bringing home the bakin'

D, here is my villanelle on baking. It's a bit awkward.



Cause, try effect for size:
as you sow so shall you reap
and what you knead will rise.

The final shapes always surprise
but come from first beginning's deep.
Cause, try effect for size.

The gentle steady sweet reprise
of pounding dough like counting sheep -
and what you knead will rise.

The wheat knows not family ties
nor past nor future, nor does it keep
cause. Try effect for size.

The swarm of yeast holds anarchies
of growth in dessicated sleep
and what? You knead, will rise.

Fire of oven - potential flies
and lasting form will end its leap.
Cause, try effect for size,
and what you knead will rise.

Dis Sonnet

The actual rule for this one was that it was to be a sonnet in the style of Flavor Flav but it turned into more of a thing dissing wack poets (see previous comments about Ouyang Yu, among others) with occasional Flavish overtones and lines I just plain bit from him and other rappers. It's pretty cheap, but here it is:

I say to lesser bards with verse unversed,
and dis/junked words, no rhythm, rhyme or such:
although when worse comes worst my peeps come first
you need some telling that you don't mean much.
Now don't get arty for your right to write.
You read some e. e. cummings, were misled
(or was it Pound, or Eliot? Some light
on this perhaps it's best that we don't shed.)

O man you should have checked yourself before
you wrecked yourself. Your homeboys bit and halved
inferior styles. Back in the day when law
was firm and justice stood, wack poets starved.

You know I've tried to help you all I can.
You know I can't do nothing for you, man.

Yay for David

My own feeble attempt at this assignment is below, on the topic of "an hour^*:"

Go on, I insist. Take a slice
of time an hour long, as wide
as the universe. Look thrice
(at least twice) from the side.

This tangled web of noodle is
a school of fish, this single
strand a spoil poodle with
his mistress on a walk to mingle.

That straightest line of all?
An apple, unready yet to fall.

^*I have discovered that the basic image of this poem (i.e. looking at a block of time as a solid thing through which objects trace paths) is not as clear as I might have hoped to people who are not physics nerds. If you're curious you might want to look at Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott's classic in the small genre of literature concerned with non-standard numbers of dimensions, or there is a demonstration of the idea over here, or alternatively just think of the blobs coming out of people's chests in Donnie Darko.

A Window's Life Is A Thankless Life

So I've gone back to uni then - so far I've had a poetry seminar and a lecture and tute in Creative Writing 1A. My first assignment is to present a review of a book of poems by Ouyang Yu, a Chinese-Australian poet who I think says some good things - there are a lot of good lines in the book but only rarely is there a whole good poem. His work, like most of the stuff we have read in class, has annoyed me because although it might have some nice images and a good idea behind it, none of it goes (also he only uses punctuation in order to inter/rupt wo(r)ds). My example of a poem that does go would be Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Windhover, which starts

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

If you read this out loud you'll see what I mean. I looked it up, and it turns out that the metre of this poem is called a "Falling paeonic rhythm, sprung and outriding." I don't know what this means as yet, but I like it. So my plan of attack is to bone up on my iambs and trochees and do some metrical analysis on Ouyang Yu and see if I can put my problems with his poems into fancy old Greek words so as to convince my teacher that I haven't just been listening to too much hiphop.

Speaking of which, I've been thinking of illustrating my talk with examples from raps that go (I really need to find a better word than go) particularly well, but I'm not sure that it will be well received (unless of course I find big enough Greek words). No-one else in my class seems to have a problem with chunks of text without much in the way of rhythm (and what about rhyme? is rhyming so very, very wrong?) that don't really sound much good.

Also I've written my very first officially sanctioned poem. We had to write something from the point of view of an inanimate object in the room (this followed on from reading Craig Raine's A Martian Sends A Postcard Home [this one started a lot of talk about "seeing with the eyes of a 'child'" in which it was never noted that we stop being children for a reason] and Sylvia Plath's (really rather wonderful) Mushrooms) so here it is in all its not-very-good glory:

I am a flat between two volumes:
In the dark I'll show your face;
Sunlight will pass through me;
The wind, I'll keep out there.

My emptiness speaks volumes
Like all mirrors that you'll face
Still everyone looks through me
As if I wasn't there.