerse and float. Write "into inspiration" instead of "out of inspiration". Do visualizations: Picture a word and a scene where you felt the word. For example, safety, disinterested, eager. Use all senses, get into yourself...

Close your eyes mentally and discover what you smell, hear, taste?
What is the size of the space? Humidity? Temperature?
How do your muscles feel? How does your skin feel?
Is there cold or tension isolated in one part of you?
Finally look, what is straight ahead, to the sides, peripheries, behind you?
Scrap any comparisons. Write direct. Be present there. No future nor past.
~ writer's block from my own site in 2002 imagine the setting in detail

Set aside the correct and significant
....Try direct seeing of the smallest possible thing in the smallest possible detail. Think of the undergrad Robert Pirsig described who has inflexible filtering that let in too much. She was a contracted listener. She was committed to a large important canvas. She chose a broad topic and then got stumped. "She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard." Don't avoid what has been said. Don't seek to reference what has. Don't plan where it is going or pace it. Just describe.

"She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.” [...]“’Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.’ Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.” - p. 170-171, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Disconnect culpability and identity
...it's not you. Write in a character as different from what "you" would write or say as possible. Your evil twin. Your saintly twin. You if you were stupid. If Stuffy. If rude. If impossibly polite. If you were born as your irritating neighbour. Appropriate any voice and run it as long as you can. And/or swap about consistency when you tire of one, even if within phrase. Channel flip until something clicks. What would your pseudonym say?

No Time
- Speed write, push as much thru as possible for 5 minutes then cull
- Write short: twitter-length
- 5 word bio of this moment
- do a Fibonacci (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8 syllable lines)
- Decompress, make time to make very few words but the right ones

Can't Make Nothing Out of Nothing
…Use 5 prompt words to spark ideas and a time limit of 10 or 20 minutes to produce something. Sometimes it will have a few lines of use or keeper phrase.
…Add constraints, limit options. Start to list words with or without certain letter(s) to force assonance (same vowel sound) or consonance. (see online tools list). See what words end up near each other and how the word play into ideas.

Flip your usual habit
Do you have a plotter or pantster style?
...normally free write then edit? Make a mind map or pile on the constraints use a strict form and fill in the slots by meter and rhyme pattern or word lengths.
...normally do a brainstorm and outline before writing, do automatic writing and don't let pen leave page. No pauses allowed. Sense optional. Sentences fragments. Phrases. Can't think of a word leave a blank line or sketch something but keep moving.

Read what you don't like
...Until you can't help but throw the book, retort or get where the person is coming from. (Preferably all 3.) Expose yourself to what is against your bias or outside your reach. If you only reinforce what you know, you aren't challenges. Irritate yourself into growing.

Other Things to Do with other people's books
….tear all the words of the right margin. Rearrange those into a line or few.
…plunder the one you love. Take a poem you like and use some of the words in it in the order it appeared in that poem. Make your new setting for them.
….tell another version of what that poem said, keep its subject but change the point of view
…retell in formal language, slang language or using another form of poetry (from free verse reduced to limerick, or from pantoum to sonnet, for example)
…substitute your words slotted into their grammar and rhyme. Or use their meter but your ideas and sounds into the slots.
…copy the first 4 lines or your favorite 2 and then take it your own direction
…use a system for getting a random choice of starter batch lines. Throw dice twice to get a page number and the words to use as material by counting in.
…OR spell your first name as numbers. That's the page # to pillage. So Pearl = 7 + 5 + 1 + 9 = 22. Spell your last name as #. (That's the line # and # of words to take as your starter batch.)
(A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6, G=7, H=8, I=9, J=1, K=2, L=3, M=4, N=5,
O=6, P=7, Q=8, R=9, S=1, T=2, U=3, V=4, W=5, X=6, Y=7, Z=8)
If your name is a bigger # than the # of lines or pages, sum your name as in numerology. For example Pirie = 7 + 9 + 9 + 5 = 45 → 4 + 5 = 9 So I would start on page 22, line 9 and take 9 words there. (You could just point at a random part of the book but working for a number makes it seem predestined or that you've made an investment that you want to pay off through poetry.)

