Guy Conner's Blog, page 4

The Next Phase of My Life

I’m in the mood for a short poem today:

The Next Phase of my Life
a haiku

My body feels like a sponge;
Void of all content,
Alert, and primed to absorb.

The post The Next Phase of My Life appeared first on Guy Conner.

Why I Love Darkness

A short while ago, I promised deeper poems. What follows is a second poem about my mother and what it was like when alcohol took over her life. It is also about my relationship with my father, but more on that later…

Why I Love Darkness

Memories
Are not backlit;
Like fretful flies,
They dodge and flit,
Before they settle in the mind.

Memories
Are not a choice;
Like poetry,
They give a voice
To wounds that fester and endure.

1960:
Standing on the lawn that morning,
The grass I mowed and left...

My First Double Dactyls

In the past, I have posted about double dactyls here and here.

In 1966, or 1967, When Hecht and Hollander published their book of Double Dactyls, Esquire magazine held a competition where readers could submit their own double dactyls. I wrote the three that follow, but I didn’t have the courage to submit them.

Jiggery-Pokery!
Wilt-the-Stilt Chamberlain
In real life is really
About five foot two.
He dunks ’em because of his
Superplasticity,
So eat all your spinach,
It could happen to you.

Higg...

More on the Influence of Form

Not long ago, I posted about the influence that poetic form has on the effect of a poem. At that time I said that I intended to do further experiments with translation of a poem from one form to another. Here is my next attempt.

The starting point is a light verse I posted almost at the beginning of this blog. The original is a Shakespearean sonnet, which may be thought of as a sequence of seven couplets. The first translation is a series of seven cinquains; the second is a series of seven ha...

My Introduction to Politics – Part One

I don’t remember not being able to read. I do have a clear memory ( I was two or three) of being lifted up and placed in the center of a big bed — covered in one of those old-fashioned bedspreads with raised embroidery. My father surrounded me with what seemed like a sea of comic books and told me to learn to read them.

And learn I did. I’m not sure how I did it — I have no memory of anyone sounding out letters for me. I could tell you that I seem to remember words being spelled out for me, b...

Is Your Mother Home?

In 1952, my family moved to the upper floor of a house at 1412 North St in Beaumont, Texas. As was common in Gulf Coast homes of the period, the house had ceiling fans in every room (except the bathroom), and a screened-in sleeping porch at the front. My four-year-old sister and I were given beds at either end of porch, and our parents had a bedroom at the back. It wasn’t much, but it was all a Professor of Mathematics with a family could afford in those days. Almost every night, after my sis...

Going Deeper

It has been a while since I’ve published a poem on this blog, and there is a reason. I’ve been preparing myself to write about more serious personal issues.

About a year ago, I had a profound, life-changing experience. I went on a two-day retreat in which I did nothing but eat, sleep, and read and reflect on my friend Cathy Wild’s forthcoming book Wild Ideas: Creativity from the Inside Out

For years, I had been aware of a significant weakness in all my creative endeavors: an inability to fac...

The Influence of Form

I have written about my approach to translation from one language to another here. Recently, it occurred to me that recasting a poem from one form to another in the same language is also a form of translation. Let me illustrate.

In April of this year, I posted my translation of the introduction to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. The fourth stanza reads as follows:

The Devil holds our puppet strings,
He leads us through the murk and mire
Nearer to Eternal Fire
And makes us like disgusting things...

On The Satisfactions Of Verse

My late wife used to describe me as a combination of a poet and an engineer. She was right. Sometimes, for me, the sense of having created art is the primary motivation; and sometimes, the process of writing a poem has its own rewards; its own satisfactions; its own frustrations.

For example, I imagined the following little verse as a story poem — the protagonist visits his aged parents in order to convince them to move to some sort of care facility. At the time I wrote the first version, som...

Plainsong v 2

Years ago, when I was at Rice, I had a roommate named Fred who was very musical — he played the piano and guitar and had a powerful but sweet tenor voice. One evening, he claimed to me that he could sing anything, absolutely anything. I challenged him and offered a textbook øn differential equations. He opened it, and immediately began to sing the text beautifully, turning phrases like: ” the partial of y with respect to the partial of x” into lovely sounds.

I thought of Fred when I wrote the...