NaPoWriMo #14

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

For Sarah's prompt at readwritepoem.

The first line (which was given) fitted quite well with some lines I had already jotted down. I think it's still a little incoherent - May is going to be a big revision month!

NaPoWriMo #13: Secret Codes

This one is written for Carolee's prompt, which was to think of a message, attribute it to an unlikely object, repeat at will and then use one of the lines to start a poem. Rather than just using one, I have used a number of different objects in my poem. Although it's autumn here, the poem ended up with a spring feel to it.
As always, this is a rough draft - it feels as if it needs a little more at the end, but I like the way it's heading.

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo: Day 12

Today I went back to using the prompts supplied at Readwritepoem. The prompt, supplied by Angie Werren, was The One You Didn't Choose. Among the rules given were to choose something concrete - so, a thing, rahter than a path not taken. I was thinking of ignoring the prompt again and using another from my store of poem ideas, but then I remembered a travel incident and came up with the following (dashed down in my coffee break, so, it needs a little revision):

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #11

I suspect there are two sorts of poetry prompts: those that work as a test of ingenuity, which make you feel as if somehow you don't quite measure up, and those that work as an inspiration, drawing out all sorts of ideas that you didn't know you had. Any one prompt of course, can work as either sort for different people - or even for the same person on different occasions.

I've been feeling less inspired by most of the prompts provided at various sites for NaPoWriMo this year, and more as if my ingenuity is being tested. So I've decided instead to work on some of the other poems that are queuing up in my head to be written. Here's today's effort:

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #10

This one was written using Robert Peake's prompt at Readwritepoem.

He gave a list of words of which we were to incorporate twelve, along with something from another poem that didn't pan out (the chestnuts), something that tastes terrible (I'm sure that a number of things in this poem would taste terrible, if I was foolish enough to try it - the dried seed pod, maybe), and a sound that makes you happy (the chestnuts again).

Okay, I'm being a bit loose on the taste there, but I think I met the rest of the requirements. I'm not wildly excited by this piece but I feel as if I'm getting back on track after yesterday's disastrous piece (which will probably disappear from the blog at the end of the month).

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #9: Not Like a Red, Red Rose

Over at Readwritepoem Jill asked us to make a list of unusual objects, think of our current love or obsession, and use one item from the list as a metaphor for the object of our affection.

I'm glad it's the weekend coming, because I am beginning to flag. I hope with a little more time I can come up with something a bit better tomorrow. In the meantime, I found myself gazing at office supplies on my desk:

(Disclaimer: This poem may or may not be about a current or past love obsession. I approached it more from the point of view of the objects than from the person being written about).

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #8: Love Tanka

I read somewhere that Zsa Zsa Gabor once said "I know nothing about love, I was always married". Sometimes I feel like that too - having been married to the same man for almost forty years (gulp!), I don't seem to have a great store of romantic incidents to draw on. It's not that there is no love, but everyday steady love is different from "crazy head over heels roller coaster ride falling in and out of love" love. And I don't want to write endlessly about forty year old stories. (I'd rather write about two hundred year old events!)

So, faced with the prompt to write a tanka based on an amusing love incident, what could I write? I hope the following is at least mildly amusing.

(And if it's not, then there are still 22 more days to go)

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #7: An Image Prompt

On days like today I wonder why I let myself in for writing a poem a day for a month.
I left home for work in the morning, then from work picked up my daughter who is cleaning out her flat, dropped her on our doorstep with her bags and boxes, and headed off to the Madras Cafe Bookshop for another in the Canterbury Poets' Collective's autumn poetry reading series.

I finally arrived home after nine, ate dinner then turned to the prompt for the day.
This was Readwritepoem's day 6 prompt (since the prompt doesn't turn up here till the evening, I use it for the next day's poem). The task, to take an image and use it as the basis for a poem. I looked at a number of images last night but nothing inspired me - I think because my poetry tends to be ideas based rather than image based. It often includes images but the idea comes first.

However, on my desk at work was a calendar with rather surreal images from painter Andrew Bond. I brought it home with me and used bits and pieces from several images to compose today's poem - many of the images seem to be a protest against the expansion of dairy farming on the dry Canterbury Plains.

I may expand on this piece in the future, however for now this will have to do.

