Author: Paul Szlosek
Paul Szlosek was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge, as well as a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in various local publications including the Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Worcester poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, and (most recently) the hodgenelle.
Five Clerihews by Joan Erickson (and One More by Myself)
My good friend and fellow poet, Joan Erickson, recently emailed me to let me know that while perusing this blog, she read my post on clerihews, and decided to try writing a few of her own. She included the three that she wrote in her email, then a few days later (apparently still in the grip of clerihew fever) sent me two additional ones. I thought all five captured the spirit of the form splendidly, so I have asked her kind permission to publish them here, which she graciously granted. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have:
Five Clerihews by Joan Erickson
George Burns’
radio show made me lose concerns
on days that weren’t always sunny.
He and his wife Gracie were so funny!
Ed Sullivan
was a real fan.
Had the Beatles on his show –
the screaming and singing made him glow.
Norman Rockwell
didn’t have to sell
his paintings in a gallery.
Everyday people paid his salary.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was the president who felt
we had nothing to fear –
except fear – is this clear?
Eleanor Roosevelt gave birth
to six babies. For what it’s worth,
later confessed – had no idea how
to feed or care for a baby. Wow!
Writing clerihews must be contagious, because immediately after reading Joan’s delightful one about F.D. R., I was inspired to pen the following about another U. S. President:
Abraham Lincoln
was always thinkin’
that more was less.
That is why he didn’t deliver a longer Gettysburg Address.
Mmmmm… I just had a brainstorm for an interesting poetry project. Since now I have posted clerihews about four different U. S. presidents (Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln), we just need 40 more about each of the others (yes, there are technically 45 presidents, but in reality only 44 because Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms and is counted twice) to have an entire gallery of presidential clerihews. So how about it, dear reader? Will you accept the challenge of writing a clerihew about one of the remaining presidents, and either send it to me in an email or leave it in the comments of this post? Please do! If we can gather enough, I will publish them all in a future post.
Invented Poetry Forms – The Acrostic Selfie Poem
The name of this form is fairly self-explanatory. An acrostic selfie poem is a short, usually whimsical self portrait in verse, in which the first letter of each line spells out the poet’s name. I can’t actually say who first invented the form since the acrostic name poem goes back at least to the Middle Ages, but I first utilized the concept myself about 15 years ago while teaching a poetry workshop for children at the public library in Sterling, MA. If a poet is feeling ambitious, one can use their full legal name, but it is quite acceptable to settle just for your first name like I did when I wrote the following example as a model for my students (I hope you will enjoy reading it and that it will inspire you to try writing your very own):
Paul
Polite to inanimate objects,
Always apologizing to furniture he bumped into,
Until all his friends and family complained
“Like a chair really cares if you are sorry!”
10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Mark Strand
“Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.”
“A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.”
“Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.”
“The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.”
“It’s very hard to write humor.”
“There’s a certain point, when you’re writing autobiographical stuff, where you don’t want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.”
“Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”
“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.”
“I feel that anything is possible in a poem.”
“Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.”
– Mark Strand
10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti*
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
“Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”
“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”
“We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”
“The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.”
“Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.”
“Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.”
“What are poets for, in such an age? What is the use of poetry?”
“The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.”
“If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.”
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
*Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday today!
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by John Keats
“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”
“I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night’s labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.”
“No sooner had I stepp’d into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem’d to say ‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day.”
“All writing is a form of prayer.”
“I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.”
“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
“The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.”
“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
“A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.”
“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.”
– John Keats
10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Charles Simic
“The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.”
“We name one thing and then another. That’s how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there’s a lot of space inside words.”
“Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.”
“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”
“Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.”
“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”
A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.”
“The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It’s about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.”
“I’m not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I’m against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.”
“I do believe that a poem needs to remind the reader of his or her own humanity, of what they are, of what they’re capable of. Awaken them, in a sense, to the fact that there’s a world in front of their eyes, that they have a body, they’re going to die, the sky is beautiful, it’s fun to be in a grassy field when the sun is shining—those kinds of things.”
– Charles Simic
Invented Poetry Forms – The Clerihew
In today’s post, I have decided to tackle one of the very first poetry forms that I ever learned to write. Sometime in grade school, I was taught about the clerihew (along with the limerick and the haiku) and thus started my lifelong obsession with poetic forms.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the British humorist and novelist best known for (besides the poetry form which bears his middle name) his two detective novels “Trent’s Last Case” and ” Trent’s Own Case”, invented the clerihew when he was only sixteen. According to my calculations, since Bentley was born in 1875, the first clerihew was written in 1891.
