Occasionally and with great pleasure I get a chance to set up a playful exchange
with my friend Anna Marie Sewell, and at times another friend, Shayne
Golosky-Johnston joins the party. One of us will send off a picture or a recent
piece of poetry we have been working at, or just a line or two of found potential. The other takes a line or two, or maybe
even just a phrase from that as a prompt and begins something new and sends it
back. And back and forth we go, building up from the original.
On Jan
17, I sent Anna Marie and Shayne this:
I was
looking through a back issue of prairiefire
and found a poem by Erin Noteboom, called "Ghazal beginning with lines by
Yannis Ritsos."
One of Noteboom's own lines
struck me:
"Learn
to walk as if you had a different history"
Care to
start there? In Ghazal form (if not mode)?
As, for example:--And I wrote this rather freer than
appropriate opening gambit:
Learn to walk as if you had a different history,
Had not
been born of immaculate deception.
What
would we gladly give for total independence?
Everything
but reliance on experience over novelty.
The moon
last night shone off icy crust across my walkways
Snow
polished to glistening seduction, fixed uncertain fluidity.
If I read
the ravens rightly, we live in a permanent joke
But lack
the sense of humour to recognize the punch line.
The
predictable seasons regularly erase my frames of reference:
From a
river frozen over is there an upstream and a down?
The
little rituals we make up daily keep us going on and on
Let us
call love to account, proclaim our unpolished desire.
I am
preoccupied with form. Pattern resolves doubt
when
topicality fails and nature hides from metaphor.
Then I revised and tried something a little more "formally" responsible
Jan 18 (3)
Learn to walk as if you had a different history,
The one to come from wellspring and ashes in the making.
What would we gladly give for total independence?
Everything but reliance on experience unforsaken.
The moon last night shone off icy crust across my walkways
Fixed uncertain fluidity, snow polished seduction.
If I read ravens rightly, we live in permanent joke
But lack the sense of humour to recognize the punch line.
Predictable seasons erase my frames of reference:
From a river frozen over is there upstream and down?
Let us call love to account, proclaim unpolished desire;
little rituals we make up daily keep us going.
I am preoccupied with form; when topicality fails
and nature hides from metaphor, doubt seeks out pattern.
Anna Marie took the challenge to heart, and wrote a witty and
thoughtfully lush riff on the “ashes in the making.`` You can find it on her January 19 blog entry
at http://prairiepomes.com/
Please go there, appreciate and enjoy, and leave her a comment….
Deciding
to try in my own halting way to take a more traditional approach, as did she, I
gave it one more try for now, on a riff from hers: “addicted to the blue,” from
her couplet
s
he never shared her bed with any one addicted to the
blue
consuming smoke, yet she found ashes, in the making.
January 27: Addicted ghazal:
Against habit, law,
life’s lessons, precept, and parent’s rules,,
the rebel strums a twelve-bar tune, addicted to the blue.
Nose to ground,
feet mired in mud, cold, wet and tired, by raven’s
sly croak tricked
skyward, no longer addicted, to the blue.
What mood is this, an angel’s fete, from Mary’s lap, outreaching,
tricks shepherds from their own true work, addicted by the blue?
Romance passed through puritanical monochrome mind’s eye
an art color blinded, blinkered, addicted to the blue.
Awake to the simpler rude multiplication, hue Dons
a clearer perspective, far from addicted to the
blue.
February 18 update:
And speaking of lines that beg to be taken up and thought through, these lines from an Italian songwriter, Claudio Lolli, from his 1980 song "La canzone del Principe Rospo" ("The Frog-Prince Song" translated by my colleague from the University of Alberta Department of Modern Languages, William Anselmi):
Si potrebbe parlare delle parole e della loro strana mania di mettersi ensieme,
basta una penna o una bocca disposta all'amore e niente piu le trattiene,...
One could speak about words and their strange obsession to get together,
you just need a pen or a mouth given to love and nothing holds them back,...
That`s as far as we got—or have managed to get so far. But from her blog, apparently
Anna Marie has caught the bug.
