Poem: malison d'etre

As I may have mentioned, I'm doing most of my blogging on Facebook these days, at the link given at the bottom of the page. But I still want to post my poem for Poetry Pantry at Poets United, and so I posted the poem on my Facebook and added my poem to the Poetry Pantry linky. And I thought I'd better post links to the poem here. Click on the poem title to read the poem.

malison d'etre


jonathan is a bat out
of hell
which explains his crispy singed
wings
and his
expression of perpetual exasperation
and why he sleeps
hanging over the heat register
on cold nights
he's working on a PhD
in social work
but what he really
wants is to
be a rock star
like michael jackson
& madonna
strangely enough he cant stand baseball
or hippoptamuses


(c) Nissa Annakindt 1990

This poem is included in my book Where the Opium Cactus Grows.



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Poem: advice to the shopworn

the truli modern poet will
always!!! carry a beeper
///in case/// of poetry emergencies
GLeeMing down the stairs at 3 am
      *to insert a radon paradox
      (or) delete a rude cauliflower*

(c) Nissa Annakindt, never you mind what year.

A poem from Where the Opium Cactus Grows, which is soon to go out of print.  This was written during a phase of my life as a poet in which I did a lot of monkeying around with peculiarities of typesetting and spelling. Some of my poems from this period have to be altered before posting online because they turned out to do weird things to HTML.

This poem was shared at Poets United's Poetry Pantry #127.

Poem: Buy! Buy! Buy!

Buy! Buy! Buy!

at a dealer near you
the only leading brand
recommended by more doctors and
handpicked by juan valdez
for confidence that lasts
and whiter washes
anything else is just a
no sugar added
all natural
wimpywimpywimpy
brand x

(c) 2010 Nissa Annakindt


One of the poems from 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows'. It is a species of found poem as the phrases are from advertising.

Poem: On the Creation of Found Poetry

On the Creation of Found Poetry
  In a dismal pile are found
stray words from many sources

thrown in a blender, tortured with forks
and aged six years in wooden casks

then inscribed by persian slave
calligraphers upon the floor

(c)  Nissa Annakindt

Another day, another sijo--- this one from my book 'Opium Cactus'. The topic is a totally different form of poetry--- found poetry. In the simplest form of found poetry you simply take someone else's prose words and arrange them like a poem. There was one alleged poet who came out with a whole book of 'found poems' from the words of a government spokesman he didn't care for. This type of found poetry raises for me an issue--- is it really my poem if Bill Clinton composed the words and I just arranged them to spite him?

But there is also found poetry where the poet has the work of not only finding the words/phrases but putting them together from different sources, working with them to express the poet's vision. I find this kind of found poetry very satisfying. I also use the method of finding the words/phrases as if for a found poem, but using about an equal amount of words of my own to create the final effect.

As to why I used one poem form--- the sijo--- to describe another--- the found poem--- I'm just weird that way.

Poetic prompt: write a poem about a poetic form that you like--- or one that you hate.

Poem: catpoem/claudius

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


(c) Nissa Annakindt

NOTE: Poem from my book Opium Cactus. 
If modern poetry is drawing words out of a hat, this is the high-tech equivalent--- a Babelfish poem. Babelfish poems are created by writing an ordinary sentence, translating it into an exotic language (Asian languages work best) using Babelfish. You then cut-and-paste the Babelfish translation back into the Babelfish window, and re-translate it back to English. Or some other language. You use the resulting word-salad as source material for your poem.

'catpoem/claudius' came to be when I wrote the sentence 'My cat Claudius has a neurological disorder' and translated into-out of Korean using Babelfish. The translation it spat back is exactly what you see here, I only had to arrange it into haiku form.

My cat Claudius, by the way, was the best cat ever invented. He had a neurological condition and walked crooked and stumbled a lot. The vet advised me to let him live in the house. When the house cat Cheney had kittens, Claudius managed to stumble into the kitten basket and became the official kitten-sitter. One of the kittens, Germanicus, became his best buddy for life. Both Claudius and Germanicus died, I believe from drinking some antifreeze from a bottle that was cracked.

Claudius as a kitten

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

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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Having fun with my juvenilia

As I am working on the new poetry book, I'm having to go through some of my earliest poems--- my juvenilia (though I was already old enough to be tried as an adult when I wrote them).

We all like to think we are making progress in our writing, and so sometimes we are embarrassed enough by some of our early work that we are tempted to through it out. But resist that temptation. Because for one thing, old writing can help you measure your progress. And sometimes you will be surprised by something that you wrote years ago that turns out to be good enough to keep, or at least be worth the effort to re-write.

Total Word Count Guesstimate
I don't know how many words the poetry book is going to run. It's actually more a matter of the number of pages. Currently I am at page 38 which is nearly halfway to the minimum.

A Guessing Game
These are two of the poems of the new book. One was written in my first year of writing poetry (un)seriously. The other was written this year. Guess which one is which.  Note also that the titles of these two poems are in the running for being the book title, so if you like one or another say so.

running about on hens' legs
for baba yaga
trouble, trouble vicks and tea
break the corners of tv
hide the harp and bend the lid
do you know what marko did?
too late
too late
anticipate
simmer pansies vixen tee
build the carpet on the sea

ninth horseman

my heart's
frying in a cast iron skillet

the refrigerator watches sullenly
as the world melts