"Reasons for Living": A new "Next Line, Please" poetry challenge

 

Our prompt this week was to write a poem based on an error, mistake, or slip of the tongue. Nearly as impressive as the poems that came in were the editing suggestions our NLP players made, which were unfailingly cordial and constructive.  It was even more difficult than usual to select among the entries.

Let’s start with poems based on typographical errors and the like. Josie Cannella’s “Prayer Against Autocorrect” begins:

Hale Merry, full of grease,
How does your garbage grow?
Wind sill or bells and cuckold’s hell
and petty maidens all in arrow

Paul Michelsen’s self-described “Tie Pose” capitalizes on mondegreens: “I always thought Jimi Hendrix / was such a ladies’ man / ‘til I heard him ‘scuze himself / to kiss this guy.” In “The Pledge,” Millicent Caliban recollects the columnist Art Buchwald’s first efforts to memorize the pledge of allegiance—“I led the pigeons to the flag”— and takes off from there to imagine the pigeons’ puzzled response to the “space marked out in red, white and blue / that did not yield any crumbs.”

Baruch November, a first-time contributor, came up with “Out of nowhere, a Shidduch,” beginning with Polonius’s famous line, twisted:

Neither a borrower nor a bungler be.
In love, the latter I’ve always been—

Having lived an eternity
alone for a Jewish man.

I posted online for a new
apartment in Crown Heights.
Out of nowhere, a shidduch

Was offered with a woman
whose sole descriptor was a love
for stray dogs.
That is just how
these days are— hounds visit

The soft rooms of women
while I busy myself bumbling

Plans for a date that’ll
only end with me

Turning on the darkness
of my empty bedroom.

It must have delighted Baruch to read that Josie Cannella loved the dog imagery and the last stanza, and was moved to look “shidduch” up in the dictionary—that is, to Google it. Learning that it meant “the offer of an arranged marriage” enhanced her pleasure in the poem.

My favorite of Millicent Caliban’s two poems is “The Poet’s Lament,” which appropriates Andrew Marvell’s majestic tetrameter and a few lines from “To His Coy Mistress” and applies them to the life of an office worker:

Had I but words enough and time,
I might write verse of love sublime.
But at my back I always hear
My supervisor hovering near.
I fear he will inspect my screen
Expecting images obscene.
So must I type this deadly dreck
From nine to five with stiffest neck.
I hate my job with all my heart,
But somehow I must do my part
To pay the bills and make the rent.
My famished soul is ne’er content

Greg Chaimov airs his fascination, which I share, with the way “sacred” becomes “scared” if we transpose two letters. “On Reading Scared as Sacred” was inspired by a line from Yannis Ritsos:

Alone with the moths on the ill-lit porch, he glances up
from Ritsos’s Monochords to track the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse.  He’s startled his sense
of the verse as sacrament has led him to assume
a meaning the poet hadn’t pursued.

Assume. Ad plus sumere, for “to take,”
related to consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, casts a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes
and the tattered wings that glide
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.

 Emily fearlessly edited the poem:

Alone with moths on the ill-lit porch,
he reads and tracks the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse. Assume, related

to consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes,
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.

The impulse to condense is always worthwhile, though we would lose, in this case, “verse as sacrament.” Whether you prefer Emily’s revised version or not, I applaud the effort NLP players are making to critique, edit, and respond to one another’s poems without an inkling of rancor.

Christine Rhein wowed us all, I think, with “Voice Recognition.”

Global warming—turned global warning on my phone,
as I dictate notes about my friend—his cozy home
on the shore of eerie—the lake making its weigh up
his see wall, splashing past it—residence / resonance
in peril. And of course, climate scientists—science dissed,
their data obvious to sum / oblivious to others. How to
school / cool the planet—the question of the our, of mine
over matter, of dollars and sense—profits, pipelines,
the booms day / doomsday clock—so much time, wasted.
Oh, feudal world. Oh, futile trust in words. Monstrous
storms. Towns on fire. Paradise—a pair of dice.

 Christine’s wordplay—in which “paradise” is the obverse of “a pair of dice”—won plaudits. Michael C. Rush singled out “The question of the our.” Charise Hoge picked “Oh, feudal world.” The ending delighted both Emily, our critic of the week, and Byron.

For the rest of this post, and the new prompt, as well as the reason a detail of Paul Cézanne's "Still Life With Apples and Pears," ca. 1891–92 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) illustrates this post, please click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/reasons-for-living/