The clerihew is a four line biographical poem that is usually comical, and has a rhyme scheme of aabb. The first line normally contains the name of a famous person (although you can use a fictional character or nonfamous person as an alternative). The length of the lines tend to be inconsistent, and the meter irregular. Like haiku, clerihews seldom have titles.
I am not sure if the clerihew is still being taught in schools, but I sure hope it is. It is a delightful form to play with, and when I was teaching my poetry workshop for children at a local library, the kids really seemed to enjoy writing them. So why don’t you try penning one today? I am sure you will have a great time like I did when I wrote the following eight:
A Collection of Clerihews
President Richard Milhous Nixon
was always fixin’
to retire early, but instead he resigned
when caught in a scandalous, political bind.
President Donald J. Trump
cured this nation’s economic slump
when he was elected and took over.
Now we are all rolling in clover.
Henry David Thoreau
liked to watch the trees grow.
He certainly wasn’t too fond
of anyone trying to deforest Walden Pond.
Edgar Allen Poe
was a talented but morose fellow
who wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart” & “The Raven”,
and preferred Providence to New Haven.
Captain James Tiberius Kirk
could be an overbearing jerk
suffering from a severe lack of tact.
He’d make long self-righteous speeches and overact.
Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy
never could express any joy,
yelling ” Damn it, Mister Spock,
I am actor, not a Doc!”
Old Walt Whitman
was a hit, man,
with his poetry and flowing beard,
yet still most people considered him quite weird.
Paul Michael Szlosek
suffered an anxiety attack
when he discovered that he left his autobiographical poem
on his desk at home.
10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Wallace Stevens
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.”
“A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”
“The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.”
“Poetry is a means of redemption.”
“The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.”
“The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.”
“Poetry is poetry, and one’s objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one’s objective in music is to achieve music.”
“Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it … if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, … it may be … that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.”
-Wallace Stevens
Four Herrickelles by Paul Szlosek
In my last post, I introduced the herrickelle, a poetic form I recently invented based on the poem “Upon His Departure Hence” by the 17th Century English poet and priest Robert Herrick. Today I would like to share a few more herrickelles I’ve written. If after reading them, you feel inspired to try your hand at writing one of your own, I recommend going back and reading my original post on the herrickelle, where the rules to writing them are laid out in full.
(One quick note: the herrickelle is not the only invented poetry form to be based on the work of Robert Herrick. There is also the herrick, modeled on what is clearly Herrick’s most notorious poem ”To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”. The herrick is definitely a more sophisticated and complex form than my rather simple herrickelle, involving alternating masculine and feminine rhymes and strict meter. If this intrigues you, you can read more about the herrick here.)
You will discover all four of these herrickelles certainly have a more modern feel to them in terms of theme and language than the one I posted yesterday as an example (that one had a distinct Medieval flavor). I hope you enjoy reading them, and am curious to hear what you think, both about the form and the individual poems:
Gambling at Foxwoods
I say
the way
I p!ay
takes not
a lot
of thought.
I spin,
don’t win,
begin
to let
roulette
upset
my day.
I stay
and pray.
Oh no,
I go
and blow
a wad
on Odd,
(oh god)
or Red
instead.
So dead
on my
feet, I
still try
to win
and spin
again.
I bet
more, get
more debt!.
Perseverance in a Catastrophe
I know
the show
must go
on. You
do too
(No clue
how or
what for).
Ignore
your doubts,
the shouts,
the bouts
of pain.
Remain
calm, sane
til one
Is done,
my son.
A Letter of Advice (to Vincent From Salvador)
Hello,
Van Gogh!
Start slow…
Adhere
your ear,
with beer.
Erase
your face.
Replace
it with
a myth,
a glyph.
Disguise
your eyes
with lies
once told
(so bold)
to old
girlfriend.
Pretend
to mend
your heart;’
restart
your art!
Critique of a Terrible Poet
This time,
his crime
was rhyme
so bad;
it’s sad.
It had
no flow
and no
joy – oh,
no bit
of wit.
It’s sh*t!
Paul's Poetry Playground 