This week on Next Line, Please, writers were asked to write a poem in the form of a string of haikus. As usual, many excellent candidates rolled in, and here are but a few!
Eric Fetzer’s “Erased de Kooning, 1953” reads like a "spontaneous essay—in this case on a pivotal moment in the history of modern art." I enjoy how lines one and three rhyme and how the rhythmic structure of the haiku helps the poem along.
Rauschenberg erased
A tough de Kooning drawing
Leaving a smudged trace.Was it a lecture,
Destruction as creation,
A dada gesture?But the gesture left
Subtle marks on white paper
So we’re not bereftOf media, form
As expression of movement:
Not out of the norm,Just new medium.
But many of these would be
Awful tedium.
Michael C. Rush’s “Blow, Wind” "seems to advocate discarding poetry while exalting the deep source of all poems." It reminds me a bit of Marianne Moore's "Poetry" which begins, "I, too, dislike it."
No more poetry.
All rhymes are accidental,
lack utility.Only the wind now
will I listen to. It won’t
insist why or howthings happen, or can’t.
Or tell me nothing matters,
or chide, cut, or grant,grudgingly, a sense,
a temporary feeling,
worth all this expense.Blow, wind, blow. Give me
sensation without meaning—
the truth, probably.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post and to enter your own candidate for this week's prompt! Spoiler Alert: it's Valentine's Day themed.
--Virginia Valenzuela
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