Category: Poetry

This Thursday, April 30, is Poem in Your Pocket Day, part of the celebration of National Poetry Month. The idea is that you carry a poem with you to share with people you meet that day. Their website has a downloadable pocket-sized poems that you can print to share or poems categorized by topic that you can choose from.
In the last issue of Ampersand, Cathy Miranker wrote about Poem in Your Pocket day. We included a cardboard library pocket with the issue along with instructions for a simple single sheet book. Cathy proposed that people make a book, using a favorite poem as content, and bring it to the annual PCBA Printers’ and Book Arts Fair on Sat May 9th, for our own local celebration of poetry month. I’m excited to see what people come up with.

Another topic that seems to come up a lot around me recently is Twitter, specifically is it good for anything. I first checked it out last year when there was a wild fire near my sister’s house in Los Angeles — someone was posting updates about the fire, but calling my sister turned out to be much more informative (and accurate). Then this week there was a article in the NY Times about a woman who tweets mini-recipes. For instance:

Biscotti: mix 1/3c sug/3T oil/egg/t anise flavr; +c flour/t bkgpwdr. Roll log to fit bkgpan; pat down. 30m@375/190C. Slice~14; brwn+6m/side.

Quite a feat of condensed writing and getting the bare essentials into 140 characters. (You can see more here.)
The article says “entries on her personal Twitter stream are all written as senryu, a syllabically constrained poetic form like haiku. Here’s one: ‘As a Catholic schooled atheist, I’m sorry for an awful naught.’”
I didn’t know about senryu, and here’s what Columbia Encyclopedia says:

senryu (sĕnrēū’) , a Japanese poem structurally similar to the haiku but primarily concerned with human nature. It is usually humorous or satiric. Used loosely, the term means a poem similar to the haiku that does not meet the criteria for haiku.

and wikipedia says “Unlike haiku, senryū do not include a kireji (cutting word), and do not generally include a kigo, or season word.” Now I’m not sure what I write — since I like the cutting word part but usually don’t have a season or nature word in mine.
There’s a twitter stream of only haiku — here’s the first example I saw (which is probably really a senryu):

Bad 401k.
Hidden fees eat it away.
Zombie savings plan.

and a senryu stream. And finally haiku headlines, which condenses the news into 3 line snippets — probably the perfect way to keep up with the world for those of us who think we’re too busy…

To celebrate National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month, this month’s giveaway is a copy of my artist’s book A Word on Statistics. In it, the Nobel-prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska takes a playful look at numbers and human nature. You can read the entire poem here. The book is 5-1/2″ by 3-1/2″ with the text of the poem printed letterpress and the illustrations (the dot grids) printed offset.
To enter, post your favorite poem in a comment to this post by April 23th. The winner will be selected at random and announced on April 24th.

April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month. (This year “awareness” is related to climate and climate change, but I suppose I’m more aware of numbers in April because of US tax day on April 15, but I digress…)
The other day I got an announcement from Kat Ran Press about their latest chapbook, with a quite wonderful poem, perfect for both celebrations — The Certainty of Numbers by Bruce Snider

The Certainty of Numbers

It’s not the numbers you dislike—
the 3s or 5s or 7s—but the way
the answers leave no room for you,
the way 4 plus 2 is always 6
never 9 or 10 or Florida,
the way 3 divided by 1
is never an essay about spelunking
or poached salmon, which is why
you never seemed to get the answer right
when the Algebra teacher asked,
If a man floating down a river in a canoe
has traveled three miles of a twelve mile canyon
in five minutes, how long will it take him
to complete the race? Which of course depends
on if the wind resistance is 13 miles an hour
and he’s traveling upstream
against a 2 mile an hour current
and his arms are tired and he’s thinking
about the first time he ever saw Florida,
which was in the seventh grade
right after his parents’ divorce
and he felt overshadowed
by the palm trees, neon sun visors,
and cheap postcards swimming
with alligators. Nothing is ever simple,
except for the way the 3 looks like two shells
washed up on last night’s shore,
but then sometimes it looks like a bird
gently crushed and on its side.
And the 1—once so certain
you could lean up against it
like a gray fence post—has grown weary,
fascinated by the perpetual
itch of its own body.
Even the Algebra teacher
waving his formulas like baseball bats,
pauses occasionally when he tells you
that a 9 and a 2 are traveling in a canoe
on a river in a canyon. How long
will it take them to complete their journey?
That is if they don’t lose their oars
and panic and strike the rocks,
shattering the canoe. Nothing is ever certain.
We had no plan, the numbers would tell us,
at the moment of our deaths.

	Probably the most well-known haiku is Basho’s poem about a frog and a pond. See Rexroth’s translation at right or 31 translations on the Bureau of Public Secrets or Chad Sweeny’s 33 translations.

My first encounter with haiku was one rule: 3 phrases of 5, 7, 5 syllables respectively. Later I learned about the “cut” line, where the poet uses punctuation such as a dash to divide the poem into two juxtaposing or contrasting parts. As I read more about haiku in both Japanese and contemporary English and began writing my own, I gave up on the first rule — “syllable” isn’t quite what the Japanese form uses and some haiku enthusiasts say 11 syllables and a 3-5-3 syllable meter is closest to the quality of the Japanese form while others prefer the sort of “free form” haiku that I write (there’s a nice explanation of this here by Keiko Imaoka.) Some of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of famous Japanese haiku use a free form style:

Autumn evening —
A crow on a bare branch.

An old pond —
The sound
Of a diving frog.

So probably I don’t write haiku at all, but something called “micro poetry” (see this article on Jim Murdock’s blog about short form poetry ) — but I’ll continue to be entraced by inventing 2 images in 3 lines.