Some of you asked for help finding a twenty-first century poem. Others asked for (more) help writing your own poems. Here are some resources & ideas.
Poetry in the twenty-first century:
Go here for the UBUWeb. In the upper left hand corner of the page (below Samuel Beckett's head) you'll see a search box. Search for your theme. Not everything you'll find will be poetry. Not everything you'll find will be from the twenty-first century. But I found a lot of interesting things while looking for your themes. (Note: It took me a few minutes to notice that in order to get the "next 10" results of my search I had to scroll down a bit & look at the lower right corner of the page.)
Go here for issues of Poetry magazine from the last decade. Look for titles that sound promising. Not all the poems are available on the web.
Go here for issues of Jacket magazine from the last decade. (Jacket #10 was published in January of 2000. I know, I know, the new millennium didn't begin until 2001 but I'm trying to give you guys an extra year in which to find a poem that addresses your theme.)
Go here for issues of Octopus magazine. (The link will take you to issue #14 but in the right most margin you'll see links to the previous 13 issues too.)
Go here for electronic books published by Faux press. (You'll see the titles of dozens of e-books published in the last decade. Look for titles directly related to your theme or which seem to share associations with your theme.)
*****
Ideas for Writing your Own Poems:
* Write your own poem in response to one of the poems you've found.
Perhaps you've found a poem that you relate to; you might present the theme in a similar way but with your own style (slang, modern diction, modern syntax, archaic syntax), your own images (ones from your own lived reality or from the mediated virtual reality you're familiar with) and your own details.
Perhaps there's a poem that upsets you might write a response chastising the poet or the poem's speaker. Or, you might create an alternative to the vision of the theme presented in the upsetting poem.
Your response might attempt to use the same form as the original.
Or, like Harryette Mullen's "Dim Lady," it might use a different form.
You might take further inspiration from Mullen to rethink & rewrite a poem:
Mullen transforms the traditional natural images of beauty found in Shakespeare's poem into imagery derived from contemporary companies and products. Could you transform the imagery in a poem you've found in a similar way? Or in some other way?
Mr. Telles recently "translated" a sonnet into Gloucester dialect. Could you "translate" one of the poems you've found into another dialect or speech register?
You might confine yourself to using only the words (or forms of the words) found in a poem you've found.
Or, you might write a distorted-mirror poem in which you write a variant of every word in the original. So "Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art" might be rendered as "Dim moon, I'm certain that you change like me".
Some poets take a line that they like (or that moves them, or that disturbs them, or that stirs them) and use it as a catalyst for their own writing, titling their new poem "Poem beginning with a line from X". Here are some examples: 1, 2, 3.
* Write your own poem by "Google sculpting". Google sculpting is the process of using search results to generate language material for a poem.
There are several ways to do this:
1. Go to Googlism.com. Search for you theme. (Here is a search for "birth".) Edit the results into a poem. You'll be able to generate interesting and surprising new relationships and juxtapositions that reveal aspects of the theme that appear in our online culture but not, perhaps, in most poetry about the them.
2. Conduct a search of your theme -- or to make it more interesting use word combinations related to your theme -- using your favorite web search tool. Collect the language -- words and phrases -- from text that appears under the links. Edit the results into a poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment