Monday, December 19, 2011

Poem: paper dragons


 






paper dragons
 
blue & yellow folded paper dragons
sail away in an indigo Tintenfaß
dragons dangerous yet delicate
for they cannot breathe fire
and live


(c) Nissa Annakindt


Poem #4. The word 'Tintenfaß'--- German for inkwell--- is particularly fine, adding that needed note of strangeness. From
Where the Opium Cactus Grows

Shared in Poetry Pantry #86

Origami instructions for making your own paper dragon:
Origami Dragon Folding Instructions

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Happy Birthday to Who?



Amanda Borenstadt shared this with me on my birthday yesterday. The Doctor and Weird Al--- totally the best present I got! Way better than the mammogram that my new doctor's office inflicted on me on the day (that's why you should never get poor, they schedule your appointments without asking you and then get huffy when you say you have plans....)

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Apostrophe Atrocities



"John has three cat's, a mother cat and it's babie's. One of the kitten's is real cute but the other ones face looks like the hind end of an as's."

This is an all too common example of apostrophe atrocity. As a peaceful prolife Christian, I think people who write like this should be killed. With wood chippers.

Well, that might be a _bit_ harsh. But there is no excuse for anyone who is an aspiring writer to write like this. Not even in an email or Facebook post. Not even if you are dyslexic or don't speak English or just had your brain eaten by a zombie.

If you think you may have committed an apostrophe atrocity, get thee to the English grammar confessional at once. Your penance will involve an intimate encounter with the first page of your Strunk and White.

Strunk and White? That's short for 'The Elements of Style' by William Strunk and E. B. White. Every household that doesn't have a copy wedged next to the other household essentials (The Bible, Webster's Dictionary, The Catechism of the Catholic Church (or your denominational equivalent), and The Star Trek Concordance by Bjo Trimble) is probably inhabited by sister-marrying illiterate hillbillies, rather than the literate cousin-marrying hillbilly type that most of us strive for.

Correct version of above sentence: "John has three cats, a mother and its babies. One of the kittens is real cute but the other one's face looks like the hind end of an ass."

And now, for no apparent reason, a picture with cats.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Using Babelfish to write poetry



I have an unnatural obsession with machine translation. I have a great time using the various internet sites that provide computerized translation from one language to another, like Babelfish.

Since I am a person that actually knows about languages (during my Pagan days I translated a Pagan booklet from German into English) I know that computer translations usually suck. They are helpful if you already know the language you are translating into well enough to catch mistakes, but otherwise they can be trouble.

But while Babelfish and her sisters may not be able to solve the world language problem, they do have another use. They can write poetry.

You see, one day I was testing Babelfish to see how well it could translate into Korean. I know next to no Korean, so what I did was I wrote a test sentence: "My cat Claudius has a neurological disorder", translated it English-to-Korean with Babelfish, and then cut-and-pasted the resulting unknown Korean sentence into Babelfish and did a Korean-to-English translation.

This is what Babelfish spit out at me:

To my cat Claudius
there is a military force
at the nervous crane.

Who knew Babelfish could write a haiku? So, anyway, I slapped a title on it ('catpoem/claudius') and added it to my collection of poetry written. It is now included in Where the Opium Cactus Grows.

In this first case I liked what Babelfish did enough to keep it pretty much as it was, I just arranged it into three lines.

Most of the time Babelfish poetry is more work. You might have to run it through a couple of languages (Asian languages seem to work best), and pick-and-choose the best results and do a lot of rewrites. But it produces some pretty cool imagery and can help to fire up those creative juices on days when you just don't feel like writing anything.

Monday, March 28, 2011

How to Write a Juxtaposition Poem



When I write poetry I like to write what I call juxtaposition poetry. It's a little like found poetry, except that you 'find' the raw materials from three different sources--- books, newspapers and the like. It's not only interesting of itself, but is something that can get your writerly juices going when you have writer's block.

Your three sources need to be very different from one another--- in 'nuclear sainthood profits' from my book Where the Opium Cactus Grows I used a Catholic prayer book, a book about nuclear war, and something by Karl Marx.

What you do with your sources is 'point and click'. Open each one at random and point, without looking, at the text. Copy out words or phrases from that point. Do this one after another until you have enough material for the poem at hand.

