Poetic Chatter House

Melissa,

This place is still very foreign for me. Trying to get a feel for what can be done here. I noticed there is a link for posting images. Is it possible to post poems with pictures? Now that has tremedous possibilities. Folks could post their poems with pictures or you could even have picture prompts for people to write to. I have no idea how to make the picture fuction work. It asks for an "image url". Is there an image bank we can pick from? And if so, where might it be. I'm lost in the woods over here...lol.

Just shooting some ideas for this place. The picture option would be excellent.

Scott

been on helium forr a while now, errrr *my keyboard is wanting to add xtra r's* but only check it once in a while, hadnt even known they had forums and now these things called 'zones'. But I do wrrite from time to time and i am constantly compulsed to rhyme. My young children love it, the olders trry not to be too annoyed:)

So please excuse any waste of space and/or bandwidth (if they still call it that these days) I might use just trying to make some mistakes, meet a few peeps and figure it all out!

fjalldfjwoajouejraejradfnmvcjaoefaa;ldfzdkfja;oeirafafaea

Hi everyone,

I wanted to take a few minutes to get your thoughts and Ideas on how we can get this group up and running.

Many other groups are being formed in Betaville and they've been successful and I know this one can be as well. I am sure many of you are still getting acquanited with how Betaville works.

This will eventually take place of the coffee house. Not just Poetic Chatter but others will evolve. You can even form your own group if you want to and allow who you want to invite or leave it open as this is.

I am hoping this will become the home that the Poetry Coffee House is on the forms. Do you think we should rename this to the Poetry Coffee House. I sure would love your input.

Missy

Hello, group. I was exploring the new groups and thought I'd join. I'm working on a poetry challenge on another website. The challenge is a year-long endeavor of writing free verse and twenty-five different forms of poetry.

I thought it would be nice to belong to a place in which I can get some feedback and discuss those pesky forms. Actually, I'm a big fan of form poetry, especially the villanelle.

this is very simple, take a haiku 5 7 5 syllable count

the last line of the haiku must be the first line of the second haiku we just play tag back and forth.

Hi Poets,

Yes change is afoot once again. Seems like once we get settled something happens and we're left gasping.

Looks like our beloved Poetry House is going to become a "Read Only" place. So what to do?

Well we could just move here and let this be our place of meeting and critiquing, at least this place is stable for the time being. Sound off and let me know what you think.

My best

Missy

Share what you know about Haiku's here.

Thanks,

Missy

Share what you know about Sonnets here.

Thanks,

Missy

Leave your best quote here or post a famous quote. Let's see what's on your mind.

Leave your poem here or post a poem you like here. This is the spot for it.

Share what you know about Free Verse here.

Thanks,

Missy

Share what you know about Acrostic here.

Thanks

Missy

I see too clearly,

the contradictions

in your descriptions

of me, and by now...

I should know the score.

You will only do

the things that you

can clearly account

you get paid for.

Still, why can't I ask

for this small task?

A mere turn of the tables

quickly, and nothing more?

I only want your point of view,

a few insightful words from you

to help with what I'm trying to do.

But it seems you're saying

it's because I'm paying

and you have to say

you can not help me

in this way.

So after all, you contradict - and

I feel like somehow, I've been tricked.

It's not really a big surprise, and

you need not remind me

of the rules

and of the fools

who break them.

So no question or two

will I ask of you. I will refrain.

I get the picture.

You're the contradiction,

a charming work of fiction.

To me, they do not differ.

I'm a marionettes puppet-
strings taut, I do his will.
My ignorance was blind,
that's his private thrill.

Heavy eyebrows
conceal the truth,
a mustache hides
his evil grin.
That cleft on rounded chin,
is where satan's fingers been.

You lured me with a promise,
and now I wait my fate.
Hordes of others like me,
dance within hell's place.

Svengali,
release my strings;
let me lift my head.
I've done your bidding as you willed,
seeds sown, sprout villainous bid.

Your tomatoe is my tomato,
Potato, potatoe...
dueling spuds at ten paces.
Come on now,
let's be politically, poetically correct.
Let's finesse our finest words
with bright colours/colors so bold.
Hey rock my world, challenge
my spelling. I dare you.
It's all pomp and circumstance
anyway, this prideful boasting
of politically, poetically correct
word affiliations.
Let's look beyond the politics
of correctiveness and simply
mingle amongst the creativity
of individual uniqueness.
Your nanner might be
a yellow piece of fruit,
but my nanner is my mom's, mom.
~Salute~

GROWING WILD

Writing you this, I can feel a dewclaw
pushing through the skin an inch above my thumb.
I'll sign this letter with a muddy paw.

