M Christine Delea's Blog, page 21

Can You Really Title Something with a Question?

Of course you can!

Just a smattering:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (science fiction novel)

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by Carole King and Gerry Goffin (song)

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (book by Horace McCoy; 1969 movie)

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (YA book)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (play)

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962 movie)

N or M? by Agatha Christie (mystery novel)

Would I Lie to You? (British TV show)

...

Reading Late Anabasis by Ishion Hutchinson

Reading Late Anabasis

by Ishion Hutchinson

  published in Connotation Press

There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality.

            —Thomas Browne, Urn Burial

 

You read the ripples of their sandals

and armors dragged in dust, the anagram

of crows following them, the air

 

sick-riveted pitched down in night’s

large territory near a highway trucks rumble

like tankers to war, or breath moving

 

upon water, condensing time—night

being the sun’s drop into ashes.

You look up and see barba...

Living Room by Marie Ponsot

Living Room

by Marie Ponsot

The window’s old & paint-stuck in its frame.


If we force it open the glass may break.


Broken windows cut, and let in the cold

to sharpen house-warm air with outside cold


that aches to buckle every saving frame


& let the wind drive ice in through the break

till chair cupboard walls stormhit all goods break.


The family picture, wrecked, soaked in cold,


would slip wet & dangling out of its frame.

Framed, it’s a wind-break. It averts the worst cold.

Try a Tritina! Poetry Prompt

Are you wishing to try a form poem but don't know where to start? Are sonnets too stuffy, villanelles too rhyme-y, and sestinas just too much? Do you freeze up just by considering a pantoum, a haibun, an interlocking Rubaiyat, or a ghazal because they are so long?

If so, Marie Ponsot has got a form for you to try! She called her invention a triton, and said it is "the square root of the sestina." You can also think of it as a mini sestina.

As with sestinas, tritinas repeat the last words of th...

Haiku by Natsume Sōseki

Haiku

by Natsume Sōseki

Over the wintry

Forest, winds howl in rage

With no leaves to blow.

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The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer: Postscript by Hildegarde Flanner

The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer: Postscript

by Hildegarde Flanner

(originally published in a review of the book The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer in The New Republic, 1980; republished in 100 Great Poems by Women, edited by Carolyn Kizer, The Ecco P, 1995)

To forget him! To forget all of him!

To forget the beautiful skull where genius shuddered!

Suffer him to sink into the white sand

Where his mind pierced the stones and the stones

Marvelled. Consider the stones, they fell in two

And...

Movies and Books and Reviews, Oh My!: Prompt

Today's poem on my blog was written in response to a book review. The book, The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer, contains the correspondence of the man for whom a hit movie was recently released and, coincidentally, tonight is the Academy Awards, and the film, Oppenheimer, is sure to win at least 1. At least.

For this week's prompt, I would like you to write or otherwise create a piece of art that responds in some way to either a book or a book review you have recently read, or to a movie you hav...

The Pivotal Kingdom by Alice Fulton

The Pivotal Kingdom

by Alice Fulton

(published in her 1994 book, Powers of Congress, David R. Godine, Publisher)

A head capsized the wild mechanism of May

and a body followed, casting off

its muddy husk.

I gazed at him from the raised walkway

of the excavation site,

through dust the color of suntan.

I wanted to stroke a thing so warmly

smooth, a uniform khaki, on bended knee.

I wouldn’t mind touching hands

tensed round centuries

of hiatus in place of vanished weapons.

His motions tabled for ...

A Voice Speaking Out by Faye Turner-Johnson

A Voice Speaking Out

by Faye Turner-Johnson

  (published in Sky Island Journal, Issue 7, Winter 2009)

 

I have a voice that roams wild through the streets at night

sometimes yowling at the moon

 

screaming to reach the stars

shocking those who hear it

 

they say it is too raw . . . tone it down

bring it into the backyard . . . fence it in leash it

 

make it civilized

then come to us again when it is well-mannered

 

so I take it into the galleria . . . hang it there

place it on display to give ...

What Does Your Voice Do?: Prompt

In today's blog poem, "A Voice Speaking Out," by Faye Turner-Johnson, the speaker begins by telling us, "I have a voice that roams while" and tells us a few other things her voice does.

There is a twist, however. In stanza 3, we are told by the speaker that "they" object to the speaker's voice. The poem goes on to say what "they" suggest and the speaker's response.

In your response to this prompt, write/create a piece in which the speaker (it can be you, but it does not have to be) faces obje...