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #6

Back to work after the Easter break today and suddenly I don't have all day to sit around thinking about what I'll write. I'm not sure that it makes much difference, if I do have all day I tend to procrastinate and push something out in fifteen minutes or so anyway.

I have this fantasy that I should spend hours carefully crafting my poems, but in the end I think most of them are written like this. Then, the ones I don't care about too much get left, and the ones I do care about get set aside for a while, then I return to them and try to refine them so that my face to face writing friends grasp what I really intended in the first place.

Once again, the prompt at Readwritepoem didn't really inspire me. So I pulled another idea from the stock of ideas that I have been putting off actually writing for the last few months. I suspect most of these ideas will prove to be not that great after all. But at least getting them down on paper at last will free me up for something else to flow (I hope). This is from our trip to the UK in 2007, which I am still processing.

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #5: Not an Inside Out Poem

The latest prompt at Readwritepoem had me stuck: "inside out". In fact, my brain feels rather fuzzy lately, especially over Easter - too much chocolate and not enough exercise. maybe.

Instead I turned to an idea that had been buzzing round my head for a while and not quite made it out as a poem yet. Mark Twain was apparently born in the year of Halley's Comet, and died in the year it next appeared. The poem however is not about Mark Twain.

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

NaPoWriMo #4: Something Scary

Using the third prompt from Readwritepoem:

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

An Easter Photo

Nellie meets the new rabbit in town

NaPoWriMo #3: Acronyms

RWP stands for Readwritepoem. It also stands for many other things, as revealed by the Acronym Finder. Today's challenge was to take inspiration from the list of other definitions of RWP. I chose two of them to come up with the following rather raw and unedited effort (guaranteed to be biologically, historically and scientifically inaccurate).

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

Trees #2

Another one for Carmi.

This is a close up of a nikau palm, taken near Punakaiki on the West Coast of the South Island

NaPoWriMo #2: Doing the Shuffle

Now that the US has joined us in the month of April, I have used the first of the prompts at Readwritepoem for my second poem for the month.
The task was to put my iTunes player on "shuffle", write down the first five song titles that came up, and use them in the order they appeared and without alteration, in a poem.

To be honest, it didn't grab me hugely. The trouble is that pop song titles do tend to invite rather cliched love poems (or falling out of love poems). I wanted to break out of the mould, but it would have taken more than a day to come up with something more imaginative. For what it's worth, here it is (the song titles were Let's Do It, Another Galaxy, Truth You Know, When I See You, and Sure Don't Feel Like Love.

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

Thematic Photographic: Trees

We have some rather odd looking trees in New Zealand. This is a lancewood - Maori name horoeka - taken on the West Coast in January, although we also have one in our garden.

For more tree photos, visit Carmi's Thematic Photographic here

NaPoWriMo #1

Happy April everyone! Once again I have agreed to the challenge of writing a poem a day for the month of April. There are a number of prompt sites on the internet that offer a prompt every day for the duration of the challenge. It's the only way I'd get through it - it saves me from spending half the day dithering over what I'm going to write about. My site of choice is Readwritepoem, which I think offers great prompts.

The only problem is that we in New Zealand are a day ahead of much of the rest of the world. Last year, it was nearly bedtime before the prompts appeared. And I just can't bring myself to say that I am writing "a poem a day for the period April 2nd to May 1st." Somehow, it just doesn't seem to induce the same motivation in me. So for my first effort I pulled out a file where I have saved previous Wordles pulled from the Readwritepoem site, and used several of the words in my poem:

indigo, rust, ocean, congregation, punctuate, numinous

(All NaPoWriMo poems have now been removed for possible editing and submissions. Contact me if you would like to read them.)

Poetry in Autumn

Even before the leaves suddenly started changing colour this week, there were signs of autumn. For instance:

- crocuses in my garden
- chestnuts to pick up, roll around in my palms, and put in my pocket to feel their satiny smoothness at odd moments
cool nights
- mornings that are still dark when I have to get up for work (that will change when daylight savings ends in a week or so, but not for long)
- and of course the Canterbury Poets' Collective's autumn series of poetry readings.

There have been two so far. At the first I had the pleasure of arriving early to have a coffee and a bit to eat with Kay McKenzie Cooke, and to catch up on her news. Kay was one of the three featured readers, and I enjoyed her reading very much. She read from both her first two books (I have the second, but not the first) and also for her next collection which she is still working on - it promises to be another good one. The other two guest poets were local poet David Gregory and a visiting American, Mary Jane Grandinetti. David was rather too modest and only read a few poems. I would have liked to hear more of his tricksy word play. Mary Jane introduced us to short forms, in particular the fib. She edits two online journals for short poetry forms, the Fib Review and the Shot Glass Journal.

The second line-up of three guest poets included two local poets and one from Nelson. Robert Lumsden from, I gather, Singapore, was unable to make it so Sean Joyce substituted for him at the last minute. Sean has the wit and fluency of the Irish - his "Irish pantoum" was a great hit. Tom Weston was the other Christchurch poet, and again I enjoyed his intelligent and thoughtful poems. But Jessica le Bas from Nelson was for me the most memorable. Jessica read two poems from her first collection, but focussed mostly on her second book Walking to Africa. The poems in this book form a connected narrative about her experience of the mental illness of a daughter who became unwell at the age of fourteen. It is a powerful, moving and brave collection. I have to admit, after borrowing the book from the library, I didn't buy it. I thought that it might be one I couldn't face dipping into over and over as I do with most of my poetry books. I hope though, that it finds a wider audience than the usual poetry buying public. Jessica is an excellent reader although she commented that there are poems in the collection that are too difficult for her to read now.

Both evenings had the usual line up of open mic readers in the first half. There is an audience vote for the best, and since this is the twentieth year of readings, the best open mic readers will be the guest poets for the final evening in the series. It looks like being an excellent night.

*****

And, also on the poetry front, I've pretty much decided to sign up for NaPoWriMo at Readwritepoem. I think it's time to remind myself that I can actually manage a poem a day, if I use my two fifteen minute coffee breaks. (Bad poems probably, but still poems, with potential for revision).

Monochromatic: Seals at Kaikoura

Here's another photo for Carmi's monochromatic week at Thematic Photographic. This one's not from our recent road trip, but from last September. It was taken just north of Kaikoura (a popular destination for whale-watching, etc) when we were returning from a holiday in the North Island. There wasn't a lot more colour than this in the original photo - just variations on grey - blue greys, beige greys etc.

When I was pulling this one out of the files I remembered a letter to the editor of our newspaper a week or so ago. A Brazilian tourist was saying that he had a wonderful time in New Zealand, but...

He went on to complain that our roads were single carriage way, even near the big cities. He seemed to think we should upgrade them all. Well - except for Auckland, where there are real traffic problems - we seem to get around OK. Even if we sometimes have to wait patiently to pass a slow campervan or truck. We only have four million people, the traffic problems are not huge. And I think most New Zealanders would think that if we have spare money, it should be spent on health and education rather than a lot of unnecessary multi-lane highways (except in Auckland, where, as I said, there are real traffic problems. Although not as bad as London).

The point of all this? Well, when I took this photo I was standing on State Highway 1. The equivalent of the M1 in Britain. Except that the M1 is a multi-lane highway where the view is of nothing but other cars whizzing past at high speed. If you can see the countryside at all, it is mostly embankments or hedges blocking any wider view.

OK, I wasn't actually standing on the road. I was at least a foot from the side of the road. And yes, the traffic here in the South Island is less than the North Island, but there's plenty of places in the North Island, too, where you can just pull onto the shoulder on the side of the road and stop to take photos.

I have a huge file of seal photos, those pups are just so cute. (New Zealand fur seal, the Maori name is kekeno)

Thematic Photographic: Monochromatic

Looking over my travel photos, I find that those taken in low light - mostly in the evening - seem to call the most to be rendered in black and white. Earlier in the day, strong colour calls to me. In the evening, it's the moods, the shapes, the contrast of tones that ask to be photographed. Here are a couple that didn't have much colour to begin with - and what they had, I have removed in Photoshop. The first, I showed in colour a few posts ago. The second, a shot of Lake Wanaka in the evening (while we waited for our Indian takeaways to be ready), I haven't shown before.





More monochromatic photos this week at Carmi's Thematic Photographic here.