Since you've been gone
I've grown a little wilder every day,
like a dog on one of those abandoned farms
out in the scrub-pine country between the rivers.

I'm living in just one room of the house,
I've turned it into a lair.
I wake there by the bones of my last meal.
I'm eating rare steaks, loving the taste of blood.
Yesterday, grabbling in the creek,
I caught six red horse with my hands
and ate them for supper.

Late in the afternoon I sit out back
and watch the woods creep closer to the house.
Rabbits come up into the grass. They watch
me warily, know I can't be trusted.
Tomorrow or the next day I may pounce
and bolt one squealing, beating heart and all,
snapping his bones between my teeth.

I walk in the woods at night and strange scents
curling from folds of wind
stir whines and whimperings in my throat.

If you don't come home soon
I know I'll range farther and farther off
into my woodsy dreams.
When you do return, you'll find the grass
knee-high around the house, the doors all open,
chewed bits of fur and feathers in the bedroom,
bones buried in your bedroom slippers.
I will have taken up
with some skinny, yellow-eyed bitch from the woods.

By late summer, lovers parked by cattle bars
will swear they saw me running with wild dogs
that drag down sheep and cattle between the rivers.

                                   by Jim Wayne Miller

Kerry Michael Wood

http://www.helium.com/users/134001

http://www.kerrymichaelwood.com

http//poetry.helium.com/zone/2748
http://www.zone/helium.com/883
http://poetry.helium.com/zone/2654

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Of course, free verse is poetry. As a debate topic, this rates right up there with Does Macy's Sell Pantyhose. To say that free verse is not poetry is to say that Walt Whitman, the father of American free verse, was not a poet but just wrote prose with odd line breaks and lots of repetition.  The terms verse and poetry are synonymous, Verse is defined as "Metrical composition, form, or structure; metrical language or speech, poetry." The term verse has wider application than does poetry. It may refer to a single line of a longer poem, a number of lines or a stanza of a poem or song. or a sequence of lines in music leading to a chorus or separating one chorus from another.

Mistaken notions about free verse and blank verse are commonplace. Blank verse is distinct from free verse.  English blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. In French poetry, it also includes unrhymed six-accent verse; however, such twelve-syllable lines -- known as Alexandines -- are rarely found in English poetry. Alexander Pope spoofed the 12-syllable line thus in An Essay on /Criticism:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Pope's first line has five accents making it iambic pentameter: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. The second line has six accented syllables with a central pause or caesura. It can be scanned variously, but most of us hear da DUM da DUM da DUM, DUM da da DUM da DUM. The image of the wounded snake and the words "slow length" reinforce the extra long line visually and aurally.

Free verse has irregular cadence and lacks traditional stanza form.  Just as blank verse has variations and substitutions of non-iambic feet to lend emphasis or prevent singsong regularity, free verse often has interior rhyme, fortuitous end-rhyme, alliteration, and all the other terms of figurative language.

Finally, the statement that all poetry must have meter excludes all concrete poetry and the innovations of literary figures like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D., all of whom found the formal verse of the Victorian period stilted and employed the tones and cadences of spoken language. All poetry -- rhymed, metrical, and free -- must have structure. Line breaks evoke voice and tone. Writers of free verse are conscious of the cadences and rhythms, and precise word selection

Observe the following examples to illustrate the distinctions made above. The preceding sentence, just like this one, is prose and makes no pretense of doing more than imparting information. I could have said: "I hope today to clarify some points about what differentiates these truths." The words following the colon could be separated into two iambic pentameter lines.

I hope today to clarify some points
About what differentiates these truths.

All of us without thinking say sentences consisting of iambic feet -- unaccented syllables followed by accented ones. But we are not composing anything that could bear the exalted title of poetry. My simple statement of intention does not pack any added meaning or intensity.

Free Verse

As an example of free verse, let's look at a brief poem by Walt Whitman, the first American to use this genre extensively. The opening line doubles as the poem's title.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars

Note there is no meter or end rhyme. Instead the poet begins the first four lines with "When" clauses. This is a conscious artistic device we don't hear in ordinary speech, and it reinforces the notion of the poet having become "sick and tired" and overwhelmed by the catalogue of rational proofs. And so to seek relief he rises and glides off to be by himself under the stars.

