Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem about a flower. It didn’t quite go as I hoped. So I wrote about that, instead.
Tag: poetry
The Heritage of Rage (NaPoWriMo 2016)
Once again, I decided to try today’s prompt from the official NaPoWriMo site: write a tritina. To make it even more challenging, I used an online random word generator to come up with three words. (From another perspective, this could be seen as avoiding the work of thinking up three words for myself.) With three words randomly generated, writing this poem became mostly an act of galumphing.
I should probably note that this poem isn’t autobiographical. While my heritage is mixed (but overwhelmingly northern European), I don’t have any particular rage connected to it, nor do I yearn for an ancestral sky.
Food (NaPoWriMo 2016)
The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is a challenge to “write a poem about food. This could be a poem about a particular food, or about your relationship to food in general.”
Given the importance and prominence of food in all our lives, you’d think this would be a fairly easy task. Instead, I found my mind circling around the topic, jumping from one aspect of food culture to another, thinking about food in a variety of contexts. So rather than try to focus on one isolated idea, I used that jumping-circling itself as the jumping off point for my poem.
Fair Game (NaPoWriMo 2016)
Let’s say we make a game:
We create a field,
Assign positions,
Agree on the rules.
You pick your spot,
I pick mine,
Each according to
Our individual talents.
We all play our game
As best we can.
We follow the rules.
We play fair.
But the game doesn’t work.
The Cruelest Month (NaPoWriMo 2016)
The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to “write a poem in which you explore what you think is the cruelest month, and why.”
My Muse: A Haiku (NaPoWriMo 2016)
Waiting for my Muse
to strike (the capricious tease).
Still I wait. I wait.
For Addison, With Love (NaPoWriMo 2016)
April is National Poetry Writing Month and I’ll be participating. I won’t promise a poem a day, and I won’t always be following the daily prompts on the official NaPoWriMo site, but I do plan to write at least two or three new poems a week for the rest of this month.
Here’s my first NaPoWriMo poem:
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Terza Rima & Why the Limerick Is the Greatest English Poetic Form
I took a class on Dante’s Divine Comedy in college. The class was taught by a visiting professor from the University of Padua. He talked about Dante the same way English speakers talk about Shakespeare, only even more so. The Divine Comedy is widely considered by native Italians as having invented the modern Italian language. This professor spoke of it as the purest and most perfect expression of his “mother tongue” (see footnote).
He spent significant time analyzing the terza rima structure of the work. In particular, he stated that many native Italians consider it to be, once again, the greatest expression of their language. It’s perfectly suited to Italian: the cadence captures the robust, rounded, plosive earthy lilt and rolling quality of it; Italian is one of the most rhyme rich languages in the world, and the complex rhyme scheme of terza rima is calibrated to make the most of that fact. Moreover, terza rima doesn’t work well in any other language. It’s purely Italian.
This got me wondering if there’s a poetic structure equally well suited to English, a structure as deeply native to English as terza rima is to Italian.
I’ve concluded that the limerick comes closest.
Shakespeare and the Notion of Love
It would seem that this is going to be the year for Romeo and Juliet. There’s a new movie coming out (starring the wonderful Hailee Steinfeld) and the Kansas City Repertory Theatre has a production slated for their 2013-2014 season.
I’ve never particularly liked Romeo and Juliet. I feel like I should but I’m always disappointed by productions of it. For this, I blame a professor from my freshman year of undergrad. The reason I’m consistently disappointed by productions of Romeo and Juliet is because I have yet to see a production of it based on his interpretation.
This professor’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet starts with the line Juliet says to Romeo after they have their first kiss – she tells him, “You kiss by the book.”
She’s not speaking metaphorically – she’s referring to an actual book. And she obviously doesn’t think that kissing by it is a good thing.
Continue reading “Shakespeare and the Notion of Love”
John the Librarian 