Poetry Out Loud Finds: Timely Shorter Poems

These are a few poems I've stumbled across on the Poetry Out Loud website while helping students search for poems.  They're all shorter, but interesting choices for students.

"The Bloody Sire"  by Robinson Jeffers (http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/11973)
    Violence as the source of all morals.

"Chord" by Stuart Dybek (http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/30360)
    Death as music?

"All Hallows Eve"  by Dorothea Tanning (http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/243566)
    Surprising conflation of werewolves and husbands.

"Late Echo" by John Ashberry (http://poetryoutloud.org/poem/23488)
    The necessity of writing about the same things over and over.

"Coda"  by Basil Bunting (http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/177179)
    Blind repetition of history.

"Nude Descending a Staircase" by X J Kennedy (http://poetryoutloud.org/poem/17444)
    Classic surreal ekphrasis describing Duchamp's famous painting.

Finding my Inner Performer at the Poetry Center

I'm spending the next two mornings in Poetry Out Loud training at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Yea!

Today we spent time sharing teaching ideas, and Sarah Kortemeier led us through several simple and useful exercises to promote proper use of breath, physical relaxation and comfort, and a sense of community where we can all get over ourselves a little bit in order to serve the poem.

We spent time familiarizing ourselves with our poems (mine is "Ecology" by Jack Collom) and working on memorization.  We also had a bit of time to think about the lesson idea we will share tomorrow.

Tomorrow, after (I'm really hoping!!) some hard-core performance work and feedback, we will recite our poems on video, which will be shared online.  Yikes.  If I would have known that it might have motivated me to eat a little more carefully this summer.  I am not at the height of my physical confidence. However, if you'd like to witness our performance, it is at 12:30 at the Poetry Center.

I've got some studying to do tonight... I know about half the poem.  I wonder if the ellipticizer at the gym is conducive to poetry memorization.  I'll let you know.

Here's some further reading for me by Collom, in Exquisite Corpse: http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_9/critiques/collom.htm

Here's the poem... I am completely swallowed by the poem when I read it.  I love its rolling, lengthy sentences, his use of sound, and how the interconnectedness of the words themselves creates its own ecology of language, which underscores the idea of our unavoidable place in the natural ecologies of the planet.  I also like the spiritual overtones of the ending.  I'm sure I don't have this poem "all figured out," whatever that means.  Anyway...

Ecology

By Jack Collom

Surrounded by bone, surrounded by cells,

by rings, by rings of hell, by hair, surrounded by

air-is-a-thing, surrounded by silhouette, by honey-wet bees, yet

by skeletons of trees, surrounded by actual, yes, for practical

purposes, people, surrounded by surreal

popcorn, surrounded by the reborn: Surrender in the center

to surroundings. O surrender forever, never

end her, let her blend around, surrender to the surroundings that

surround the tender endo-surrender, that

tumble through the tumbling to that blue that

curls around the crumbling, to that, the blue that

rumbles under the sun bounding the pearl that

we walk on, talk on; we can chalk that

up to experience, sensing the brown here that’s

blue now, a drop of water surrounding a cow that’s

black & white, the warbling Blackburnian twitter that’s

machining midnight orange in the light that’s

glittering in the light green visible wind. That’s

the ticket to the tunnel through the thicket that’s

a cricket’s funnel of music to correct & pick it out

from under the wing that whirls up over & out.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry