Found Poetry Review Challenge

Was one of your poetry goals to participate in more poetry challenges? If so, I have just the challenge for you.

This one sounds like fun (and a little bit of work.)

The Found Poetry Review is inviting established and emerging poets to participate in its 2015 National Poetry Month project, PoMoSco (short for Poetry Month Scouts.)

A short definition: Found poetry is a poetry form in which you utilize preexisting text and reshape it into a poem.

The challenge is to complete their poetry prompts in five poetic categories: remix, erasure, conceptual, chance operations, and out and about.

Thus, you must possess a willingness to experiment. (What poet doesn’t want to experiment?) In return for all your poeming, you can earn at least 30 merit badges and something special at the end of the challenge.

Oh, and you’ll need to have a Facebook account to join.

But, you don’t have a whole lot of time to think about it.

Registration for PoMoSco is open until 11:59 p.m. EST on February 1, 2015.

I just signed up although I haven’t had much experience with Found Poetry. My goal was to step out of my comfort zone. So, I’m stepping into this challenge.

Won’t you join me?

(Thank you, Misky, found-poetry extraordinaire, for the heads up.)

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Gogyohka

WD POETIC FORM CHALLENGE: GOGYOHKA

This short form was developed by Enta Kusakabe in Japan and translates literally to “five-line poem.”

Pretty much, that’s it. Five lines.

Give it a try.

Here is one I wrote:

Photo: Piotr Siedlecki Public Domain

WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?

The clock always
tells me the truth.
You offer  hours of excuses.
This little joker
keeps ticking.

c. J.lynn Sheridan 2014

~~~

Golden Shovel

Recently, Poetic Asides (Robert Brewer) hosted a challenge to write a Golden Shovel poem. This was a new form to me.

Here are the rules:

· Take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire.
· Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem.
· Keep the end words in order.
· Give credit to the poet who originally wrote the line (or lines).
· The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the poem that offers the end words.

Robert sorted through 700 comments. You can imagine my glee at finding my name on the top ten list. I’ve only made that list once before so perhaps I was a little giddy. Congrats to all the winners!

 

“Things I’ve learned along the wrong path”
by J.lynn Sheridan

The pining of the evening winds tell
another story—the capture of lovers and all
their secrets never explored because the
things that really matter are forgotten–truth,
beauty, and purity—the trinity of passion. But
when truth hurts and beauty fails to tell
of its suffering, only purity remains. It
stands alone as the plumb line without slant.

From Emily Dickinson #1129

Erasure Poetry

Our Lost Jungle challenges us to randomly
take a slice of writing and erase bits of it to create
something new. Erasure poetry is just what it sounds like
and can be quite liberating.

My son had been reading Romeo and Juliet for school
and since that was the closest thing to me, I opened to the first page. I didn’t quite create a new theme, but it was interesting to see what Shakespeare might be like condensed into a free form.

ACT I

PROLOGUE

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children‘s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

 

My erased version: Shake/Speared love

In dignity
we lay ancient
blood unclean
Two lovers
life
death
strife
love of rage
which children toil
to mend.

Ekphrasis

“The Drift of Love”

The cattails stare
at the forlorn driftwood—

Where the lotus beds sleep,
Where I forgot to say “I do,”
Where you forgot to ask.

Where the kiss you forgot
to give me now rests beneath
the pier,

Where I still drift

patiently in love.

Written for Our Lost Jungle Poetry Form Challenge.
Ekphrasis is a literary description of a visual work of art (usually a painting).

Today, Khara challenged us to snap a photo outside our window. This isn’t exactly outside my window but it is down the street.

Note: “Patience n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” AmbroseBierce, “Devil’s Dictionary.”

Terza Rima

 

Bequeathing the Broken
(or That Which Children Gather)

Into the waters she sent her wounds,
to be released,
unholy as an awkward blue

moon from where old men see
the counted stars
and where young men are deceived,

where youth are cast upon the seas
to sail or flay
against the lesions of the deceased.

 ***

our lost jungle poetry form challenge

In which Khara asks us to do the terza rima

twist.

My twist was shortening the second

line of each tercet.