A May Haiku

Май. Квітнеючая дзічка.
Затрымай дыханьне,
Інакш пасыплецца сьнег!

May. Blooming crab tree.
Do not breathe,
Snow will fall!

– Victar Licvinau

Written in Belarussian and translated into English by the author.

About an industry-leading younger German poet from the old East

His verse

was markedly
distinguished

by the presence
of the absence

of punctuation.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2007)

Confessions of a poetry machine killer

I killed a poetry machine

Oh what shall we do,
that thing it is dead –
a poetry machine,
the best ever had.

It mixed black with blue,
it strung a mean word,
it bounced on a hue,
flipped many a bird.

You fed it a coin,
its wheels would spin,
it spat out a poem
that made you grin.

It got better at it,
more perfect each day,
that’s when I'd had it
and blew it away.

The best thing to do
now that it’s in peace
is to leave it alone,
and all at its ease.

– iself (© 2007)

Inspired by Keith O’Connor’s I killed my poetry machine.

Izzy cowrites poem with Sylvia Plath

Round Cup's Round Cup

“I need my mornings and all the tree ducks shady;
I moan my gooses and all is dig again.
(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

The slave go clawing out in thick and awesome,
And undeveloped morning ducks in:
“I need my trees and all the goose ducks shady;

I moaned that you diged me into flat
And stay me light, needed me quite shady.
(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

April ducks from the slave, morning's trees moan:
Exit goose and Leo's flat:
“I need my trees and all the goose ducks shady;

I diged you'd stay the way you said,
But I need old and I duck your name.
(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

I should have treed a goose instead;
At least when flat moans they dig back again.
“I need my trees and all the goose ducks shady;

(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

– Izzy & Sylvia Plath

Note
This is a generated madlib poem (go get one for yourself here). It doesn't sound bad – well, Izzy tuned it about 7 times until she was halfway satisfied with it – and has only a few rough grammatical edges.

Let the Exquisite Cadavulator do the poetry

There is a site that does dada poetry for you. You can either feed it an URL or type your own text in a box. Here's my box text (inspired by a movie with Louis de Funès, part of which I recently watched):

the young clown looked out of his caravan and noticed that the elephant who was manned by two people was gone the day began with sorrow even though out there was a humorous blue sky

Run through the cadavulator, this produced the following result:

who caravan young out and a that sky of was there blue with his clown by gone was was people two manned the the elephant though began day looked noticed even sorrow the humorous out

Something half-way grammatical and semantically discernible was turned into something ungrammatical and, well, definititely dada or blabla or something.

Now another trial. A terse collection of words in ungrammatical order based on observations of my immediate environment:

everything green white trip yellow book specialty you Theo's tell religions DataPerfect I

And cadavulator's output:

everything green Theo's tell religions trip DataPerfect white book I yellow specialty you

That didn't do anything for me, to tell you the truth. Give the machine one last chance:

love you I

Cadavulator's response:

you I love

Hey, not bad!

Go try cadavulator yourself.

Platitudes revisited 1: poem by Ernst Jandl

no contradiction

life
becomes longer
and longer
i.e. shorter
and shorter
it doesn't stretch

(translated without much effort from the German original contained in ernst jandl, der gelbe hund, 1982)

Note
For those of you who have never heard of Ernst Jandl: he was an Austrian poet who lived from 1925-2000 and was quite well-known for his humorous, partially experimental poems and linguistic artistry. He also created some funny neologisms.

Some of his poems, as the shining example above, are barely enough to elicit a half-chuckle and can be safely said to be padding material.

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux

From this poem by Louis Aragon from 1946 two lines in a new translation by myself:

Mon bel amour mon cher amour ma déchirure
Je te porte dans moi comme un oiseau blessé

My beautiful love, my dear love, you who tear me apart,
I carry you in myself like a wounded bird.

For some reason, these two lines from the poem – which do so much to create the image of a love apparently full of pain and contradictory impulses – have stayed with me for many years, while the rest of the poem has not.

The ending, which sounds like a punch line from a French chanson, is actually on the flat side:

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux
Mais c'est notre amour à tous les deux

There is no happy love,
But this is our love.

The very last line could become more prosy to reflect the French more directly, e.g. "But it is the love between the two of us" or "But it is the love the two of us share," but that doesn't do much, does it?

Unnoticed in an ocean

... a situation that spells trouble.

More so, I would guess, than up the proverbial shit creek without a paddle.*

And pray
what might I
be trying to say?

– Little J. from his rosebed with flowers

* There, it seems, you always have the option of going with the flow, for which you don't need a paddle. Unless Shit Creek has some dangerous white water passages in between the yellowish brown ones...

Or did you write that yourself?

Was that a real poem

or did you write that yourself?

That came out of my head by itself,
with words that formed themselves,
a beginning by itself,
and an end in itself,
so yes, I wrote it myself
and it is real in itself
and in any other selves
exposed to it whether or not they themselves
realize the significance or insignificance of this or themselves.

– P. Lato

Eye opener

I
can
barely
open my
eyes at this point in
time, but time will tell whether they
shall remain open,
but try I
will, so
can
I?

A forward and reverse fibonacci, also called a diamond.

Received from one who calls himself morningworker233x5 and wishes to remain anonymous. He (or she?) was also the one to inform me of the special poetic terminology.

Thank you & copyright morningworker233x5

Late night fibonacci

The
late
night fib-
onacci
floats on the milky
rays of moonlight, basks in pale gold.

– Lenny Bloomfeld (Copyright 2007)

Note
A German version of this poem can be found at the author's site, where the Indian yellow color he insisted on looks much better.

Where am I in your life?

Two poems by Pakistani poet Parveen Shakir (1952-1994), who wrote in Urdu, in English translation by Alamgir Hashmi:

a moment's leave, anonymous,
between the breaking of one dream
of love and another's beginning

http://www.beilharz.com/poetas/shakir/

Cosmic idyll disturbed

What happens when God picks up his little lab by its corners?

Belarussian poet Viktar Licvinau has the answer in A laboratory.

Poetry & abstraction

Some rudimentary muzangs on poetry, art and music.

Correct me if I'm wrong (in other words, comments invited). I've noticed that poetry magazines and e-zines that include art seem to prefer realistic or semi-realistic over abstract art. This seems to go hand in hand with the kind of poetry they tend to publish, which could also be termed to be more or less realistic. The kind that appears to be proud to be the opposite of Robert Bly's "leaping poetry" idea. At worst, I'd call it "clod-stuck poetry."

It is exemplified very well by the stuff Ted Kooser, ex-U.S. Poet Laureate, digs up for his weekly e-mails.

You can subscribe to it under http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/