Compressed into  Whitman's eight lines are a variety of feelings and attitudes that would be difficult to express in a full page of prose. The speaker/poet thrills to the mystery of the universe, not to the dullness of data, charts, proofs, and columns of figures. He prizes man's individuality and is stifled by the crowded lecture halls. He prefers silence to applause, star-lit darkness to lighted classrooms, movement to sitting. Perfection lies for him not in mathematical complexity and scientific knowledge but in imaginative response to and harmony with nature. There is a bit of punning in his use of the word "unaccountable", after all of the counting and higher mathematics in the astronomer's speech. Also his use of "mystical" to describe "moist night-air" suggests religion, which runs counter to dispassionate scientific rationality. In short, this is a poem and a work of art to be read, reread, and pondered.

Blank Verse

There seems no necessity to do more than give examples to demonstrate that this term is not interchangeable with free verse. It refers, as stated earlier, tounrhymed lines of verse in which iambic pentameter predominates, Shakespeare's plays are mostly blank verse, but they also contain prose as well as rhymed couplets and even a sonnetimbedded here and there.

Robert Frost once waggishly described urhymed verse as "playing tennis with the net down." Frost preferred traditional forms but detested the stilted artificiality that often accompanies them. His poetry is proof that ordinary language can resonate with substance and grandeur. The following blank verse sample is the beginning of Frost's "Birches," which will speak for itself.

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice after a sunny morning
After a rain.

Word of warning:

Too often people think and claim that they have written free verse merely because they have used haphazard line breaks and created odd shapes. Such stuff is not poetry of any sort.

Kerry Michael Wood

http://www.helium.com/users/134001

http://www.kerrymichaelwood.com

http//poetry.helium.com/zone/2748
http://www.zone/helium.com/883
http://poetry.helium.com/zone/2654

Sonnet - Billy Collins

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,

and after this one just a dozen

to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,

then only ten more left like rows of beans.

How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan

and insist the iambic bongos must be played

and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

one for every station of the cross.

But hang on here wile we make the turn

into the final six where all will be resolved,

where longing and heartache will find an end,

where Laura will tell Petrarch

to put down his pen,

take off those crazy medieval tights,

blow out the lights, and come at last to bed

Kerry Michael Wood

http://www.helium.com/users/134001

http://www.kerrymichaelwood.com

http//poetry.helium.com/zone/2748
http://www.zone/helium.com/883
http://poetry.helium.com/zone/2654

The Grammarian's Haiku

I ku, you  ku, he,

she or it kus,we ku, you

ku, they ku. Thank ku.

Kerry Michael Wood

http://www.helium.com/users/134001

http://www.kerrymichaelwood.com

http//poetry.helium.com/zone/2748
http://www.zone/helium.com/883
http://poetry.helium.com/zone/2654

Hi Missy,

There are some good info out there about haikus (on the internet).

1. 5/7/5 (syllables on each line)

BTW some English speaking poets are using a modified 3/5/3 to match the brevity of some of the Japanese haiku.

2. hint of season

3. layered meaning

4. epiphany (or the a-ha moment)

There are more rules for those who are really into rules, but I use these four ideas to help me with my haiku.

Just wrote another one yesterday -

Ravens squawk
a morning bugle
Time to work

I used the 3/5/3 modified haiku.

Cyn

Hey ;-)

This is not my favorite form because it can get cheesy fast; however, there are some good ones out there.

Many days I ride -
your horse
Behind me
in the natural beauty
roses bloom
to greet the new day
how could you know?
do you remember
a day, the day I was born
you do

And there it is an acrostic. ;-)

Cyn

I gotta agree with Kerry cause Free Verse if done right has its own internal rhyme and rhythm.

Look at TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. Whitman's poetry follows the sounds of opera.

Cyn

I really think that only people who know something about c. c. cummings' poetry should be allowed to judge a category like Inspired by e.e.cummings. I'm not saying I should have won, but I at least did more than combine words oddly. Anyone who has read She Being Brand New should realize that to cummings, capital B's were either breasts or buttocks or both.

she being Brand

-new;and you

know consequently a

little stiff i was

careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal

joint tested my gas felt of

her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the

clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she

kicked what

the hell)next

minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg.  ing(my

lev-er Right-

oh and her gears being in

A 1 shape passed

from low through

second-in-to-high like

greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

                  (it

was the first ride and believe i we was

happy to see how nice she acted right up to

the last minute coming back down by the Public

Gardens i slammed on

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB

-ling

to a:dead.

stand-

;Still)

Here's mine. I think it finished 28/33.

tell me.

e. e.

about capital B

do you see Breasts

or Buttocks

or Bothatonce

just tremB

-ling to a halt,;.