Online Prompts and Workshops

It isn't the idea but how much you bring to it, explore and develop and polish...but if you're looking for somewhere to start, some grain to form your snowflake around...here are some starts.

Poets Online
Has monthly prompts of a subject or form with an example poems by expert

for example: poems by Robert Hass and, having read those, write about the conversations of couples in your own way

Friday Fives
set of words to spur or stir story, memory, flash fiction, poems.

for example: freckle, evade, peck, scoot, dash

One Word

60 second to expand or spin-off word in whatever way comes to mind from the prompt word. it cuts you off after a minute.

for example: tarnish, noose, or symbol

Language is a Virus

A prompt list. you can only see 1 at a time (can't be so overwhelmed by options)

for example: compose an index. Of anything.

Guardian's poetry workshop
with one prompt per month from the likes of Annie Finch or Mark Doty

for example: a close study of another species or elegies

Charles Berntein's list of 88 experiments

for example, pick 20 words and write three different poems using only these words, homophonic translation from a language you don't know, lines collaged from media

Sunday Stealing

Meme questions that might not occur to you from which to springboard

for example: Back in the day: Been caught sneaking out? What happened the last time you played sports? Ever licked someone’s cheek?

NaPoWriMo 2009

for example: follow a word trail to see what starts, from synonym to synonym or its perfect rhymes or pseudo-rhymes and see where they take you. “Papal” becomes “apple,” which becomes “grapple.” If you add “dabble” or “baffle,” what an interesting story you may have!

One form a day for April

for example: A French rondelet. One stanza. Only 2 rhymes with a strict pattern, repeated refrain. Line 4 must rhyme with the refrain.
                      _dog days_
Line 1 :: A -- four syllables             wilted flowers

Line 2 :: b -- eight syllables           at the window smell like swamp gas

Line 3 :: A -- repeat of line one      wilted flowers

Line 4 :: a -- eight syllables
         from you who are gone torque powers,
Line 5 :: b -- eight syllables          stink, to prod me to sun and grass.

Line 6 :: b -- eight syllables         rubber stems safe in wet, harass

Line 7 :: A -- repeat of line one      wilted flowers

30 in 30
Another set of Napowrimo prompts

for example: So today I want you to pay more attention to the Shape of your poem.
Play with the spacing of l e t t e r s.
Feeeeeeeeel how your man ip u lation of the English language is when you add a visual element.

Poetic Asides
Writer's Market April Challenge (over 10,000 responses to 15 prompts so far)

for example: Two for Tuesday: write a love poem and /or an anti-love poem

Messing in Meter
Messing about with rough text, then metered it into dialogue, then for interestingness. It's not the material or idea but what you do to it.

for example: Patrick Gillespie took the purple prose by Thomas North converted from prose to blank verse to more oomph/personal style added

hard by her, on either hand pretty fair boys appareled as painters
do set forth god Cupid, with little fans
in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her.

On ei|ther hand |were pret|ty boys | ap-par-eled
As if |they each |were Cu|pid, fan|ning her

To keep |the wind |up-on | her.

On either side stood sweating boys
Like Cupidons with multi-colored wings
They teased the air with fans
That almost robbed the swooning breeze…

Weekly exercise prompts
for example: In 400 words or less, create a story that might explain the origin of an idiom.

Online Wordly Tools
Do erasure
use a black marker, keep a few words from a whole page

Wildcard dictionary
look for part of a word or sound such as (stats with a bl, ends with a rd) bl*rd (also a reverse dictionary at the site)

Anagrams search

Rhymes and slant rhyme Dictionary

Scrabble Helper
search for certain sounds such as you need all voiced and harsh tpkgbd???eea

It's good to exercise the composition muscles.

Today's challenge at Poetic Asides is to title a poem as "All I want is ______". I added a second constraint for myself of doing it as a reversing Fib.

All I want is more

tad
titch
smidgen
of excess
to push back wall scrapes.
exponential growth is freedom.
what's sustainable?
smaller loops
golden
mean
twists


Yesterday's challenge was to title with a color. I bumped up the constraint by making it a Rondeau as well.