A pure juxtaposition poem just uses this material as you found it. But the secret to writing a good juxtaposition poem is to cheat like hell. Fudge a bit when you are pointing to select your source material, and add, subtract and re-arrange the material to help it make more sense. Or less sense, depending on your writerly goals.

I might point out that my 'nuclear sainthood profits' is not an average example of my juxtaposition poems, but one I feel is one of my best efforts in that direction. Most juxtaposition poems are choppier and don't have unified themes (whatever themes are, I try to avoid them). 'nuclear sainthood profits' is what happens with juxtaposition poetry when your Muse is in the building.

Here is the complete text of 'nuclear sainthood profits' from 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows'.

nuclear sainthood profits


wages after the labour, we beseech you, o limited nuclear war
a son is given to us, testing increasingly smaller warheads
if this limit is overshot, ground zero will accumulate debris
o mary conceived without sin, detonate a nuclear weapon
in the presence of mine enemies


behold, a virgin shall declare war on the soviet union and china
the market price of our pope, our bishop, and all true believers
includes mutual assured destruction when wages and prices are high
and large numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles
now and at the hour of our death

This poem was written 21 years ago--- wow, a poem that's old enough to drink! At the time I wrote it I was NOT a Catholic, and I WAS a Marxist. But I never meant it as in any was anti-Catholic. It was more like a nuclear-war-drives-us-all-to-pray thing. And of course there was the 'blame-capitalism' reish going on as well. (Did you know that capitalism is responsible for the lack of life on Mars?)

The sharpness of this poem is a result of using sources with high emotional impact. You don't have to do that all the time--- I've used a local newspaper as a source many times, both for juxtaposition poetry as I've described it here, and for single-source found poetry.

These blander sources are essential for school teachers using juxtaposition poetry in the classroom, since in a school setting one WANTS a bland result. In homeschooling, a wider variety of sources are possible, whatever the homeschooling mother thinks is acceptable.

In my experience, some juxtaposition poems are finished after the first day's work, and others need more work. In addition, any type of poem benefits from being 'aged' in a file for a few months and then being given a bit of polishing if needed--- or even a complete re-write.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: write a juxtaposition poem of your own. (If you post your poem on your blog, do post a link to it here in a comment.)

Related Post:
Blogging 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows'

Featured Books:
The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets
Modern Korean Poetry
Where the Opium Cactus Grows





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Thursday, March 10, 2011

Read the Bible in a year--- and the Catechism

There are a lot of plans out there for reading the Bible in a year, and now that I am a Bible Christian instead of an Odin-worshipping Neopagan, I see the value of them. It's harder to get in the discipline of Bible-reading if you always are wondering which part of the Bible to be reading on any given day.

Today I found a Bible reading plan with something extra--- it's based on the complete Bible, not one that omits the books tossed out of the Bible by most Protestants after the Reformation. And it ALSO includes daily readings of the Catholic Catechism, so that you will also read THAT in a year (if you so choose.) Read the Bible and the Catechism in a Year

The daily reading includes a chapter from 3 different books of the Bible each day. It's in PDF format and if you print out the 2 pages onto the same sheet of paper and fold it in quarters, you have a little leaflet you can keep in your Bible.

Some people might assume that only those Bible Christians who are Catholic would like this scripture reading plan. But nowadays Protestants and Evangelicals are often less than fully convinced that Martin Luther was inerrantly inspired by the Holy Spirit when he treated the Deuterocanonical books (the 'Apocrypha') as not really Biblical, since Luther also wanted to kick the epistle of James out of the Bible altogether (the Deuterocanonicals were included in the Luther translation of the Bible, but grouped together between the Old and New Testaments).

Even Pastor Arnold Murray of the Shepherd's Chapel TV Bible study program is not against reading the Deuterocanonicals and says good things about them, though he doesn't preach on them as he does with other books of the Bible. So this Bible reading plan meets the needs of many Bible Christians who are Protestant/Evangelical as well as the Catholics.

I'm starting with the Bible reading plan today. Another nice thing about it is that it doesn't have the months and days listed so you can start any time, and if you skip a week, you can just keep going with where you left off--- and you can read ahead when you are energetic. I challenge anyone out there to do likewise.



Kindle Bible (KJV with Apocrypha) (best navigation with Direct Verse Jump)
Kindle Catholic Bible (D-R) (best navigation with Direct Verse Jump)