Summer travel produces poetry

Oh the beauty, the horror, the long whine of the family road trip. Who hasn't endured this summer nightmare? Emily Andrade beautifully distills the experience in this found poem, which originally appeared at the Found Poetry Project.

The Ten Commandments (of traveling with my parents)

1. Don’t snap your gum.
2. Don’t ever drive that close to a semi again.
3. Follow that car!
4. Don’t put your fingers on the window.
5. Watch out for elk.
6. Tell me where we are.
7. Be ready with the money before we reach the toll.
8. Don’t eat mother’s tuna sandwich.
9. Please, don’t kill us.
10. Pass me that lotion.

Written by Joseph and Sharon Andrade
Minivan trip to San Bernardino, CA, from Indianapolis, IN, Spring 2005
Found by Emily Andrade

Emily explains her found poem: “Original quotes from Joseph and Sharon Andrade during a minivan trip to San Bernardino from Indianapolis, Indiana for my Uncle Ruben’s funeral in the spring of 2005. Formed into poems by Emily Andrade, who was taking notes and a strict diary of the trip. Joseph and Sharon did not know they were being recorded and Emily did not know she had poems until the end of the trip. (A special thanks to the Andrade parents, who made these poems possible.)”

Fibbing along

Recently enamored with the short form poem, last week I shared my love of the fib. Named after the mathematical Fibonacci sequence, the fib is a six-line, 20 syllable poem with a count of: 1/1/2/3/5/8.

Jill Reedy Groseclose took a try and produced a modified fib.

“[It’s] one syllable short,” she says of her first fib. “Kind of a theme in my life...”

In this poem, Jill, who is my cousin, fills family references into just a few lines, giving a nod to our mothers (both voracious readers), to our grandmother (a master crossword-er), and to our recent reconnection.

An
Instant,
Serendipitous,
To find you so in love
With words, Their shape and sound

I
Love
Them too!
Malleable and enduring
Are the words our inheritance?

The poem is a loose interpretation of a traditional fib. But I like that the piece bends the rules to represent its “fibness.” Isn't a fib, after all, just a soft fabrication of malleable facts?

Thank you, Jill.

Keep those fibs coming!

Art is a lie

. . . that helps us feel in control. It helps us create an order and a harmony we can only rarely create in our own existence. Art helps us establish a sense that we, and the events of our lives, matter, that they have meaning and weight and beauty."

— Kathleen Rooney
from Live Nude Girl: my life as an object

Fibbing

I’m no good at math but I do appreciate structure and brevity. So, when writer/photographer Jack Cantey posted his fib experiments, I was immediately intrigued.

The fib (named after the mathematical Fibonacci sequence) is a six-line, 20 syllable poem with a count of: 1/1/2/3/5/8.

I’m drawn to the fib for the same reasons I like the tanka and the lune: controlled beauty and distilled language. But with the fib, there is also the beauty of typography. The lines undulate on the page, creating gentle waves of white space, that, in turn, make the spare lines even more powerful.

In sleep

last
night
angry
rain pelted
windows, battered doors
by morning the sky turned amber

a
still
voice said:
forget the
storm in your head, clear
every dream, dark, coiled and mean

- Drew Myron

I encourage you to try a fib. It’s a fun and attractive poetic form that can produce unexpected results. Start fibbing now! Send your fib experiments and I'll post them here.

Bloat be gone!

I’m drawn lately to the short forms: tanka, lune, fib, scratch-outs and more. Poems that are lean and fit, that reach and leap.

This turn to form, to rules and constraints, is a new fascination for me. In recent months, I’ve become fatigued with the confessional quality of everyday life, the bloated exposure of saying too much, too clearly. Rather than the tell-all, I want to parse and peel, and make words work in the rearrangement.

My poetic efforts are not profound. These word games are often academic but they work because the process requires attention and focus to language and choices. And the form gives shape to emotions I’m not ready to access — or share — directly.

In the next few weeks, I’ll share some of my favorite short forms, starting with the lune.

Lune
3 lines, 11 words
3/5/3

I love this form, especially since it spiraled into a successful mistake. The lune (pronounced loon) was invented in the 1960s by poet Robert Kelly, who was not satisfied with the Western use of haiku. Kelly, according to the Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, recreated the traditional haiku into a thirteen-syllable form of 5/3/5.

Later, poet Jack Collom was working with schoolchildren when he mistakenly remembered the form as a count of 3/5/3 words, not syllables. The result is a more flexible form of haiku that is easy to teach and create.

With an emphasis on word count, rather than syllables, the new lune is less mechanical and more accessible. In the following poem, I’ve linked three lunes together to expand on a theme.

Yes. No. Almost
(a linked lune)

Spring sneers, pauses
shifts wind, turns hope sour,
says not yet

I swallow the
gravel of these moody May
days, and wait

In the seam
of inbetween the sun frays,
boldly breaks free

— Drew Myron

Now it’s your turn. Have you tried a lune? Send me your work. I’ll post them here, and we’ll celebrate the satisfaction of the short form.