Is &&& three

kit e cats Or

justOne alsO

tremB

-ling

I’m never shOOr

abOut the O’s.

Be they BallOOns

Or BuBBles,

Waiting tO Be pOpped

Pop. P_p.

(Just lOOk at all those

BOOBies mayBe BOOties!)

And use binOculars (or are they specs)

Since they’re 100 k’s away.

Leaves are

f

a

l

l

i

n

g

(

)

C—a—t’s strechchchced Out ass-leep

ZZzzzz

Kerry Michael Wood

http://www.kerrymichaelwood.com

http://www.helium.com/users/134001

http//poetry.helium.com/zone/2748
http://www.zone/helium.com/883
http://poetry.helium.com/zone/2654

Well, Kerry I did a really good ee cummings poem too... with some double meanings. I even translated for the crowd who didn't want to take the trouble... and of course, dropped to the bottom.

So it is hard to find too many folks out there who have studied ee cummings or any of the other poets on there.

I sympathize as I am in the same boat.

Cyn

Mark Strand is one of the best modern poets out there. I like his stuff too.

Cyn

Cyn I loved the whole concept of these words. How delicious, the thought of eating poetry :)

While mine wasn't as good as both of yours, I was happy with my take of one of his poems. Alas there is not accounting for what should be deemed great poetry, seems like most times journal types of poetry tend to fair better :)

Those are my two cents on this matter.

See even here I got an education about ee cummings I didn't know about.

Thanks.

Missy

Poetic Travels

Missy,

Long time no read- I found this to be a splendid, easy to absorb, yet pertinent 'real' gem.

I hope you are doing well- I always enjoy your mind.

GM

Greg it's so good to see you, truly. I know you've been busy life has a way of keeping us that way. It's a good and bad situation at times.

Thanks for your comment. I seen the word Svengali and thought how cool and I looked it up and found the definition to be interesting and this poem came of that, although in life I am sure this could fit some of the situations I've found myself in at times lol.

I hope you'll be back more often. Know you're missed around these parts.

Missy

Poetry Coffee House

The ultimate in free verse is the quintessence of "Found Poetry" that constitutes my opening stanza. My favorite line is: margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan. Pure genius, I'd say.

Kerry Michael Wood

http://www.helium.com/users/134001

http://www.kerrymichaelwood.com

http//poetry.helium.com/zone/2748
http://www.zone/helium.com/883
http://poetry.helium.com/zone/2654

Here are a couple of Haikus I wrote in the 5/7/5 style.  Thanks for reading.

Water flows gently

Through meandering pathways

Past quiet houses

The fast flowing creek

Narrowed to a small stone's width

Leaving downstream dry

What I appreciate about Haiku's is the strong image they can give in so few words and these tell a story with an image.

I quite enjoyed these. Thank you so much for posting them there.

Missy

I rose to greet the pale of day
while sun still stretched before his play
and I too stretched and made my way
to percolate my brain awake.

Wood as old as 1910, bore my weight and I'm not thin;
good to know it's as strong as when, cut from tree
in 1910.

I grabbed my cup for a sip of joe and poured
until my eyes said whoa,
too soon my cup would have overflowed
if I'd not stopped pouring java so.

So now I've sat upon my ass
and tappity tap as a rhyming lass
how about that for a free verse brat
rhyming lines that aren't just crap.

Today

By: Carol Gioia

Today is a brand new slate
for me to write upon,
I can re-invent myself
before today is gone.

Putting my best foot forward,
letting inner beauty shine,
holding my head up high,
knowing I’ll be just fine.

Standing by my principles,
determining not to stray,
cherishing each moment,
I shall seize the day!

Thank you Missy.  It's a pleasure to be involved with the Helium poets and writers. 

One thing I find interesting about Haiku, or any formal poetic form for that matter, is how our minds work to fit narratives into the structure.  The same scene described in the Haikus above could easily be translated into a paragraph of prose.

That is a very valid point, either or, some great lines can be had from any form of poetry.

Apples in red bloom

Slummbering under full trees

Concussion from fruit

Let's get this chatterhouse, chattering. Give you best advice regarding Villanelle's. How do you go about creating one?