Seeing Red

Our Land: Back Off Government!!!       A rare threat,
these rural signs by cinderblocks, cars set
up:     Gas, Bait 'n' Ice Cream Fireworks Gift Shop
  Your Dock & Deck Specialists.     Bob's Truck Stop
2 Buck Breakfasts.     FR3SH LO3STErS.     Guitars sweat

the blues dropped.     Softly, our losses are debts
but waxing nostalgic spatters the carpet.
An ice cube makes brittle, knife up off pop... 
Our Land. Back Off.

Stains, textures are lost in the discarded.
What are your feelings towards my man? (Guarded
mumble reply): I'm fond of the guy.      Chop 
shop welding torch eyes! (She misheard.) Stop
fight! Not, "I fondled the guy."  Cigarette... 
Back off!


A couple days ago, the challenge was for a love poem, and/or anti-love poem. I added the constraint of it being a sonnet. This is what I came to from that...


Foible Acceptance

Your requests? Rational. Forgetting task
-- while distracted into focus -- I write
of you, my sweet. Not washing dishes, whites
and windows. Papers slide in piles off desk.
What's daily asked, it isn't much. I bask
in words, sit blind. I swear I don't incite,
deliberately, as tease or test. (Quite
absent-whatted?) Clothes doffed to floor. I'm brusque
at lunch, leave doors ajar. It's not malice
nor unspoken griefs, nor any lash at you.
I love you -- failings intact, in palace
of clouded head — and I strew. Don't construe
love's lack! It's just, I'm lax! I'm busy too!
If true, "Time makes all whole" this too shall bliss.

Waiting for my order to come, I ended up using a gift coupon and buying other things to hold me over. Never mind the 2 library books I haven't finished, or the 7 owned books I am actively reading, or the 1 other from a friend that I'm reading, the pile reshuffles, again.

Li-Young Lee's book that arrived, admittedly, I got because I have all his other books, including autobiography. I buy it for completion as much as for the gems of poems. There may be diminishing returns. From peruses he has reshuffled understandings of previous memories of family, but the shifts, where and how may be interesting. Other things must have blipped his radar in life but this is what he needs to revisit until he doesn't. A person goes where one has to at each stage.

His direction is going expansive which I am reluctant to go with. I resist his broadening out to the Rumi-ecstatic, the turmoils of self-torture bouts with the romance of melancholy. His poetic peers perhaps push him to do more of the same lyric sentences of lived experience. Or that may be a matter of how his mind shifts not any outside influence. He is naturally a long polisher. His words are a slow-write and slow read not a rush through but slow pick thru. Borrowing doesn't make sense so I buy it. It buy it too for the voice. This one comes with a CD. His is a lovely reading voice. It would be better to see him perform again but the where or when of that is unknowable.

I think I prefer poems on the air, live, adapted to each telling and audience. There can be a constancy of page for archive but after first telling, the interest is in the nuance and shift. It's like recorded music or any paper-print. They are fixed, canned, vinegary.

I'd rather see music being created or stories being related interactively when the sharer knows I'm there, as much as a love books. Recording is the access to something, asynchronously gifted, some shard of idea but the completion is the exchange, the performance without it being stripped of 2 breaths, the potential for flub or improv or improvement. That makes it vital...

A paper page is behind authorial glass, a control-freak's space, that can't be lived in without the audience fearing to crease, without the hesitancy from recoil of the mandate that one must not opine in. The meaning is set out to be received, not dialogue with.

Dialogue becomes more complex in print, protracted monologues exchanged that can't have course correction if someone drifts off on some point. A long blather and one small portion taken up. You have to go on trust, all was heard instead of with small parcels of information, each with acknowledgement. Misunderstandings or judgement can cantilever instead of the natural continuous feedback of pinging back and forth in live words.

What is in recorded is final. Until the internet and the erasure and overlay that emulates oral, unless the archivists get to it.

But still, all that aside, 3 new books today. Behind my Eyes, Mountain Tea, Area of Fog. I'm heady with anticipation to dig into them all. And yet still 4 projects of synthesis (of which writing here is none of them) before I can conscionably dig in.

To expand and apply from yesterday's examination of how Yeats did that complex structure of rhythm, rhyme, semantics and argument, I have a response to the Day 15 challenge to the exercise to change the title of a poem and respond to it with a poem. One can stick as closely as one likes. [I edited since what I posted there and since I posted it here yesterday; still bumps in it.]

The Orchid in the Tree of Her

"All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn-out and old" - W.B. Yeats

His excuses are collected sod
from mouldy leaf and the sand
that would sting an unblinking eye.
It all lodged in the crotch in wait.

The seedling's soil -- in the fork
when a sapling -- just fanned
off the breeze's small back. What's lost
were just motes. To earth, new estate.

The grains, if retained or dropped
from her furrowed bark, she understands;
there's no mutual harm. She's not food
but a table. The nursery sates

self. The water, the leaves and the buds,
of her trunk have created their blossom's chant
off the breeze's small back and what's lost
were mots juste to earth. New estate.

I tried to keep to the transition of high ratio of anapest mixed into iambs until its all anapest, and to keep the rhyme and repetition structure intact. I want the structure to not draw attention to itself naturally and come off as unforced as his. (Aim high, crash into the ground. ;)) His is naturally flowing, and a natural sounding poem.

I set out to retort the brunt of the bitter turn of The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart and answer with the same concept of a flower within. I aimed to reframe and spin so that she is not a rose that loses her color quickly, taking a note from Carl Smith's

I overlooked an orchid/while searching for rose/...The orchid is a flower that blooms so tenderly/If placed beside a blushin' rose/ the rose could not compare

The object of affection is not a plant with the only relevant part being embodied by a flower, in fact, but a tree that lives in symbiosis with a lasting orchid (cue Georgia O'Keefe) and spurns the spurn and dirt throw at her and the too early declaration of grave.

I'm still fiddling with it, but it may have some potential.

Rather a metaphorical wall is that the orchid is such a general word for the largest flowering family with over 20,000 species, some terrestrial, some aquatic, half of them epiphytes/on air, and include everything from bladderworts to those feather boas in freshwater lakes to venus fly traps.

The epiphyte orchids which flower from the bark of trees live incidentally with the tree, not sending roots in parasitically, or in mutual symbiosis, just prop themselves inert in mutual non-harm, a form of commensalism.

What would that mean for the figurative? The orchid is not nurtured in soil caught by the tree, thrown by forces and drifts of nature. The dirt accumulates but is not critical.

Would the biology of commensalism be denouncing the relationship of her own sexuality (as orchid) if woman is tree. The tree is untroubled and there's no interaction except being in the same sun. That biology troubles the flow of the poem.

At least I think I understand the 3-beat meter better now.

How not to write Iambic pentameter is as much about how not to write it by Patrick Gillespie. He starts with purple prose and plays with the materials...I like this. He tears things back to base ideas, building blocks. An idea isn't too precious to mess with. Edits are substantive yanks. This I can grasp.

He was talking about process of moving from idea to vividly written and metered. It doesn't matter the idea or the starting point. It's what you apply to it.

Where do you start?
The first thing you might do is to lineate the prose. [...]

Ta da! We now have a free verse poem. And this is probably where 99 out of 100 modern poets stop. Free verse is the easiest and least demanding literary form ever created. But for those who like to juggle with more than one ball, let’s try two. The next step is to transform this passage into Iambic Pentameter.

[...]The blank verse (Iambic Pentameter) is competent and passable poetry. And  this is where many poets stop (those who write meter); but this is still juggling with just two balls. Now let’s juggle three. Let’s vary the meter and give it some life. [...]

Study closely how little additions and adornments turn ordinary prose into poetry. It’s not the content that makes the poem.

To paraphrase what he says of the next stage, you could add characters. Convert to dialogue. Add internal linkages of extended references to one base of metaphor, add wordplay and style.

It's a mechanic bent, but more can be said with that than talking from the perspective of poetry as mystic.

I like the exercise point of view rather than let us make something which is complete and true in first draft which is no more than tweaked for spelling. I'd rather tear something to component parts. All is lego.

I like making a long poem then just tearing the right margin words off and keeping those, or a subset of. It's not a pride issue to spend 2 or 3 hours on a poem and then throw it out. Process can be more interesting than product. And more useful.

