Sunday Soldiers

Sunday soldiers march down
march upon frozen ground.
Cavalier brutes mighty wall
winter warriors standing tall.

Gladiators battling in rain
battle for yards to gain.
Pursuit of righteous might
pursue weakened foes tonight.

Hesitant heroes final stand
finally swept from the land.
Defeated enemies fighting done
Conquerors glorious war is won.

A Poem In Progress

the day comes when breath
heaves once and is gone
increase of uprising and
morosely easing into

and then the stark vision
of darkness and shape
aged in a century until
dust to know the earth again

to where it flies and splashes
harmoniously spins neatly
joins the awesome pulse grasps
knowledge ebbs slowly inward

unknown there save newer
land tilled and weeded again
damp magnificent space and
then again co-joined reality

strengthened mightily one
time in timeless beauty
breathing in and screaming
out until is pulses again

this is natures law without
restrictions this is life
kissing death in unison

Seemingly Unaided

by Suzanne Saporito (guest blogger)

I don’t know much about the formalities of poetry. I don’t know much about meter. The iambic and the penta meters will never stick within me so that I can express their ways to you. I can’t tell the difference between a metaphor or simile while I’m writing unless I look them up in a dictionary. Nor can I define the repeating sounds rhymes make within a lines delivery and truly, I don’t think much about it.

 

I don’t write the piece, the piece writes for me. It writes the emotions that are creeping in my bones. The ones that come from an autumn breeze or from a lone leaf falling, breathing its last hoorah, triggering my poetic song. The verse is born from the ethereal realms of my being. I’ve always found it so fascinating. Free flowing and moving with no thought to have brought me to its place, until the day I was told that poetry had structure. My response to that information was “Get Out of Here”. But it was true, and wow did I have a hard time with it.

Let me take you to my beginnings with form and my journey in the unaided ways of working with poems and structure. My first, and still most loved form is Rubaiyat. It has an unbalanced beauty to its fall and frustrated my free falling poetic mind, that I lost my way trying to count syllables (8989) and then casting more doubt into its rhyming lines (aaba)… What is that?, I said “you’ve got to be kidding me”. I became so disturbed by the strict, straight and narrow that I lost my way and found myself in the emptiness where no muse would gather to share her light.

Each line was forced under the strain of keeping time and rhyme, I was frazzled. Then a friend introduced me to Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat) and he told me to just read them. Wow, the poetic spirit of the poems spoke to me and shined. Each small four lined piece of magic was ingrained in my person, not memorized, but captured like a photograph, except I captured the flow and fall of the piece. I found my way in the poem and the poem taught me not by the numbers that were laid in the count of syllables, but where the meter fell naturally and then the rhyme followed suit.

Every form has its song in its poetic workings, and yes I know now that there are words to define them, but its the melody of the poem that allows the write to come to structure. So I let sail the way of the form, I didn’t count a number just moved into the rhythm of the form, unaided by any direction given just the rhythm…. After that I go back over the piece an pick and weed, change and conform, Try it…. find a form that you know of or don’t know of. Unaided by any structural direction, read the poem till its meter sinks in your person. Then write where the music of poetry takes you. Sometimes its the soul of a poet that puts the melody of the form into play, seemingly unaided.

How and Why

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should doubt high drift over my love for thee
grey gloomy cloud, disconsolate, strong reign
bleak darkened frown, portend deep misery,
hide hearts resolve, beneath shadowed disdain.

Should you feel, sudden cold breath of gloom,
spate of fear, black scourge upon painted leaf,
quick cruelly fade love, grim in abject doom,
swift eclipse hopes hue, behind shaded grief.

And would unshakable faith, far be blown,
fiercely shook from loose grasp, once so near
wither sweet loves blossom, thus loss bemoan
newly dead splendor, once honored then hear:

Eternally damned shall I rove and cry
Tormented ever to seek how and why.

Just Getting Started

Revise Your Poetry!

The first completed draft of your poem is only the beginning. Poets often go through several drafts of a poem before considering the work “done.”

To revise:

Put your poem away for a few days, and then come back to it. When you re-read it, does anything seem confusing? Hard to follow? Do you see anything that needs improvement that you overlooked the first time?

Often, when you are in the act of writing, you may leave out important details because you are so familiar with the topic. Re-reading a poem helps you to see it from the “outsider’s perspective” of a reader.

Show your poem to others and ask for criticism. Don’t be content with a response like, “That’s a nice poem.” You won’t learn anything from that kind of response. Instead, find people who will tell you specific things you need to improve in your poem.

Some Poetry Movements & Their Philosophy

Victor Obi

Poetry is all about life. Every human activity revolves around the verses. For this reason it does not take much to be poetic. Expressions are made in order to leave behind impressions, be it good or bad. In the same vein poetry reflects mood; a good mood elicits positive thoughts and a melancholic mood evokes negativity.

Poetry evolved from the mimetic theory that gives the reader an eye witness account of human character. Nature bestows the gift of miming on every soul that puts pen on paper to write their observations about life based on a broad or narrow perspective. Poetry enables the reader to draw a reasonable conclusion on the numerous intricacies evolving from a narrow or broad perspective. Life evolves on the pages through fascinating sceneries painted by words carefully selected to do poetic justice to the theme.

There are different forms of poetry, but every form lend credence to the emphasis on mankind and nature. Different philosophies evolved from various poetic movements at some point in history. William Wordsworth and Percy By-Shelley led their vehement campaign on nature ; with emphasis on environmental safety as seen in William Wordsworth “The world is too much for us”. In the 60′s some African American poets evolved a theme on resistance through a poetry school called “THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE, from where the likes of Amiri Baraka Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou emerged during the peak of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King.

Africans evolved their philosophy from a poetic movement emanating from the spirit of protests popularized by the late Leopold Cedar Senghor in his writing on Negritude and the late Kwame Nkrumah’s writing on Consciencism. Time would fail me to mention the role of the late Julius Nyerere in his Ujamma (communalism and brotherwood). It is from these poetry movements that famous contemporary African poets like Wole Soyinka,the nobel prize in literature laureate, John pepper Clark,Atukwei Okai and others emerged. Poetry and philosophy do have their own ways of projecting diverse cultures based on religion, cultural belief systems and free tools made available by logic, ethics, epistemology and metaphysics.

(Jamal Uddin, Member of Worldofpoets.com)

Originality In Poetry

How is originality fostered?

1. By personal difficulties, particularly in childhood, that have been worked through. Analyse and meet these difficulties.

2. By unswerving self-honesty. Ask yourself: is this what you really hoped to write? Could you not dig deeper into the wellsprings of the poem?

3. By starting afresh, expanding your repertoire with new techniques and new themes.

4. By pacing yourselves, drawing up timetables of writing that extend and build on previous accomplishments.

5. By working in related fields: writing novels, short-stories, articles: particularly where these unlock new perspectives and energies.