To build into a structure or disassemble something which has structure are both interesting. For example, I took this Yeats poem and looked at it's structure, from rhyme (ABCD EBFD GBHD IBJD) to which sounds are most used and their place of articulation to see if there was a pattern (mostly voiced sounds but nothing strongly disproportional to normal, a lot of short i, and long o but not a strongly leaned on, dominant device of sound in this way). And then I reparsed the meaning.

S1-S2 things (example list of 1,2,3, then #3 expanded on, each line end stopped semantically) are dissonant against the memory of your beauty.
S3 world's too ugly a setting for you. I'll redo it.
S4 the new earth as your casket, and a casket for my dreams of you, my unattainable/inaccessible love.

The lines are ragged lengths with uneven number of syllables but it has a regular feel. What's going on? Yeats and Swinburns and the 19th century are characteristic for mixing iamb and anapest. I next looked at the meter which wraps around lines, so here I'll condense the couplets into one line since that how the meter neatly falls.

iamb iamb anapest anapest spondee iamb
iamb anapest anapest iamb anapest anapest

iamb iamb anapest iamb anapest iamb
iamb anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest

iamb iamb iamb anapest iamb anapest
iamb anapest anapest iamb anapest trochee beat

anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest
anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest anapest

That much regularity in meter cannot be by accident. It's not the same length of line by syllables but it is regular length by counting accentually. Each line has 3 long (or stressed) syllables.

There's one exception, that last line of the second last stanza. (The word knoll throws the rhythm, foot, and pattern of 3 stressed syllables, couldn't not be accidental. It's also the pivot point of attitude where it shifts tone. The rose goes from hidden and protected to dead and buried. Is this a love poem? or smitten from afar; can't have you; wish you to be dead; how romantic manic.)

12 feet per stanza and 4 stanzas but the base is 3. 3 stressed beats per line. There are 6 stressed beats per 12 feet. Some are iambs, some anapest, increasingly over length, anapest. The last stanza which is fastest (since one speaks an iamb in the same speed as one speaks a three beat anapest but with 1/2 more content) also has the most even roll with regularity and consistency giving a stronger resolution underscoring the summative feel.

Does this make sense more when we add back the words?

The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart

All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn-out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman,
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

- William Butler Yeats

for OSI: Water Prompt a rearrangement of words of another poem.

rock squints a mica wink

azure is to each
as far. the blue
in the while 
is in each,

wild waves
beneath. sun
unfolds ray of
air-immersed beauty.

breathing a life coil
they touch whisper
the ocean, sky
neither impossible.

A lot of days of writing what I don't like. As Nick says, it is often a poem speaks to you.

It is almost better to read and write by long turns rather than flipping to and fro, being continually caught back by how good others are. Inhibiting that. Or to read what doesn't catch at all, a tiring sort of channel flipping from poem to poem, feeling there must be something that would resonate soon. Something I can hear and feel and which is well-rendered. It feels like playing the slot machines sometime. I just want a hit. Something ahead to rest in. Whether written or read.

Huerta might be my fav find so far from the Poetic Asides Challenges.

I think my newest favorite poem is from Paul Muldoon Poems 1968 - 1998.

Wind and Tree

In the way that the most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,

Most of the world is centred
About ourselves.

Often where the wind has gathered
The trees together and together,

One tree will take
Another in her arms and hold.

Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,

It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.

Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,

Since my own one arm could not and would not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones

I tell new weather.

Each phrase placed sensitively, it extends and extends and still works. It is so literally and figuratively accurate. The end stopped lines or enjambed corral pace. It bears reading and rereading and forces itself to tongue, not content to stay on page.

Poetic Aside daily challenges can be broad (a memory, an animal), but then, it's never the idea that's valuable or unique, it's the implementation. The official NaPoWriMo (National Poem Writing Month) prompts for the U.S. are also rather open ended (write about paradise, or nicknames) but Joanne Merriam is setting a different bent with the lists she's running. Her normal blogging practice is to pull out quotes from books daily, but now she's posting links to poems to inspire a response, such as “Political Meeting” by A. M. Klein to “The Language” by Robert Creeley and “They are hostile nations” by Margaret Atwood. I'm a sucker for specificity.